Gag Reflexes: Sex Doll Slapstick and Fran Ross’s Oreo

Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head. He threw the unresisting Oreo to the floor, stretched her legs wide in the ready-set position of a nutcracker, took aim, tried to jam his pole into her vault and — much to his and everyone else's surprise — met with a barrier that propelled him backward and sent him bounding off the nearest wall. 1

— Fran Ross, Oreo (1974)

Sex dolls

The history of the sex doll is shrouded in rumor, speculation, and myth.2 In the seventeenth century, French and Spanish sailors took crude cloth and leather "dames de voyage" or "dama de viaje" with them on long sea voyages.3 The Japanese, who encountered these dolls through frequent trading with the Dutch East India Company, called them datch waifu or Dutch wives. By 1908, in a tome entitled The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization, Iwan Bloch described French sex dolls made of rubber and plastic, replete with "a 'pneumatic tube' filled with oil" used to imitate "the secretion of Bartholin's glands" and lubricate the artificial female genitals.4 A popular urban legend holds that during WWII Nazi Germany engineered the first modern sex dolls — perfect Aryan specimens, the "Borghild Project" — in order to both train and contain the sexual appetites of its invading armies, tempted as they were on all sides by contamination from foreign prostitutes of "inferior races."5 What we know for sure is that in the 1960s, the now-iconic inflatable sex doll first appeared in the United States in mail-order advertisements printed in men's magazines.6 The sex doll can be uncanny, repulsive, titillating, or hilarious. (The open question its gaping openings beg is what — or who — is the true butt of the joke.) Its form is at once sensuous and antiseptic. It is a pornographic object that is "graphic" in multiple and seemingly contradictory ways — at once explicit and abstracted, sexy and schematic, disgusting and disinterested.

Seeming to aim at verisimilitude, the sex doll always risks both the pitfalls of the uncanny valley and ethical censure. Sex dolls depict women just well enough for discomfort, while turning a mirror back unflatteringly upon the men who consume them.7 There is some debate in scholarship on sex dolls, though, about whether "reality" or "verisimilitude" are really the aim of the object at all, or the only source of its titillation.8 In a study that focuses on the fetish of the "erotic doll" in both the context of commercial sex dolls and the work and lives of prominent 20^th century artists including Oskar Kokoschka, Hans Bellmer, and Marcel Duchamp, Marquard Smith argues that "the erotic doll or mannequin is held up not as a site of verisimilitude and mimeticism but as a fabricated form organized or arranged, and understood to draw attention to its own distorting, fragmentary, partial and anagrammatical nature."9 Smith's description of getting off on distortion, fragmentation, and fabrication laid brazenly bare vibrates tantalizingly with many popular theorizations of the playful, antirealist promiscuity of literary postmodernism. The allure of the "erotic doll" isn't that it can be mistaken for a flesh-and-blood woman, but that it infinitely accommodates and enables the self-gratifying creative manipulations of men. The man aroused by the sex doll's openness to being manipulated is also recursively aroused by his own ability to make an object arousing. Which raises a definitional question: Can any plaything be a sex doll?10

Alongside the doll fabricated for sex, we have an American lineage of other women-shaped objects, made for children and lacking genitalia, yet hardly sexless: the gutta percha, the topsy-turvy, and the Barbie dolls. The sex doll's potency in post-45 American literature cannot be fully understood without bringing these sex-adjacent dolls — with their subtle yet pervasive scripts of racial and sexual violence — into the mix.

Gutta percha is "a form of resilient rubber used in nineteenth-century dolls to enable them to survive rough play that would destroy a doll made of porcelain or wax."11 These black rubber dolls were most often modeled wearing permanent grins, "and their smiles suggested that violent play was acceptable, even enjoyable."12 The elasticity of the rubber, gutta-percha, was not only key to the ways in which play was scripted for the children who used them, but also alludes to a sinister nexus of race, innocence, and pain in American culture. Robin Bernstein argues that "the materiality of black rubber dolls configures blackness as an elastic form of subjectivity that can withstand blows without breaking."13 Particularly in the nineteenth century, children were trained through these dolls to experience the battering of black bodies as play, their grins and limbs imperturbably, even giddily holding up under treatment that would easily shatter their more fragile white porcelain counterparts.

The provenance of the topsy-turvy doll — a two-in-one with full skirts that hide not legs, but another torso of the opposite color, revealed only when you flip her over — is hard to pin down, but most scholars agree that she/it was originally sewn by enslaved African-American women in the antebellum South.14 The topsy-turvy predated the Topsy of Uncle Tom's Cabin but, after the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, it was for a time commercially produced as the Topsy-Eva doll. Many have argued that the topsy-turvy is both unsexed — no legs, much less genitals to go between them — and obscene. The sinister, subtly sexual "cuteness" of the topsy-turvy doll is evocative of Sianne Ngai's description of that aesthetic category as "an aestheticization of powerlessness ('what we love because it submits to us')," "a way of sexualizing beings and simultaneously rendering them unthreatening."15 Often at once comic and sexualized, cuteness has, according to Ngai, citing the research of Lori Merish, also been "consistently racialized" in America, and "arguably evolved in close association with minstrelsy."16 Though its lack of genitalia can be read as "prudish,"17 the tospy-turvy doll seems to beg to have its skirts lifted regardless of whether black or white torso is being displayed on top, and its very alternation of black and white — separate but mirroring — alludes to, even as it polices, "racial mixing, sex, and rape within the plantation system."18 For Bernstein, the cute/vulgar topsy-turvy dolls voiced a sort of resistance through which "enslaved women scripted performances in which children and dolls unwittingly smuggled enslaved women's thoughts and anger into the inner sanctum of southern domesticity," as "in the mermaid-like absence of a crotch, African-American women figured un-rape-ability, sexual safety."19 These readings of the topsy-turvy doll as covertly liberatory, or at least subversive, raise broader questions about the possibilities of playing with objectification as a means of self-preservation or even self-pleasure.

Eclipsing her 19^th century progenitors, America's most darling and iconic smooth-crotched commodity first appeared in 1959. Barbie was named after the daughter of its creator, Ruth Handler, but modeled off the doll of a German comic strip prostitute named Lilli.20 Barbara Johnson argues that "Barbie . . . possessed the secrets of adult femininity seemingly without any of the awkwardness, messiness, or embarrassment experienced by her human owners. The flavor of her past as a sex toy for men doesn't damage her appeal; on the contrary, it seems to guarantee her heterosexuality."21 With neither nipples nor anything but smooth plastic at her crotch, Barbie is a thing of sterilized, stereotyped, white womanhood, ready to teach girls how to dress, accessorize — and possibly, at that sweet spot of preteen backlash — dismember her.22The creative/destructive manipulation that Barbie invites (as, too, did the gutta percha and topsy-turvy dolls, in their own fashion) brings us back to Marquard Smith's notion of the anagrammatically arousing "erotic doll." Smith quotes Hans Bellmer's treatise on the life-sized dolls he obsessively created and photographed in the 1940s: "The sentence is comparable to a body that appears to invite you to disarticulate it, so that its true contents may be recomposed through an endless series of anagrams. The body is comparable to a sentence that appears to invite you to disarticulate it, so that its true contents may be recomposed through an endless series of anagrams."23 Bellmer proposes words and artificial bodies as oddly, autoerotically interchangeable. Through the figure of the sex doll, solo (perhaps even solipsistic) linguistic and sexual play become strange, masturbatory bedfellows.

"A Real Doll"

Decades after the publication of Hard Core, her seminal 1989 study of video pornography, Linda Williams wondered about the tendency of academic "porn studies" to eschew the more formal term "pornography" in favor of the vernacular "porn." "How have we come to designate a field of academic study by this term? Why have we lost the graph in pornography?"24 The graphic of the pornographic has a doubleness at once visceral and abstract, and an emphatically graphic sex scene, à la the cum-slick surfaces of a plastic doll, can produce contradictory feelings: horror, arousal, hilarity. Helen Hester has recently argued that contemporary cultural expansions of pornography (like "food porn") reveal that pornography is not exclusively a sexual category, but more generally hinges on objects, images, and experiences that provoke "queasy jouissance."25 Relocating the graph in pornography helps us think through the oddly easy simultaneity of disgust and detachment, of explicit grossness and geometrical exactitude, that emerges in post-45 portrayals of sex as visceral and abstracted at once — during what we might even think of as the ascendency of the sex doll.26

The sexless/sexy/sexist/sex-ish Barbie doll is the object of A.M. Homes's short story "A Real Doll," which appeared as the final piece in her 1990 collection The Safety of Objects.27 The logistically fraught question of how to have sex with Barbie is the story's subject.28 The story begins with the declaration: "I'm dating Barbie," and goes on to recount, in first-person narration and graphic detail, a sexual affair between the narrator, a presumably just-pubescent boy, and his younger sister's Barbie doll. "We fucked, that's what I called it, fucking."29 Barbie seems to talk to and flirt with the narrator, he drugs her (with Valium-spiked Diet Coke), sucks her plastic feet, pops her head into his mouth and bites her neck, buys her gifts, and ejaculates both all over her and, twice, into the hollow torso of a temporarily decapitated Ken doll. Meanwhile, Jennifer, the boy's sister and Barbie's owner, has a penchant for chewing off the doll's feet and eventually brings the story — and the narrator's sexual attraction to the doll — to an end by giving it/her a gruesome, molten, DIY double mastectomy.The boy narrator of "A Real Doll" gets off on Barbie's plasticized surfaces, the signs of her manufacture — he loves to tongue the raised "tattoo" of the graphic inscription of the Mattel copyright on her back,30 while he quickly and disdainfully spits upon and rubs away the defacement of pubic hair Jennifer draws on her in marker.31 The first time he fucks Barbie, it goes like this:

 I was on top, trying to get between her legs, almost breaking her in half. But there was nothing there, nothing to fuck except a small thin line that was supposed to be her ass crack.

I rubbed the thin line, the back of her legs and the space between her legs. I turned Barbie's back to me so I could do it without having to look at her face.

Very quickly, I came. I came all over Barbie, all over her and a little bit in her hair. I came on Barbie and it was the most horrifying experience I ever had. It didn't stay on her. It doesn't stick to plastic. I was finished. I was holding a cum-covered Barbie in my hand like I didn't know where she came from.32

Both the boy and the story seem intent upon fucking (with) many a "small thin line" — between Barbie's legs, between people and things, play and porn, humor and horror. The unflinching sexual explicitness of the story is both unsettling and funny because the object of sexual desire is itself a sexless object. The image of the narrator's horror at his semen not adhering to the inanimate, plastic surface of the Barbie doll exemplifies the affective ambivalence of the sex doll as a porno-graphic object — arousingly explicit, and, by being coolly abstracted, equally appalling. Barbie's plastic curves, seemingly begging for rough play, turn the boy on; Barbie's plastic curves, stubbornly slick and impenetrable, likewise horrify him. The moment is also, for readers "watching" this pubescent boy stare with terror at his sister's cum-slick Barbie doll, somewhat queasily hilarious, as it toggles between the gross and geometric poles of being "graphic." Homes's story registers the pornographic humor that Hester doesn't quite capture with the phrase "queasy jouissance": the humor that emerges when the soft and sensual is translated through and into the mechanical and mass-produced — and, in doing so, becomes the gag (quip, prank, retch, choke).

The gag of Homes's story — a boy trying to figure out the logistics of how to fuck a Barbie — amplifies these dynamics of the pornographic (or, possibly, the porno-graph-ick). But "fucking" Barbie is, after all, still masturbation, and the narrator can only cum to his satisfaction in the space — made grossly literal — of male interiority — made grossly literal. He ejaculates inside Ken's hollow torso:

I started rubbing Ken's bump and watching my thumb like it was a large-screen projection of a porno movie. [. . .] I held Ken upside down above my dick and came inside of Ken like I never could in Barbie. [. . .] I came into Ken's body and as soon as I was done I wanted to do it again. I wanted to fill Ken and put his head back on, like a perfume bottle. I wanted Ken to be the vessel for my secret supply. I came in Ken and then I remembered he wasn't mine. He didn't belong to me. I took him into the bathroom and soaked him in warm water and Ivory liquid. I brushed his insides with Jennifer's toothbrush and left him alone in a cold-water rinse."33

This puts him in cozy literary company with many a man who has lusted after a doll.34 And begs the question: is the "queasy jouissance" of porno-graph-ick doll play in the canon of postmodernism the exclusive domain of men and their aggressively white toys?

Oreo: The sex doll gags back

Both pornography and comedy consist of climaxes strung together in what might, but for arbitrary time constraints, be an infinite series. Critics have leveled nearly identical critiques against each for their "failures" to balance narrative and gag. Fran Ross's novel Oreo raises questions about the structural and thematic relationship between the comic and the pornographic: how different is the punchline from the money shot? Do they rely on similar formulas and displacements, similar sorts of staged abjection? What happens when the body orchestrating the abjection is one — black, female, and potentially queer — that has traditionally been on the receiving end of it? While some recent studies have aligned post-45 prose with the mechanized logic of slapstick humor, what has been missing is a treatment of how the same structural logic — the abstracting ad absurdum of human bodies and their fleshly foibles — exists in the postmodern novel's preoccupation with moments of pornographic overexposure.Oreo is a trip. Riffing on the voyages of Theseus, the novel tells the story of its eponymous protagonist, a young half-Black, half-Jewish woman from Philadelphia, who sets out with a set of cryptic clues on a quest to find her white father in New York City and learn the secret of her birth. The novel overflows with polyglot wordplay, satirical diagrams, and an encyclopedic knowledge of both slang and scientific words for genitalia male and female. Published in 1974, Oreo went out of print within the year. After the novel's lackluster reception, Ross, a black, queer Philadelphia native, moved from New York City to Los Angeles to write for The Richard Pryor Show, but the loosely-promised job fell through when the show imploded.35 Ross moved back to New York City to work in publishing and write a second novel, but died of lung cancer at age 50 in 1985 before completing the manuscript, leaving us only with Oreo .36 In 2015, the novel was resurrected by New Directions and has since caused a small flurry of excitement — glowing reviews on NPR, in The New York Times, and in The Guardian, among others.37 With its interrupted publication history and incandescently unclassifiable form, Oreo is a novel with an odd relationship to time. Out of step with the 1970s literary moment during which it was released, it was still as Marlon James argues, "too far ahead of its time" in 2015 — yet written in lightning prose that races along with impeccable comedic timing.38

Though replete with well-choreographed physical and linguistic gags, the book diverges from William Solomon's formulation of "slapstick modernism," in which "the overarching aim of the witty novelist is thus to help facilitate his prospective readers' adjustment to their discourse-saturated environment, a pedagogical task that is accomplished when they are taught not to trust respected authority figures and the institutions they control."39 Oreo does not seem all that concerned with teaching its readers. The book is full of jokes that hinge on rapid-fire code switching, and dig deeply into shorthand and unfootnoted archives of Jewish-American, African-American, Yiddish, Classical Greek, and mathematical knowledge. It feels well-nigh impossible to catch and "get" all of the jokes. Unless, perhaps, you're Fran Ross, whose exuberant, gleeful narrative voice seems to get off on all of it, regardless of whether you are still along for the ride or not. This sort of showy self-indulgence has been a hallmark of much canonical literature of the postmodern era by white men,40 but was evidently harder to stomach — and sell — from and about a black woman.41The humor of Oreo is both intensely bodily and intensely heady: gross, linguistic, allusive, and mathy to the point of abstraction. The novel is a postmodern picaresque, leading readers through a series of elaborate, only tangentially connected gags. It reveals — and revels in — the structural resonance between the genres of slapstick comedy and pornography. Far from, in the words of one huffy Amazon reviewer, "adding little to the story," the text's moments of "explicit pornography" are key to understanding the games Ross plays with gender, race, sex, and form in the novel.42

Oreo is a master class in the autoerotics of the graphic object. Fran Ross writes for herself, appropriating the structures of "bad" narrative to flip, topsy-turvy, stories that have long used bodies like hers as props, made for rough play. The minoritarian subject revels in her own objecthood and plays back. Ross writes, in short, the sex doll who masturbates. Examining how Ross toys with the figure of the sex doll reveals to us how the status of the human under the intersecting imaginative regimes of pornography and postmodernism relies on the same rough (both approximate and violent) translation of the visceral into the abstract — for climax and for laughs.

Centering the titillating, hilarious, even stomach-turning figure of the sex doll — which flirts with yet withholds certain pleasures mimetic representation, affective legibility, and narrative containment — can reframe our understanding of the masturbatory dynamics of postmodern prose and the place of gender, sex, and race within it. How much of a stretch is it, after all, to think of most canonical postmodernist texts43 as flamboyantly artificial erotic dolls — smooth, slick, slightly icky masturbatory aids for the sexually frustrated men who write and (predominantly) read them?44 Ross interrupts and recasts the postmodernism circle jerk. In Oreo, the would-be sex doll, a thing at once slapstick, pornographic, and decidedly postmodern, disconcertingly plays — and gags — back; offputtingly getting (itself) off on being a graphic object. Oreo's sex scenes escalate from a dirty etymological reading, to an obscene phone call, to a bed trick qua standup routine, to a creatively foiled rape. Sex in Oreo hinges on a Bellmeresque play between the sentence and the body as equally doll-like, language and flesh manipulated in equally abstract and mechanized ways, as the difference between human sexual subject and inanimate sexual object becomes more and more laughably difficult to determine.

After all, Sex is a wedge issue in Oreo. The book's porno-graphic relationship with sex begins with, and continually references a geometrically-inclined extended etymological joke. The precocious Oreo is homeschooled and her English tutor, we learn, is "Professor Lindau, renowned linguist and blood donor [. . .] He spoke in roots." In order to understand anything her teacher says, Oreo must become adept at hunting down the linguistic lineage of the words he uses until she can suss out what he means — an operation similar to, though in the end perhaps more rewarding than, her own search for her absent father. Conversations with Professor Lindau tend to go as follows:

One day, Professor Lindau came in, in a bad mood. He ranted fitfully about his girlfriend. "That wedge!" he shouted. "What can one do with a wedge like that?" he asked rhetorically.

Oreo was puzzled, so the professor tossed her the desk copy of Partridge. After following a trail of false roots and camouflaged cognates, she came to Partridge's assertion that cunt (or, as Partridge put it, "c*nt") derived from the Latin cunnus, which was related to cuneus, or "wedge." Eric went on to say that the word had been considered obscene since about 1700, adding that "the dramatist Fletcher, who was no prude, went no further than 'They write sunt with a C, which is abominable', in The Spanish Curate. Had the late Sir James Murray courageously included the word, and spelt it in full, in the great O.E.D., the situation would be different; . . . (Yet the O.E.D. gave prick: why this further injustice to women?) . . . (It is somewhat less international than f**k, q.v.)"

Oreo fell off her chair laughing at this witty entry in Partridge. When she got herself together, she shook her head. Her sprachgefühl told her that Eric was stretching a point (or, rather, a wedge) and that the professor was perpetuating Partridge's error by persisting in this pie-eyed usage. She had never been misled by her sprachgefühl, and as she thumbed through a later edition of Partridge, she found that that worthy had corrected himself in a supplement: "(p. 198) cannot be from the L. word but is certainly cognate with O.E. cwithe, 'the womb' (with a Gothic parallel); cf. mod. English come, ex O.E. cweman. The ~nt, which is difficult to explain, was already present in O.E. kunte. The radical would seem to be cu (in O.E. cwe), which app. = quintessential physical femininity . . . and partly explains why, in India, the cow is a sacred animal."

Oreo fell off her chair laughing at the part about the cow. She was, after all, just a child in her mid-units. Then she pointed out the passage in the supplement to the professor.45

Despite her sprachgefühl (linguistic instinct) and subsequent proof that "Eric was stretching a point (or, rather, a wedge)," the coinage sticks. The satisfyingly abstract geometric fit of the thing overpowers its etymological flimsiness. There's something sexy about its aggressive, diagrammatic sleekness, somehow both vulvic and phallic. As the professor retorts: "'I know, I know,' he said, dismissing her quibble. 'But I like the idea of wedge. It whips.'"46 At once pseudo-scientific and obscene, "wedge" as code for cunt is a sly riff on the pornographic as an exercise in "knowledge-pleasure."47 Oreo's circuitous search through various dictionaries to get to the root of — or grow from the root up — what ends up being an elaborate vaginal obfuscation puts her in the position of a sexual-epistemological explorer. She even experiences, like any good pornographic sleuth, two moments of involuntary convulsion — falling off her chair laughing. And we, in turn, laugh at the oscillation between abstract wordplay, dirty jokes, and bodily pratfalls.

Oreo's humor often works through extravagant excess that hides a pointed acknowledgment of certain kinds of historical baggage. Harryette Mullen writes of Ross's play with cliché that her "witty reconfigurations of hackneyed phrases are sometimes just for the fun of it, but frequently her visual-verbal puns and transliterated metaphors also expose and break down petrified stereotypes in the clichés and commonplaces of familiar expressions."48 We learn, for instance, that the protagonist's nickname "Oreo" (her given name is Christine) came to her grandmother, Louise, in a dream as "Oriole," but no one could understand what she was saying through her thick southern accent and so "Oreo," which seemed an apt enough comparison, stuck. Aural information lost in translation is easily filled in with a convenient, clichéd racial slur ("an Oreo is an insult before it is a cookie in black America"49 ^— black on the outside, white on the inside) and "Oreo" replaces the other saccharine nicknames of her youth ("Brown Sugar and Chocolate Drop and Honeybun"50) for good. Though sans the pseudo-scientific notation that sprinkles much of the novel (facetious equations abound), the explication of the book's title is its own commentary on the facile equations of racial stereotyping, and a taste of the multilayered nature of the humor — homonyms upon puns upon cultural in-jokes upon physical comedy — that distinguishes the novel as a whole.

In one of the few scholarly treatments of Oreo, William W. Cook and James Tatum compare the novel's philology to stand-up comedy, remarking that, "We remember not so much the plot of Oreo, as its great lines. We often have the sense that an entire scene is set up to clear the way for some outrageous one-liners."51 There is a structural resonance between stand-up's setups — which lead to and dissipate in the abrupt release of the punch-line — and common complaints about the narrative structure of pornography, or the lack thereof. In "The Pornographic Imagination," Susan Sontag notes Adorno's critique that "a piece of pornographic fiction concocts no better than a crude excuse for a beginning; and once having begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere."52 The stand-up set as a whole, in its multiple iterative ends, is similar in this way to the pornographic film. As John Limon writes, "the problem with seeing a stand-up performance (five or twenty or ninety minutes) as a single aesthetic object is that stand-up is dominated by miniclimaxes — the series of punch lines — that are not readily convertible into straight lines for a metaclimax or punch line of the whole."53 Though it's hard to attest to Ross's personal experience as a viewer of pornography, she was intimately acquainted with the miniclimaxes of stand-up comedy, having worked as a ghostwriter in the 1960s for a male Jewish comedian.54

Oreo, as a character and as a novel, dramatizes and satirizes what Limon characterizes as the "Jewish approach" to comedy. In Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, Limon argues that "the appeal of comedy may be traced to its imposition of geometrical perfectionism on compounded liminality."55 This "compounded liminality" has much to do with the historical relationship in America of Jewishness to whiteness and so, necessarily, to its definition through opposition against Blackness, homosexuality, and femininity. "American abjectness taken to its extreme is a craving for abstraction,"56 which Limon reads as extreme whiteness:

[T]he Jewish approach to white America — as in The Jazz Singer — was made through blackface. . . . It was made, in sum, through the black body, the homosexual body, and the female body. 'Through' them means 'by way of abjecting' them ... On behalf of the American suburb, heretofore Protestant, Jewish comedians took the body and turned it into a gag, which is not the same as expressing it or repressing it. It is abstracting what is the essence of the concrete.57

On behalf of the black, female, and queer body, Oreo gags right back. All bodies become intensely linguistically abstracted and toyed with. The small thin line distinguishing human sexual agents from inanimate sexual object becomes increasingly hard to trace. If the novel is Ross's extended stand-up set in the grand tradition of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Oreo herself is unabashedly all the bodies male comedy uses to court and create the abstraction they crave.

In Oreo's sexual situations, though, people become distinctly and discomfitingly doll-like, and a more specific dynamic of comic incongruity is at play. Ross's comic genius evokes, time and again, Henri Bergson's theory of laughter. All laughable objects and moments, he asserts, give us some version of the image of "something mechanical in something living."58 Bergson theorizes that "The rigid, the ready-made, the mechanical, in contrast with the supple, the ever-changing and the living . . . in a word, automatism in contrast with free activity, such are the defects that laughter singles out and would fain correct."59  Oreo shows us, through the figure of the sex doll, the way in which the pornographic and the comic share this combination of liveliness grafted onto mechanism, flesh controlled by unrelenting formula, "in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical."60 In conventional comedy and pornography, in other words, bodies act like abstract machines — for our pleasure. What then, Oreo asks, about the sex/comedy machine's (self-)pleasure?

"Water[ing] her begonia," or, "are you wet yet?"

The bodies Ross plays with hardly stay upright and isolated, purely auditory and scopic spectacles on a spot-lit stage. Their gagging gets gross, tactile, and unexpectedly participatory. Unfolding in a section titled "Half-WIT" within the chapter "Pets, Playmates, Pedagogues," the first sex scene of the novel is a bed trick with a twist. Ross sets the scene: "Oreo's tutors were on vacation. She needed something to do to occupy her fourteen-year-old mind for a few weeks, so she put an ad in the "Situations Wanted column of the Inquirer." Three days later, she received a phone call from what sounded like a young white man."61 The man identifies himself as Dr. Jafferts, a medical examiner, and after some bureaucratic foreplay, covering Oreo's college certificates, hourly pay, and gas mileage money, Jafferts asks her to "submit to a medical examination for the job." The game is on. Jafferts asks Oreo's age, whether she's a virgin, what color her underclothes are ("all white"62) and if she'd mind "telling me all the words you know that mean sexual intercourse?" "With a wicked smile, Oreo said, "Certainly. Procreation, cohabitation, coition, coitus."63 Her tutors might be on vacation, but school is still in session. Sounding "terribly disappointed," Jafferts then asks Oreo, over the phone, to undress and masturbate. She obliges, after her own fashion:

After a few moments he said, "Are they off?"

"No," said Oreo, "I'm having trouble with my wedgies." The doctor continued, oblivious to her anachronistic answer. "Rub along the inside of your thigh and tell me when you get wet."

Oreo put down the phone and went over to water her begonia, then she came back and coughed into the phone to let the doctor know she was there.

"Are you wet yet?" he said wistfully.

Oreo said, "You know, doctor, the trouble with masturbation is you come too fast. There's no one for you to give directions to. You know, like 'No, not like that, like this. No, yes, no, harder, softer, up, down. No, no. I'm losing it. Yes, yes, that's it, stay there, right there. No, no, not like that — the way you were doing it before. Yes, that's it.' And there's no one for you not to give directions to. You know what I mean, doctor"?"

There was a moan at the other end of the line. "I'd like to come over and give you a complete examination," said the moaner hoarsely.

"Why don't you do that," said the moanee sweetly. [. . .]

The doctor let out a gasp as big as Masters and Johnson and said he could be at her place in an hour. Oreo told him that she would wait for him on her front porch and that she would be wearing a begonia leaf.64

After her initially disappointingly dry, scientifically graphic dirty talk of "Procreation, cohabitation, coition, coitus," the scene gets a little wetter. While watering her begonia, Oreo linguistically whets the sexual appetite of the hapless "medical examiner." Throughout the novel, but particularly at this moment, Ross revels in making it titillatingly tricky to tell what is euphemism and what isn't. In a novel that, as Kathryn Hume has pointed out, has scant use for a Barthesian "reality effect," there's little against which to check a claim that "she went over to water her begonia" — and what that might actually mean.65 Is Oreo really watering a houseplant or is she actually masturbating? Ross might as well have written "wouldn't you like to know?" — with the begonia leaf at the end a possible shorthand for "well what did you think she was doing?"

By making staid sexual clichés ambiguously literal, Ross leverages writing's ability to linger indefinitely in the ambiguity of euphemism — a privilege it holds above its sister arts. Kelly Dennis, tracing the differences between sculptures and paintings of the venus pudica, the nude woman or Venus with her hand tantalizingly draped in front of or across her pubis, notes that: "while sculpture allows one to circumambulate around the figure in order to witness her modesty and establish that she does not in fact touch herself overtly, the two-dimensional surface of the painting, undistinguished from itself, does not permit us the certitude that the woman does not touch herself." ⁶⁶ Literary texts, like painting, can luxuriate in the titillating ambiguity of euphemism indefinitely — the woman is potentially perpetually touching herself (or not).

At the same time, though, Ross suggests that it doesn't really matter what Oreo is or isn't doing with her nethers at this point in the novel. Oreo's elaborate pranking of "the moaner" is its own — and better — kind of slick self-gratification. Aesthetic and linguistic stimulation here are sexier than genital. Meanwhile, Ross's readers find themselves with their own sort of mounting ... anticipation, for the gag or punch-line that this extended setup promises. Oreo bemoans that "the trouble with masturbation is you come too fast" because "there's no one for you not to give directions to." She seems, though, to have solved that problem, using the "doctor," in some ways, as her own sort of masturbatory aid, a convenient rag doll she will move diagrammatically through a particular satisfying bed trick in order to mete out some punishment, but mostly prolong her own self-gratification.

Diagrammatic, I contend, is a particularly apt way to think about both the figure of the sex doll and the structure of the humor in Oreo. The diagram, straddling representation and abstraction, is defined by its two-dimensionality. It delivers information by flattening it, similar to the binary "yes/no" game by which Oreo characterizes sex. Writing on Deleuze and the diagram, Jakub Zdebik argues that "the diagrammatic process could be imagined as a physical state or system being atomized into incorporeal abstract traits and then reconfigured into another state or system."67 Oreo disassembles (or, maybe, dismembers) the game that the "doctor" thinks he'll be playing with the object of his desire, atomizes the system of sex into its various "incorporeal abstract traits" (both "Procreation, cohabitation, coition, coitus" and the joke about the begonia), and then reconfigures them into a different system, one in which the doctor has become the doll and Oreo pleasures herself. The sneaky implication, too, is that the reader herself, just along for the ride, is not there so much to get off on the spectacle, as to serve as another "one for you not to give directions to," another sex toy for the brash and boundless heroine, and the author who penned her.There's a decidedly masturbatory bent to Ross's plot but, more importantly, to her prose. Language is her toy, and she's playing somewhat dirty with it. Masturbation has long been used as an analogy for writing — "a trope for the trauma and delights of imaginative reverie, self-cultivation, and autorepresentation."68 Female masturbation, in particular, like female sexuality in general, has taken on a floral air of mystery and misinformation. In his cultural history of masturbation, Thomas Laqueur notes that "history has given female masturbation — liberating, ecstatic, dreamy, and lyrical versus abject, humiliating, and decidedly second-rate — its own, gendered resonance."69 Eve Sedgwick, most famously, argues that while under the "modern, trivializing, hygienic-developmental discourse . . . autoeroticism not only is funny . . . but also must be relegated to the inarticulable space of (a barely superceded) infantility,"70 masturbation, especially by women, "can seem to offer — not least as an analogy to writing — a reservoir of potentially utopian metaphors and energies for independence, self-possession, and a rapture that may owe relatively little to political or interpersonal abjection."71 Oreo is a slightly different sort of masturbating girl. What makes the comedy of the novel's porno-graphic scenes both more ambivalent and more hilarious than the dreamy lyricism of masturbation as a utopian metaphor of independence and empowerment is how much it derives its pleasure not in opposition to, but through a virtuosic embrace of "the modern, trivializing, hygienic-developmental discourse." Much of the novel's humor comes from overlaying this mode of mechanical, abstracted language onto situations that owe very much indeed to "political or interpersonal abjection." And then getting off not in spite of, or rapturously freed from that mechanistic gaze or that abjection, but because of them.

A slapstick bed trick

After watering her begonia, whatever it may be, Oreo hangs up on Dr. Jafferts and goes down the block to ask Betty Williams for help: "Betty was the neighborhood nymphomaniac. For two cents she would fuck a plunger. In fact, the story of Betty and the plumber's friend was a West Philadelphia legend. Anyone who thought that the shibboleth friend referred to a person was known to be an outsider and was therefore the object of xenophobic ridicule and scorn. Betty agreed to help her young friend Oreo."72 Betty seems particularly equipped to be Oreo's accomplice, to make use of men as objects, objects as men. The scene then moves to Oreo's house, where, watching from a hiding spot, she lets Betty toy with the "medical examiner."

Sitting on a high stool, Betty began a rhythmic opening and closing of her legs, revealing and concealing a tangle of pubic hair. The sweat stood out on the doctor's head after the first two open-close, open-close beats. After a while, he seemed in danger of drowning in his own juice. But Oreo's plan was without mercy. Simultaneously with the rhythms she was laying down from her stool, Betty began telling the doctor one of her favorite jokes. "It's about this man and woman who go down to Florida on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. They get up in their room, and the first thing they do is take off all their clothes."

The doctor licked his lips in anticipation, his eyes fixed on Betty's open-close, open-close.

The man who asked Oreo over the phone to get herself wet is now mired helplessly "in his own juice." The "open-close" mirrors the "No, not like that, like this. No, yes, no, harder, softer, up, down" oscillation that Oreo uses earlier over the phone to describe sex as a primarily linguistic enterprise of vaguely ineffective binary instruction-giving. The merciless "open-close" beat seems to be as titillating to the doctor as the "tangle of pubic hair." This unyielding mechanical alternation — graphically undeviating and explicit both — is what nearly drowns the doctor.

Embedded within the physical comedy of Ross's bed trick gag, and key to its pacing, is Betty's recitation of her favorite joke, which ups the slapstick ante of the scene. The married couple, in a bid to spice up their love life, decide to stand naked in opposite corners of the room and run at, and into each other.

. . .But they miss and run right past. The man is going so fast, he goes sailing out the open window. His room is on the tenth story, but he's lucky 'cause he falls in the swimming pool. But he's afraid to come out 'cause he don't have no clothes on. Everybody seems to be running to the hotel and nobody's paying him no mind, but he's still afraid to come out the pool buck naked. Then he sees this bellhop ready to go in the hotel, and he calls him over. He says, "Say, bellhop, I want to get out the pool, but I can't 'cause I ain't got no clothes on." The bellhop don't even look surprised. He says, "That's all right, sir, nobody'll pay no 'ttention to you. You just come on out." The man says, "What do you mean nobody'll pay no 'ttention to me? I'm buck naked!" The bellhop says, "I know, sir, but most of the people are up on the tenth floor trying to figure out a way to get a woman off a doorknob."

The punchline — "trying to figure out how to get a woman off a doorknob" — is a slight inversion of the Bergsonian comedic dictum of "something mechanical encrusted on the living."73 It captures perfectly, though, Bergson's elaboration of his theory that "the laughable element . . . consists of a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being" — both in physical and linguistic comedy.74 The diagrammatic plausibility — and inflexibility — of the couple's plan is foiled by their own human foibles, even as it gets one of them stuck on a very materially inelastic piece of home furnishing.

Betty's favorite joke is pure physical comedy — and slapstick at that. As Carpio describes it: "Falls and blows are at the core of what makes physical comedy slapstick, which is generally based on absurd and silly circumstances that nonetheless include extreme forms of violence against the body. (Slapstick derives its name from the two thin slats of wood used by actors of commedia dell'arte in sixteenth-century Italy to slap one another for comedic effect.)"75 Slapstick, many have argued, is funny because people get hurt. But you know that those people aren't you, and that you won't get hurt, so you laugh. Both the titillation and the slapstick sense of personal security and entertainment that Betty's favorite joke produce are short-lived, however, for her male audience. Oreo puts her highly-developed brand of self-defense, "the Way of the Interstitial Thrust, or WIT" to work.76 "Oreo came out of hiding and gave him a quick shu-kik to the groin, then got his jaw in the classic nek-brāc position. With his life but a blō away, he promised Oreo he would never again annoy innocent young women by phone or in person with his snortings and slaverings. With a half-force bak-bop she propelled him off Betty's porch and watched as he shmegeggely fled the street."77 The "medical examiner" abruptly realizes he's misjudged where the frame of the shtick is, and that his own stick is suddenly in very real physical danger — his life but a (not that kind of) "blō" away. It's a nightmare scenario for a slapstick audience — to be a sudden participant when you thought you were a mere listener/observer.

Betty's joke is not a new joke, nor is the bed trick a new prank (though this one never quite makes it to bed).78 Novelty has nothing to do with the humor here. Donald Crafton argues that "... slapstick cinema seems to be ruled by the principle of accretion: gags, situations, costumes, characters, camera techniques are rehearsed and recycled in film after film, as though the modernist emphasis on originality and the unique text was unheard of."79 Or, put another way, "in slapstick nothing is discarded." ⁸⁰ This "principle of accretion" is an apt way of thinking about the graphic humor in Oreo, which trades so heavily in making light of heavy historical baggage and functions via the rapid accumulation of seemingly incongruent forms of excess — excessive diagrams, equations, puns, euphemisms, wetness, wit, and WIT.In the phone sex / bed trick section's excessive ending, Oreo punching the doctor — "his life but a blō away" — isn't even its final punchline. The section ends with:

She turned back just in time to hear Betty saying plaintively, "But what about me?"

Oreo realized that it had been very brave and self-sacrificing of Betty to participate in this little hoax. But her face brightened when she saw what time it was. She gave Betty the good news. "What about you? It's five-thirty. Your father will be home any minute now. Do what you usually do in these circumstances. Fuck him." (60-61)

Stick it to the patriarchy — (literally?) fuck your father? Having denied Betty one form of sexual relief by sending the phone harasser showily on his way, Oreo encourages her to find another member with which to pleasure herself. This one just happens to be a member of her family. The dig is less at Betty than at the slate of objects Ross makes interchangeably available for her to fuck. Plunger, prank caller, father — none of the rods are all that appealing, but Betty is welcome to them if she wants and Oreo delights in offering her a quick and easy (and the implication is almost completely fungible) swap. Oreo (the book and the character both), it seems, prefers a queerer, less penetrative pleasure.

Maidenhead®

One can, of course, escape one's pursuer by turning into a thing oneself. The most famous story of a person transformed into a thing is Ovid's tale of the sexual pursuit of Daphne by Apollo.81

— Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things

The novel's action comes to a head in a graphic depiction of a would-be rape foiled by a futuristic super-strong rubber-like false hymen called a Maidenhead®, which Oreo pragmatically wedges into her "wedge." In this chapter, our super-savvy hyper-verbal protagonist strips and splays, turning herself into a (sex) doll with a vengeance in order to repel, quite literally, the unwanted sexual advances of a well-hung man named Kirk.

After Oreo has left Betty and Philadelphia behind to follow her father's clues through the streets of New York City, she sees: "A black pimp and ten prostitutes, five white, five black, in alternating colors, wend[ing] toward her in a ragged V, a checkerboard wedge of wedges."82 Oreo observes a ritual in which "Parnell," as she dubs the pimp, demands a shoe shine from and gives out a boot in the rear to each of the assembled "wedges" in turn. Oreo, as comeuppance, walks up, gives "him a grand-slam clout across the ass" with her cane and runs away. The Maidenhead® scene begins with Oreo having been captured and brought back to Parnell's lair for punishment, in the form of rape, in front of an audience of prostitutes. She is not to be raped by the pimp himself, but rather by what first appears to be "a small white horse" but ends up being "a man, virtually on all fours, caparisoned in a black loincloth," named Kirk, who Parnell calls his "some kinda way-out instrument of torture." As Kirk approaches Oreo, and Oreo approaches its attempted rape, Ross reverses the appraising, taxonomizing, pornographic gaze. After the amply endowed Kirk's junk is unsheathed, "unfurled like a paper favor blown by Gabriel at the last party in the history of the world," Oreo digresses into a flight of euphemistic excess:

Oreo was impressed. Male genitals had always reminded her of oysters, gizzards, and turkey wattles at best, a bunch of seedless grapes at worst. On the other hand, most marmoreal baskets (e.g., the David's) resembled the head of a mandrill (a serendipitous pun). An inveterate crotch-watcher, she had once made a list of sports figures whom she classified under the headings "Capons" and "Cockerels." The capons (mostly big-game hunters, bowlers) were men whose horns could be described by any of the following (or similar) terms: pecker, dick, cock, thing, peter, prick, dangle, shmendrick, putz, shmuck. The cockerels (gymnasts, swimmers) sported any of the following: shlong, dong, rod, tool, lumber. Neutral words (member, penis) were applicable in cases where the looseness or padding of the standard uniform made definitive assessment impossible (baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and tennis players). But Kirk's stallion was a horse of another collar, of such dimensions that he could have used a zeppelin for a condom.83

In an epic catalogue of phallic nomenclature, Ross makes euphemism itself somewhat appalling, bringing the nausea back to ad nauseum. The true object of admiration, however, is clearly not the various peckers, dongs, and rods that Oreo ogles, but, rather, as always, her own polyglot verbal virtuosity. With the appraising eye of a collector, she neatly populates a linguistic cabinet of cock-and-ball curiosities, carefully chopped off from the extraneous bodies to which they were once attached, and preserved as specimens for later use and appreciation. Much of the humor of the passage comes from Ross's ballsy insistence on turning, against gender type, an appraising eye on male physiognomy in a flourish of extravagant objectification.84 If the male gaze transforms women into sex dolls, her rebuttal pares all men down, with a hard-edged linguistic flourish, into dildos.

This power play is an important part of a set-up in which Oreo seems (temporarily) to embrace prostration and passivity before the punch line that she has used technology to weaponize her own sex. Parnell directs Oreo to strip and Oreo directs Parnell (who deputizes a prostitute) to clean up Kirk (an inspection reveals that "Kirk had cornered the market on smegma"85). Oreo returns from the bathroom clad only in sandals, a brassiere, and a mezuzah. Then the action begins:

Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head. He threw the unresisting Oreo to the floor, stretched her legs wide in the ready-set position of a nutcracker, took aim, tried to jam his pole into her vault and — much to his and everyone else's surprise — met with a barrier that propelled him backward and sent him bounding off the nearest wall.86

Splayed like one sort of tool (nutcracker), Oreo seems magically to repel an attempted penetration by another (Kirk's "stallion") at the behest of yet a third (the pimp, Parnell). Of course, the inanimate object to which Oreo's body is first compared (nutcracker) ends up being a fairly apt description of what she does to Kirk:

The look of astonishment on Kirk's face as he gave the dullard's flat-eyed stare to his bruised cock and muscles would warm her heart's cockles for all the time she was alive, alive-o. The puzzlement of Parnell, the hoaxing of the whores — oh, Oreo could do nothing but smile her cookie smile. ⁸⁷

Ross reminds us of her heroine's perpetual association with visual objectification as she smiles "her cookie smile," an allusion to her name and susceptibility to consumption. Her nickname brings us back, in this otherwise antirealist romp, to the real fact that as a woman, and particularly a Black woman, Oreo would be prone to being perceived by others as a hypervisible, hypersexualized object first, especially in the eye of a white man like Kirk. Though critics are right to note that "the only thing the novel doesn't target is Oreo herself," making sure she remains not only "omnicompetent"88 but sexually inviolate, Ross knows and shows that the world in which Oreo lives would like nothing better than to make her as ready for mastication as the prepackaged confection that is her namesake.

After these two set-up paragraphs during which the reader shares in the puzzlement of Kirk, Parnell, and the prostitutes at Oreo's "cookie smile," Ross lets us in on the technological secret of her impressive powers of repulsion.

The barrier Kirk had come upon (but not come upon) when he tried to pull a 401 (breaking and entering) was a false hymen made of elasticium, a newly discovered trivalent metal whose outstanding characteristic was enormous resiliency. Elasticium's discovery had been made possible by a grant from Citizens Against the Rape of Mommies (CAROM), an organization whose membership was limited to those who had had at least one child (or were in the seventh to ninth month of pregnancy) before being attacked (usually by their husbands, an independent survey revealed). CAROM's work was a clear case of mother succor (and thus an aid to rhymesters). Vindictiveness would soon lead CAROM's leadership to share false hymens with the world ("Maidenheads® are available in your choice of Cherry pink, Vestal Virgin white, or Black Widow black"), but Oreo had been able to get hold of a prototype because of her acquaintanceship with its inventor, Caresse Booteby.89

Maidenhead® in place, Oreo has bridged her own gap and made herself into a no-sex doll. Though she's been playing Theseus throughout the novel, here she seems, at a moment of crisis, to be pulling a Daphne, "the most famous story of a person transformed into a thing."90 But whereas the Daphne-turned-laurel-tree of Greek myth is rooted, organic, and beholden to her father, Oreo, the graphic object of the 1970s, is decidedly none of those things. She is free-standing, inorganically equipped, and, though on a quest to find her father and the secret of her birth, utterly uninterested in paternal salvation. Rather than a piece of shrubbery who will remain sexually inviolate while having no choice but to see her leaves used in victory wreaths and savory stews alike, Ross's beset heroine becomes a mezuzah-clad, afro-sporting black Barbie, who bucks not only the attempted rape by Kirk, but an expected script of what she, as an African-American female protagonist of a novel published in the 1970s, should expect to have visited sexually upon her.91 As Danzy Senna writes in the foreword to the novel's republication: "Oreo resists the unwritten conventions that still exist for novels written by black women today. . . . The character is never violated, sexually or otherwise. The characters are not from the South. Oreo is sincerely ironic, hilarious, brainy, impenetrable at times."92

Ross refuses to make Oreo available for what Hortense Spillers termed "pornotroping,"93 or, in Alexander Weheliye's words, "the enactment of black suffering for a shocked and titillated audience"94 Daphne Brooks expands on Spillers by noting that "born out of diasporic plight and subject to pornotroping, this body has countenanced a 'powerful stillness.'95 Turning prone stillness into unexpectedly slapstick movement is, in part, the hinge of the comedy of the Maidenhead scene. As attempted rape CAROMs somewhat jarringly into gag, Ross refuses the pornotropic and instead gives us an unexpected bit of porno-graphic humor, in which the sex doll pleasures herself by becoming a gleefully graphic object. This move to the masturbatory for the minoritarian subject allows, as Summer Kim Lee writes of Ocean Vuong's 2016 poem "Ode to Masturbation," bodies that "bear the marks of violent history" to "evade narratives reducible to either injury or resilience through the pleasures felt from within."96

Maidenhead® — both the chapter and the object it describes — is not a departure from, but in fact a materialization of the linguistic zingers that characterized the wedge, begonia, and bed trick episodes that precede it. The material of Maidenhead is as much wordplay as it is elasticium and more time is given to describing its linguistic provenance than its physical properties. The comedy in Oreo's sex scenes involves what happens when a hot and heavy and violently weaponized heterosexual male desire finds itself stumbling into, and shot back from, a wickedly abstract, linguistically virtuosic female precision that is at once slippery, excessive, and unyielding. In the end, to use Bergson's formulation, the butt of the joke, "that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life,"97 is more "the look of astonishment on Kirk's face as he gave the dullard's flat-eyed stare to his bruised cock and muscles" than it is the technologically-enhanced repulsive powers of the essentially adaptable and perpetually lively Oreo. We laugh as Oreo, by inserting an object of her choice inside of her, removes herself as a human object from the sexual situation, leaving Kirk as the scene's real automaton. Rather than appealing to a father river god to save her from rape by turning her into an inarticulate — voiceless and jointless both — tree, Oreo embraces the elasticity of a self-imposed, self-gratifying artificiality. Ross's graphic object — gross and geometric at once — is both pleased with and pleasures itself.       Oreo's transformation cites at once the plastic Barbie, the cloth topsy-turvy, the black gutta-percha, and the inflatable sex doll. Aligning Oreo with these playthings also signals the novel's complicated awareness of the kind of fun, familiarity, and unfettered access that has been expected of minoritarian subjects in the United States. As Kim Lee again writes, "minoritarian subjects must also bear and navigate the burden of relatability from which a compulsory sociability emerges; one must not only be legible and transparent but also accessibly and accommodatingly so."98 When the minoritarian subject-as-sex-toy becomes autoerotic, though, it suddenly jumps the shark of compulsory sociability, legibility, and transparency. The masturbating sex doll gives us instead, à la Sedgwick, "the vision of a certain autoerotic closure, absentation, self-sufficiency."99 The Maidenhead materializes Sedgwick's formulation of "autoerotic closure" and turns it into a pun, a performance, and a provocation: in short, a gag.

An abstracted linguistic humor — begonia, cunt, cockerel, etc. — meets the physicality of slapstick again and again in Oreo, without ever really melding comfortably. Kirk rebounding off of the linguistically overdetermined surface of the Maidenhead® in this scene evokes what Crafton calls "the gag's status as an irreconcilable difference."100 Crafton argues, against critics of the slapstick film who deem the gag's lack of integration into narrative a failure, that easy, seamless integration was never the point. Rather, "while other genres work to contain their excesses, in slapstick (like avant-garde, a kind of limit-text), the opposition is fundamental. Furthermore, it is carefully constructed to remain an unbridgeable gap."101 This trifecta of unbridgeability, resistance to epistemological comprehension, and unintegrated excess, is key to Ross's porno-graphic episodes.

The "unbridgeable gap" is a distance that exists not just internally, between gag and narrative, but externally, between reader and text. As Ngai writes of the related aesthetic of "the zany," "the zany object or person is one we can only enjoy — if we do in fact enjoy it or her — at a safe or comfortable distance."102 Unlike Williams's characterization of pornography as "body genre," whose "success . . . is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on screen,"103 Ngai's zaniness "does not seem to call forth a subjective response in any way mimetic of itself. This lack of accord between aesthetic subject and object seems all the more surprising given zaniness's unique history as a style explicitly about mimetic behavior."104 The sex doll is an object that seems to remain both zanily distant from and pornographically close to the bodies it mimics — making it an exemplary figure for a queasily postmodern mode of penetrative flattening.105

But the gross zaniness of Oreo's particular sex doll ploy — as opposed, for instance, to the fun A.M. Homes's narrator has with Barbie — also evokes the racialized affect of animatedness that Ngai describes in Ugly Feelings. Produced by a "surprising interplay between the passionate and the mechanical,"106animatedness is, paradoxically, a minor affect of excess, "the 'thinging' of a body in order to construct it, counter-intuitively, as impassioned."107 Discussing the example of the animated show The PJs, Ngai analyzes how the physical slippage of the Claymation mouths of the characters produces an "excess liveliness": "It might be said that the excess liveliness produced by this particular body part suggests something like the racialized, animated subject's "revenge," produced not by transcending the principles of mechanization from above but, as in the case of Chaplin's factory worker, by obeying them too well."108 In Oreo, it is a different set of lips that take their "revenge," becoming excessively animated by, paradoxically, embracing a certain script of dollhood, in order to repel the advances of a dildo who expected to be acting in an altogether different scene. Though Oreo embraces, temporarily, the role of the animated nonliving entity, the gag of the scene quickly becomes the dummying of Kirk and his cock, in their repetitive, fruitless assault — and the solitary pleasure Oreo takes in it.The animated excess of Oreo's finest scene of slapstick embraces "irreconcilable difference" along lines of both sex and race. As Tom Gunning argues, "slapstick comedy takes us not simply into the realm of the pie, but into the land of carnival, where narrative reveals the absurdity of its principle of integration, as legs transform from flesh to wood and back again, and pies end up in the face rather than in the mouth."109 The novel, with its mixed-race heroine, is decidedly not about a utopian ideal of easy and emancipatory racial amalgamation.110 Her name is Oreo, not caramel. The novel insists, instead, on graphic boundaries — reminiscent of the "checkerboard wedge of wedges,"111 or the cartwheeling skirt-flipping of the topsy-turvy/Topsy-Eva Doll — between various racial and ethnic groups and flaunts but hardly romanticizes its heroine's virtuosic ability to code-switch and temporarily hop between the stubbornly chiaroscuro planes of Black and Jewish identity that make up her world. But she never facilely collapses them into each other. Oreo briefly becomes one sort of mechanical thing, but a bridge across racial divides isn't exactly it.

The reason for this refusal might have something to do with the history of the stage and film practice of slapstick itself in the United States, which is inextricable from Jewish vaudeville and blackface minstrelsy. Carpio notes the persistent challenge for black artists "of creating an embodied, physical comedy given the lasting power of the specter of minstrelsy."112 Blackface minstrelsy was, long preceding Al Jolson's star turn in The Jazz Singer, an avenue for "Americanizing ethnics" — Irish and Jewish performers — to make a living and access whiteness.113 Melting into or with performed "blackness" was never the point of blackface.114 And neither, with very different politics, does a racial melting pot seem to be an option entertained (or entertaining) in the world of Oreo, infused as it is with both Jewish and Black traditions of verbal and physical performance that Ross stages as infused with animosity towards each other. (Oreo is conversant in Yiddish not because of her Jewish father but because her Black grandfather, James Clark, hating Jews, sells mail-order items to them at an outrageous markup.)115. Boundaries and barriers are real things, even if the materials that make them up are as artificial as elasticium, and neither uplift nor utopia are things Ross's novel cares much about. The mixed-race body of her hyperverbal protagonist is like Bernstein's characterization of topsy-turvy dolls: "bodies that do not merely mingle blackness and whiteness, but that instead keep blackness and whiteness simultaneously in tense distinction and in intimate contact."116 When the gag of the elasticium hymen flips the script of a black woman being raped by a white man, its slant acknowledgment of a dark American history of that "intimate contact" evokes Benjamin's 1927 declaration about slapstick comedy (here abbreviated by Michael North) that "the target of all slapstick is a 'ludicrously liberated technology' that provokes laughter only 'over an abyss of horror'"117

The artificiality of linguistic bodies puts them on the same shelf, in key ways, as the sex doll. Do with dolls and words what you like — "real" bodies aren't really at stake. Embracing bodies as linguistic constructions and their attempted knocking together of parts as Bergsonian slapstick, the sex scenes of Oreo tacitly acknowledge and sharply satirize the fact that bodies like Oreo's — black and female — have seldom been considered "real" either. Comedy may be a man in trouble, but the punchlines of the postmodern canon are disturbingly often a woman being raped (see, for instance, the "Strip Botticelli" scene of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49).118

The sex doll is both a figure and figurine — a rich analogy and a functional object. Centering it in the canon of postmodern prose helps us see that both the comic and pornographic function via a logic of abstracting and mechanizing human bodies. But the ways in which Ross's Oreo seizes that logic and plays — with us and herself — may also help us reframe the masturbatory dynamics of postmodern prose and the place of black female bodies and writers within it. In Oreo, the sex doll gags back.

Rebecca Clark is postdoctoral fellow with the Dartmouth Society of Fellows in the Dartmouth College Department of English. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project is titled American Graphic. She has previously published an essay on Open City and bed bugs in Narrative, an original comics adaptation of Thomas Hoccleve's "My Compleinte" in postmedieval, and an essay on laughter in The Reivers in the edited collection Faulkner and History.

References