Brave New Humans and Incongruous Bodysuits: On Surveillance and its Modes in Dave Eggers’ The Every (2021)

Abstract

This paper builds on Pierre Jourde’s definition of the incongruous as something insignificant which emerges out of discrepancies and heterogeneous encounters, often appears superfluous and carries connotations of impropriety to examine a seemingly unimportant detail in Dave Eggers’ novel The Every: the lycra bodysuits worn by the inhabitants of his near-future dystopia. Their unexpected appearance at the heart of the world’s leading surveillance corporation threatens to derail the protagonist’s plan to sabotage the company from the inside. In a world where eye-tracking is the norm and everything is permanently recorded, Delaney Wells fears she may be discovered. The paper first locates The Every and its focus on norms – sartorial and others – in the tradition of utopian literature to show that it is the clash with the new standards set at the Every that produces the incongruous. It then studies the functioning of the incongruous on the levels of referentiality, textuality and narrative to lay bare the inherent tension in any attempt to make sense of the incongruous, something which readers are nevertheless encouraged to do. The final section examines the question of mode in The Every. Indeed, the incongruous produces comic effects, thereby thwarting the expectations of readers whose surveillance imaginary may have been shaped by bleak dystopias. The Every thus raises questions about how established literary forms and genres can accommodate twenty-first century surveillance in late-capitalist societies where it seems to be whole-heartedly embraced and where it is rather invisibility that is perceived as threatening.