Category: Volume 2 – Number 1 – September 1991

  • Anouncements & Advertisements

     

     

    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu

     


     

         Journal and Book Announcements:   
    
    1)   _Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology_
    2)   _boundary 2_
    3)   _College Literature_
    4)   _Genders_
    5)   _OCTOBER_
    6)   _Poetics Today_
    7)   _SAQ_
    8)   _SSCORE_
    9)   _Tel Aviv Review_
    10)  _Electronic Networking: Research, Applications, and Policy_
    11)  _Reading Pictures/Viewing Texts_, by Claude Gandelman
    12)  _Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters_ (print)
    13)  _Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters_ (email)
    14)  _Journal of Communication Inquiry_
    15)  _Pynchon Notes_
    16)  _Artpaper_
    17)  _MeckJournal_
    18)  _Monographic Review/ Revista Monographica_
    
         Symposia, Discussion Groups, Calls for Papers:
    
    19)  International Symposium, The Netherlands, Dec. 18-19, 1991
    20)  Console-ing Passions: Television, Video and Feminist 
         studies.  April 3 & 4, 1992, University of Iowa - Iowa City
    21)  HYPERTEXT '91, 15-18 December 1991, San Antonio, Texas  
    22)  DERRIDA electronic mail discussion group
    
    1)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                           A Special Issue of
    
            _Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology_
                            5:l (Spring 1991)
    
            _The Emergency of Black and the Emergence of Rap_
                       Jon Michael Spencer, Editor
    
         _The Emergency of Black and the Emergence of Rap_ focuses on
    rap music as a new form of African-American oral expression,
    capable of voicing the full range of concerns within the black
    community, from sexuality to spirituality.  Featuring a poetic
    postscript by C. Eric Lincoln, this volume also presents essays
    on hip-hop, the debate over obscene lyrics, ghetto culture, and
    Islamic ideology.  Public Enemy, Kool Moe Dee, and M.C. Hammer
    are among the many performers discussed in this volume.
    
    Single copy price:  $10.00
    
    To order your copy today, call (919) 684-6837 between 8:30 a.m.
    and 4:30 p.m. EST, with credit card information (VISA or
    Mastercard).
    
    --Semiannual--
    Subscriptions:  $30.00 institutions, $15.00 individuals.  Please
    add $4.00 postage outside the U.S.
    
    Duke University Press, Journals Division
    6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708
    
    2)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                              _boundary 2_
           an international journal of literature and culture
    
                          Paul A. Bove, Editor
    
                     Future special issues include:
    
    Japan in the World
    edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian
    
    Postmodern Feminisms
    edited by Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer Wicke
    
    Postmodern America and the New Americanists
    edited by Donald E. Pease
    
                     Recent and forthcoming essays:
    
    Correcting Kant: Bakhtin and Intercultural Interactions /Wlad
    Godzich
    
    "Through all things Modern": Second Thoughts on Testimonio /John
    Beverly
    
    Eurocentric Reflections: On the Modernism of Soseki /Fredric
    Jameson
    
    "The Most Suffering Class": Gender, Class, and Consciousness in
    Pre-Marxist France /Margaret Cohen
    
    --Three issues annually--
    Subscription prices:  $40.00 institutions, $20.00 individuals.
    Add $6.00 postage outside the U.S.
    
    Duke University Press, Journals Division
    6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708
    
    3)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                                _college_
                                LITERATURE
    
                A triannual journal addressing topics in
                the college literature classroom from
                Plato to poststructuralism.
    
         Recent and forthcoming special issues:
    
         The Politics of Teaching Literature (June/October 1990)
         Literary Theory in the Classroom (June 1991)
         Teaching Minority Literatures (October 1991)
         Special section on Cultural Studies (February 1992)
         Teaching Commonwealth or Postcolonial Literatures (June
              1992)
         _The Waste Land_ and _Ulysses_ (October 1992)
    
    Recent contributors include Houston A. Baker, Jr., Patrick
    Brantlinger, Robert Con Davis, Elizabeth A. Flynn, Barbara Foley,
    Henry A. Giroux, Adele King, Cary Nelson, Hershel Parker, Michael
    Payne, Paul Smith, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, and Donald Morton.
    
    Subscription prices: Individuals $15/year, $27/2 years
                         Institutions $18/year, $33/2 years
    Outside U.S. and Canada, add $5/year surface or $10/year air mail
    Prepaid orders to College Literature Fund, 544 Main Hall, West
    Chester University, West Chester, PA 19383, USA, 215-436-2901.
    Payment in U.S. funds only.
    
    4)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                      The University of Texas Press
                   presents a special issue of _Genders_
    
               THEORIZING NATIONALITY, SEXUALITY, AND RACE
                           Editor:  Ann Kibbey
                    University of Colorado at Boulder
    
    Austin, TX--_Genders_, an interdisciplinary journal in the arts,
    humanities, and mass media, explores the cultural and historical
    relationship of sexuality and gender to political, economic, and
    stylistic concerns.
    
    Theorizing Nationality, Sexuality, and Race, _Genders_ #10 is a
    special issue presenting the work of some of the most exciting
    new writers in multicultural theory including Chela Sandoval,
    Tani Barlow, and Jenny Sharpe.  Together with an important
    statement by historian Linda Gordon on the concept of difference
    in U.S. feminism, these essays redefine the critical juncture of
    nationality, sexuality, and race for contemporary theory as they
    discuss such topics as:
    
              U.S. Third World Feminism
              Colonialism in India
              Vietnamese Cinema
              "Difference"
              Women's Rights in Algeria
              Chinese Women, State, and Family
    
          Published triannually in April, August, and December
          Subscription Rates:  Individual $24, Institution $40
           Single Copy Rates:  Individual $9, Institution $14
    
        _Genders_ is published by the University of Texas Press
                        in cooperation with the
                    University of Colorado at Boulder
    
              Please contact Leah Dixon for a review copy--
                             (512) 471-4531
    
    5)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                            Art  /  Theory  /  Criticism  /  Politics
    
                                 OCTOBER
    
    editors
         Joan Copjec
         Rosalind Drauss
         Annette Michelson
                                  Examine the central cultural
                                  issues of our times . . .
    
                                  "OCTOBER is among the most advanced
                                  journals . . . in the fields of art
                                  theory, criticism, history, and
                                  practice.  Its current editors
                                  . . . are intimately familiar with
                                  the cultural and political avant
                                  garde of Europe and the U.S. and
                                  are able to attract its best
                                  thinkers . . . .  Few, if any,
                                  could receive a higher
                                  recommendation."
                                                             --Choice
     6:  Beckett's "...but the
    clouds...," Kristeva, Pleynet,
    and Sollers on the United States,
    Texts by Tom Bishop, Michael Brown,
    Octavio Armand, and others.
    
    32:  Hollis Frampton: A Special
    Issue.  Texts by Annette Michelson,
    Barry Goldensohn, Hollis Frampton,
    Christopher Phillips, Bruce Jenkins,
    Peter Gidal, Allen S. Weiss, Brian
    Henderson.
    
    52:  Stephen Melville on
    postmodernity and art history.
    Michelson on Vertov's Three Songs
    of Lenin.  Krauss on Sherrie
    Levine.  Trinh T. Minh-ha on
    documentary.  Thierry de Duve on
    Marcel Duchamp.
    
              Published quarterly by
              The MIT Press
              ISSN 0162-2870
    
              Yearly Rates:  $30.00 Individual
                             $65.00 Institution
                             $20.00 Student and
                             Retired.
    
              Add $14.00 postage and handling
              outside U.S.A.  Prepayment is required.
              Send check drawn against a U.S. bank
              in U.S. funds, MasterCard or Visa
              number to:
    
                           MIT Press Journals
                            55 Hayward Street
                           Cambridge, MA 02142
                                 U.S.A.
    (617) 258-2889
    telex:  92-1473 MIT CAM
    fax:  617-258-6779
    
    6)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                             _Poetics Today_
    
            International Journal for Theory and Analysis of
                      Literature and Communication
    
                        Itamar Even-Zohar, Editor
                         Brian McHale, Coeditor
                      Ruth Ronen, Associate Editor
    
    _Poetics Today_ brings together scholars from throughout the
    world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to
    the study of literature, and with applying such approaches to the
    interpretation of literary works.  Its pages present a remarkable
    diversity of approaches, and examine a wide range of literary and
    critical topics.
    
    Recent and forthcoming special issues:
    
    Narratology Revisited, Parts I, II, and III
    
    Polysystem Studies
    
    Disciplinarity
    
    National Literatures / Social spaces
    
    Quarterly
    Subscription rates:  $56 institutions, $28 individuals,
                         $14 students.
    Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.
    
    Duke University Press, Journals Division
    6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708
    
    7)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                                  _SAQ_
    
                        _Rock & Roll and Culture_
                            90:4  (Fall 1991)
    
                 Anthony De Curtis, Special Issue Editor
    
    Robert Palmer on the Church of the Sonic Guitar
    Trent Hill on Censorship in Rock Music in the 1950s
    Greil Marcus's "A Corpse in Your Mouth"
    Glenn Gass asks "Why Don't We Do It in the Classroom?"
    Paul Smith on Playing for England
    David R. Shumway on Rock & Roll as Cultural Practice
    Robert B. Ray on Tracking
    Mark Dery on Laurie Anderson's Crisis of Meaning
    Michael Jarrett on the Progress of Rock & Roll
    Paul Evans's "Los Angeles, 1999"
    Martha Nell Smith on Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen
    Alan Light on Rap's Recurrent Conflict
    Dan Rubey on Desire and Pleasure on MTV
    Jeff Calder's Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band
    
    Subscription prices:  $20.00 individuals, $40.00 institutions
    Please add $8.00 for postage outside the U.S.
    Single issue price:  $10.00
    
    Duke University Press, Journals Division
    6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708
    
    8)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                                _SSCORE_
                    _Social Science Computer Review_
    
                         G. David Garson, Editor
    
    _SSCORE_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire
    and share information on the research and teaching applications
    of microcomputing.
    
    Recent special issues:
    
    Computerized Simulation in the Social Sciences
    Edited by David Crookall
    
    The State of the Art of Social Science Computing
    Edited by G. David Garson
    
    Symposium on Computer Literacy: 
    Implications for the Social Sciences
    Edited by William H. Dutton and Ronald E. Anderson
    
    Quarterly
    Subscription prices:  $72.00 institutions, $36.00 individuals
    Please add $8.00 postage outside the U.S.
    
    Duke University Press, Journals Division
    6697 College Station, Durham, NC 27708
    
    9)---------------------------------------------------------------
    
                            _Tel Aviv Review_
               An International Annual Literary Anthology
                                Volume 3
    
                          Gabriel Moked, Editor
    
    "Rarely has a new literary journal entered the marketplace with
    such grace and force as the _Tel Aviv Review_"--Judaica Book News
    
    _Tel Aviv Review_ brings together diverse fiction and nonfiction
    writing, much of it on topics concerning Judaism, Israel, and the
    Middle East.
    
    Highlights from this 500-page collection include four chapters
    from a new novel by Amos Oz; S. Yizhar on the 1947-48 Israeli War
    of Independence; an essay by Robert B. Alter on modern Israeli
    fiction; poetry by Yehuda Amaichai; a radio play by Gabriel
    Josipovici; and an interview with George Steiner.
    
    Also available:  The _Tel Aviv Review_ Volumes 1 and 2
    
    Retail price, $19.95--see your bookseller.
    Prepaid subscription price for individuals, direct from Duke
    University Press, $14.00.
    
    Duke University Press, Journals Division
    6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708
    
    10)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                        Announcing a New Journal
    
                         ELECTRONIC NETWORKING:
                   RESEARCH, APPLICATIONS, AND POLICY
    
    A new journal will be published in Fall, 1991: ELECTRONIC
    NETWORKING: RESEARCH, APPLICATIONS, AND POLICY, edited by Charles
    R. McClure with Associate Editors: Ann Bishop and Philip Doty and
    Resource Review Editor: Joe Ryan.
    
    This cross-disciplinary journal will provide coverage of an
    evolving area of information technology and communication: the
    rapidly growing use of telecommunications networks to provide
    information services and products.  The journal will publish
    papers that report research findings related to electronic
    networks, that identify and assess policy issues related to
    networking and that describe current and potential applications
    of electronic networking.
    
    The purpose of the journal is to describe, evaluate, and foster
    understanding of the role and applications of electronic
    networks.  Moreover, the journal intends to promote and encourage
    the successful use of electronic networks.  The journal will be
    of interest to network users, managers, and policy makers in the
    academic, computer, communication, library, and government
    communities.
    
    Volume 1 will consist of two issues published in August and
    November, 1991. Volume 2 and future volumes will consist of four
    issues to be published in February, May, August, and November.
    Initially the journal will appear in paper format.  The editors
    and publisher are exploring options to move into an electronic
    format at a future date.
    
    The editors welcome contributions on topics related to electronic
    networks such as:
    
    --Uses and impacts of electronic networks in research and
      education
    --Managerial and organizational concerns
    --Standards
    --Technical considerations in the design and operation of
      networks
    --Public and private sector roles and responsibilities in network
      development
    --Social and behavioral factors affecting the use and
      effectiveness of networks
    --The development of the National Education and Research Network
      (NREN)
    --Infrastructures needed to support electronic networking
    --Policy issues at the national, regional, state, and
      institutional levels affecting the use and development of
      electronic networks.
    
    Types of contributions may range from reports on research,
    assessments of policies and applications, or opinion essays.
    Papers will be reviewed by an Editorial Board and external
    experts as appropriate.  A Resource Review section will
    critically evaluate the latest books journals, reports and
    networked information of interest to our readers.
    
    Prospective contributors to the journal should contact Charles R.
    McClure, Editor, (CMCCLURE@suvm.acs.syr.edu) Ann Bishop,
    Associate Editor, (A71BISHO@suvm.acs.syr.edu); Philip Doty,
    Associate Editor, (P71DOTYX@suvm.acs.syr.edu); or Joe Ryan,
    Resource Review Editor, (JORYAN@suvm.acs.syr.edu); at the School
    of Information Studies, Syracuse University 4-206 Center for
    Science & Technology, Syracuse NY, 13244-4100; Phone: (315)
    443-2911; Fax: (315) 443-5806 for additional information and
    guidelines for the submission of manuscripts.
    
    Personal subscriptions to the journal are $33 per year;
    institutional subscriptions are $75 per year; $15 additional for
    subscriptions outside the United States.  Additional information
    regarding subscriptions can be obtained from Meckler Publishing
    Company, 1-800-635-5537 or via the internet
    (meckler@tigger.jvnc.net).
    
    11)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                     READING PICTURES/VIEWING TEXTS
                           by Claude Gandelman
    
                        is now available from
    
                        Indiana University Press
                        10th and Morton Street
                        BLOOMIGTON IN 47405.
    
                    The price of the book is $22.50
    
    12)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                             ARL Directory
           to Meet Need for Catalog of Electronic Publications
    
    Responding to the library and academic communities' increasing
    use of and interest in the burgeoning number of electronic
    publications, the Association of Research Libraries will publish
    a hard-copy Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and
    Scholarly Discussion Lists.
    
    Although many journals, newsletters, and scholarly lists may be
    accessed free of charge through Bitnet, Internet, and affiliated
    academic networks, it is not always a simple chore to find out
    what is available.  The Directory is a compilation of entries for
    over 500 scholarly lists, about 30 journals, over 60 newsletters,
    and 15 "other" titles including some newsletter-digests.  The
    directory gives specific instructions for access to
    each publication.  The objective is to assist the user in finding
    relevant publications and connecting to them quickly,  even if
    not completely versed in the full range of user-access systems.
    
    Content editor of the journals/newsletters section is Michael
    Strangelove, Network Research Facilitator, University of Ottawa.
    Editor of the scholarly discussion lists/interest groups is Diane
    Kovacs of the Kent State University Libraries.  The printed ARL
    directory is derived from widely accessible networked files
    maintained by Strangelove and Kovacs.  The directory will point
    tothese as the principal, continuously updated, and
    free-of-charge sources for accessing such materials.
    
    The publication will be available to ARL member libraries for
    $10 and to non-members for $20 (add $5 postage per directory for
    foreign addresses).  Orders of 6 or more copies receive a 10%
    discount.  Updated editions are planned.
    
    The following order form is provided for your convenience.
    Feel free to print it and attach it to your check or money order,
    payable to ARL.  U.S. Dollars only.  ALL ORDERS MUST BE PREPAID.
    
    Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
    Association of Research Libraries
    1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
    Washington, DC 20036    USA
    
    Name____________________________________________
    
    Address___________________________________________
    
    _________________________________________________
    
    _________________________________________________
    
    Number of Copies _________  Amount Enclosed _____________
    
    For Further Information Contact:
    Ann Okerson
    ARLHQ@UMDC.Bitnet
    (202) 232-2466 (voice)
    (202) 462-7849 (fax)
    
    13)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
         The _Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters_
    
    is now available from the Contex-L fileserver and consists of two
    files.  These may be obtained by sending the commands:
    
    Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl1 Directry
    Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl2 Directry
    
    The Directory documents over 26 e-journals and 63 e-newsletters.
    Special thanks to Ann Okerson at the Association of Research
    Libraries for her support and guidance in this project.
    
    This Directory, along with Diane Kovacs compilation, _Directories
    of Academic E-Mail Conferences_ is also now available in print
    and on diskette (Dos WordPerfect and MacWord) from:
    
    Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
    Association of Research Libraries
    1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
    Washington, DC   20036   USA
    
    ARLHQ@UMDC.Bitnet
    (202) 232-2466 (voice)
    (202) 462-7849 (fax)
    
    Michael Strangelove
    Department of Religious Studies
    University of Ottawa
    <441495@ACADVM1.UOTTAWA.CA>
    <441495@UOTTAWA>
    
    14)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                            CALLS FOR PAPERS
    
                      JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION INQUIRY
    
      The _Journal of Communication Inquiry_ is currently seeking
    manuscripts that emphasize interdisciplinary inquiry into
    communication and mass communication  phenomena within cultural
    and historical perspectives.  Such perspectives imply that an
    understanding of these phenomena cannot arise solely out of a
    narrowly focused analysis.
    
    Thus, manuscripts should emphasize philosophical, evaluative,
    empirical, legal, historical, and/or critical inquiry into
    relationships between mass communication and society across time
    and culture.
    
      The journal also invites contributions of articles, book
    reviews and review articles from all scholars.
    
      Submission deadline:  November 1, 1991  (see details below)
    
                            -------------------
    
           Cultural Materialism:  Essays on Culture as a Practice
    
      This theme issue of the journal will address communication
    found in newspapers, advertisements, novels, visual arts, music,
    etc., as cultural practices--recorded communication of a
    particular place and time, rather than as individual
    decontextualized artifacts.
    
      Papers submitted for this issue should include a consideration
    of the overt and covert relations between cultural practices, and
    the political, social, ideological, and economic system in which
    they exist.
    
      Submission deadline: January 15, 1992.
    
      Submit three copies of your paper to the address below.
    Maximum length is 7000 words, including notes and references.
    Manuscripts should have a detachable title page listing the
    author's name, address and phone number.  The title--but not the
    identification of the author--should also appear on the first
    page.  Other than on the first page, the author's name should not
    appear anywhere in the manuscript.
    
      The journal style is outlined in "Parenthetical References and
    Reference Lists," in Kate L. Turabian, _A_Manual for Writers_,
    5th ed. (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1987), 111-9.
    Endnotes (used for explanatory purposes only) should be held to a
    minimum.  Similar citation styles (such as APA) and other styles
    in earlier editions of Turabian or of this journal are not
    acceptable.  THE AUTHOR IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING HER OR HIS WORK
    CONFORM TO STYLE REQUIREMENTS.
    
       Please direct queries, subscriptions, requests for previous
    issues, and all manuscripts to:
    
      Editor
      _Journal of Communication Inquiry_
      205 Communication Center
      School of Journalism and Mass Communication
      The University of Iowa
      Iowa City IA 52242                          (319) 335-5821
    
      Recent issues:
    
      10:1        MTV
      10:2        Stuart Hall
      10:3        General Issue: Texts and Representations
      11:1        The Feminist Issue
      11:2        Ideology Around the Dial
      12:1        Cultural Studies in South Africa: A Formal Attempt
                  at Praxis
      12:2        History, Historiography, and Communication:
                  Critical and Cultural Perspectives
      13:1        The Weimar Republic and Popular Culture
      13:2        Cultural Studies: Ethnography
      14:1        Minority images in Advertising
      14:2        Visual Communication
      15:1        Freedom of Expression and the First Amendment
      15:2        Another Politically UNCorrect Issue
    
    15)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                    Announcing _Pynchon Notes_ 24-25
                              Now Available
    
                          --------------------
    
                             _PYNCHON NOTES_
    
                          --------------------
    
                                 Editors
    
                             John M. Krafft
                       Miami University--Hamilton
                           1601 Peck Boulevard
                        Hamilton, OH  45011-3399
     E-mail: jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet or jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu
    
                            Khachig Tololyan
                           English Department
                           Wesleyan University
                       Middletown, CT  06457-6061
    
                           Bernard Duyfhuizen
                           English Department
                   University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
                       Eau Claire, WI  54702-4004
                      E-mail: pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet
    
                          --------------------
    
         _Pynchon Notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and
    fall.
    
         Submissions: The editors welcome submission of manuscripts
    either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy
    disk.  Disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; IBM compatible preferred.
    Convenient formats include ASCII, DCA, WordStar 3.3, Microsoft
    Word 4, and WordPerfect 4.1 or later.  Manuscripts, notes and
    queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to
    John M. Krafft.
    
         Subscriptions: $5.00 per single issue or $9.00 per year.
    Overseas airmail: $6.50 per single issue or $12.00 per year.
    Checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
    Subscriptions and back-issue requests should be addressed to
    Bernard Duyfhuizen.
    
         _Pynchon Notes_ is supported in part by the English
    Departments of Miami University--Hamilton and the University of
    Wisconsin--Eau Claire.  ISSN 0278-1891
    
                          --------------------
    
                         Contents of Issue 24-25
    
    The Politics of Doubling in "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"
         Douglas Keesey                                             5
    
    The Rats of God: Pynchon, Joyce, Beckett,
    and the Carnivalization of Religion
         M. Keith Booker                                           21
    
    The Double Bind of Metafiction: Implicating Narrative
    in _The Crying of Lot 49_ and _Travesty_
         Vivienne Rundle                                           31
    
    The American Way and Its Double in _The Crying of Lot 49_
         Mark Conroy                                               45
    
    Strobe's Stimulus
         Stuart Moulthrop                                          71
    
    Oppositional Discourses, Unnatural Practices:
    _Gravity's_ History and "The '60s"
         Eric Meyer                                                81
    
    Mindless Pleasures
         Mw. Mac Kay                                              105
    
    _Vineland_ and Dobie Gillis
         Rhonda Wilcox                                            111
    
    Rooney and the Rocketman
         Donald F. Larsson                                        113
    
    Surrealism, Postmodernism, and Roger, Mexico
         Michael W. Vella                                         117
    
    James Bond and _Gravity's Rainbow_: A Possible Connection
         Robert L. McLaughlin                                     121
    
    A Thoughtful Thomas Pynchon
         Charles Clerc                                            125
    
    Pynchon, Joseph Heller, and _V._
         David Seed                                               127
    
    Fractured Mandala: The Inescapable Ambiguities
    of _Gravity's Rainbow_ (Review)
         N. Katherine Hayles                                      129
    
    No Mean Accomplishment (Review)
         John L. Simons                                           133
    
    Continuities, Echoes and Associations (Review)
         Thomas Schaub                                            135
    
    The Little Engine That Could (Review)
         Steven Weisenburger                                      139
    
    Jissom on the Reports: A Thoroughly
    Post-Modern Pynchon (Review)
         Louis Mackey                                             143
    
    Other Books Received                                          155
    
    Notes                                                         157
    
    Bibliography (--1991)                                         159
    
    Contributors                                                  169
    
                           --------------------
    
                               Back Issues
    
         _Pynchon Notes_ has been published since October, 1979.
    Although most back issues are now out of print, they are
    available in the form of photocopies.
    
    Nos.  1- 4: $1.50 each; Overseas, $ 2.50.
    Nos.  5-10: $2.50 each; Overseas, $ 3.50.
    Nos. 11-17: $3.00 each; Overseas, $ 4.50.
    No.  18-19: $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00.
    No.  20-21: $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00.
    No.  22-23: $9.00;      Overseas, $12.00.
    
         Khachig Tololyan and Clay Leighton's _Index_ to all the
    names, other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _Gravity's
    Rainbow_ is also available.
    
    _Index_: $5.00; Overseas, $6.50.
    
         All checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
    Overseas checks must be payable in US dollars and payable through
    an American bank or an American branch of an overseas bank.
    
    16)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
    PEOPLE IN THE ONLY U.S. STATE THAT DIDN'T HELP VOTE RONALD
    REAGAN INTO OFFICE MAY KNOW SOMETHING THE REST OF THE
    COUNTRY DOESN'T.
    
    It's not at all coincidental, we think, that they subscribe to
    _Artpaper_, a monthly magazine on art, community, and cultural
    activism that Stuart Klawans praised in the TLR and The Nation
    called "handsome, witty, interactive."  Plain-talking and
    guaranteed jargon-free, _Artpaper_ prides itself on publishing
    specific, local, and diffident voices from across North America.
    
    Subscriptions are $22/year by check, VISA, or MasterCard. You can
    contact us by snail mail (2402 University Avenue W., St. Paul, MN
    55114-1701), e-mail (artpaper@ well.sf.ca), hotline (612-887-
    1999; then 2869*), or fax (612-922-8709, day/early evening only).
    Article queries: J.Z. Grover, Editor.
    
    17)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                          MeckJournal Debuts:
    
    New Electronic Journal on the Internet Founded to provide timely
    and accurate information about emerging technologies, Meckler
    Publishing has always been on the cutting edge.  As a book,
    journal and newsletter publisher and conference organizer, the
    company is dedicated to serving librarians, information end-users
    and specialists, and the information industry as a whole on all
    aspects of computer-based technology.
    
    This year, the company's twentieth year of operation, Meckler has
    committed its resources to becoming the leading provider of print
    and electronic information about electronic networking throughout
    the world.  An electronic publishing division has been
    established and through Meckler's link with Princeton
    University's JvNCNet it offers a service called MC(2).  Currently
    featured on the MC(2) electronic system is the complete catalog
    of Meckler Information Technology Publishing, full conference
    programs for four technology conferences (Virtual Reality, HD
    WORLD, Electronic Networking and Publishing '92, and Computers in
    Libraries Canada), as well as five-year indexes to two of its
    monthly publications.  Within the month, 1991 Tables of Contents
    for all Meckler technology journals will be mounted.  This fall,
    Meckler technology books will be offered at the Table of Contents
    level.  A facsimile order for articles and chapters will be made
    available.
    
    MeckJournal, which is available at no charge to interested
    parties, is the latest service to be offered to Internet/Bitnet
    users.  Issues will include an editorial, late breaking news, and
    either a forthcoming feature article from a Meckler journal, a
    chapter from a forthcoming technology book, or a contribution
    from a Guest Editor.
    
    A subscription to MeckJournal may be placed by sending a message
    to Meckler@tigger.jvnc.net with the following information in the
    body of the text:
    
    Subscribe MeckJournal [Internet or Bitnet address]
    
    Subscribers will automatically receive each monthly issue and
    other information as it is published.
    
    Internet/Bitnet users may also access the journal through the
    following method:
    telnet to:                         nisc.jvnc.net
    at the logon prompt, type:         nicol [lower case] 
    no password is needed
    select MC(2) from the preliminary nicol menu
    
    MeckJournal content for the next year is based on the following
    schedule--
    
    September: Electronic Networking: Research, Applications, Policy
    October:   Book Chapter
    November:  Academic & Library Computing
    December:  CD-ROM Librarian
    January:   Computers in Libraries
    February:  Book Chapter
    March:     Database Searcher
    April:     Document Image Automation
    May:       HD World Review
    June:      Book Chapter
    July:      Library Software Review
    August:    Multimedia Review
    September: OCLC Micro
    November:  Book Chapter
    December:  Virtual Reality Report
    
    The first issue presents Marian Dalton's essay "Does Anybody Have
    a Map?"  It will appear in the first issue of Meckler's
    Electronic Networking: Research, Application, and Policy
    scheduled to debut in mid-October, 1991.  The journal is edited
    by Dr. Charles McClure (Syracuse University) in association with
    Ann Bishop (University of Illinois) and Phillip Doty (University
    of Texas/Austin).  Joe Ryan of Syracuse serves as Resources
    Editor.
    
    We invite suggestions and comments for future issues.
    Nancy Melin Nelson
    Executive Editor
    
    18)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                            Monographic Review
                  ______________________________________
    
                           Revista Monografica
    
               The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
                     Box 8401  Odessa, TX 79762-0001
    
    EDITORS
    
    JANET PEREZ                                 
    Texas Tech University            
    
    GENARO J. PEREZ            
    The University of Texas of
        the Permian Basin
    
    EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
    
    Jose Luis Cano                               Estelle Irizarry 
    Madrid, Spain                           Georgetown University  
    
    Manuel Duran                                     Elias Rivers
    Yale University                             SUNY, Stony Brook
    
    David W. Foster                              Maria A. Salgado
    Arizona State University         University of North Carolina
                                                   at Chapel Hill
    Juan Goytisolo                                             
    Paris, France                                      Noel Valis
                                         Johns Hopkins University
    Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
    The University of Texas
    at Austin
    
                                 Call for
                                  Papers
    
                          Number 8 (1992) of the
              MONOGRAPHIC REVIEW/REVISTA MONOGRAFICA will be
        devoted to Experimental Fiction By Hispanic Women Writers
    
        Traditional critics have attempted to enclose women's writing
    within rather narrowly circumscribed boundaries, much as
    patriarchal societies have limited women to enclosed spaces.
    Within this context, letters, diaries, and autobiography are
    typically "women's genres," along with religious poetry and
    romantic love lyrics.  Women's fiction is dismissed as
    overwhelmingly "domestic" and autobiographical, Volume 8 of
    MONOGRAPHIC REVIEW/REVISTA MONOGRAFICA will expose the "phallacy"
    that the female text is the author with essays on Hispanic woman
    writer's experimentation, aesthetic innovation, and vanguardist
    contributions.
    
                   Papers of twelve to fifteen pages
             should be submitted before 31 August 1992 to:
    
                        Genaro J. Perez, Editor
                        Monographic Review
                        Department of Spanish
                        University of Texas/Permian Basin
                        Odessa, Texas 79762-0001
    
    19)-------------------------------------------------------------
    
                 "A NEW, VERY NEW IDEA OF 'AUFKLARUNG'"?
    
     International Symposium at the University for Humanist Studies,
             Utrecht, The Netherlands, December 18-19, 1991
    
         What should be the premises of dialogue and what are the
    shared presuppositions in the recent debate between those who
    align themselves with the tradition of western neomarxist
    Critical Theory (with and without "pragmatic turn") and those who
    are inspired by that displacement within philosophy and literary
    theory commonly and insufficiently defined as Post-Structuralism?
    
         To discuss these questions, an international symposium will
    be organized at the newly founded University for Humanist
    Studies.  Invited speakers include Geoffrey Bennington, Rosa
    Braidotti, Peter Dews, Nancy Fraser, Rodolhe Gasche, Rainer
    Nagele, Gianni Vattimo, Elisabeth Weber, Albrecht Wellmer, and
    others.
    
    For more information write to:
    
    Prof. Dr. Harry Kunneman
    University for Humanist Studies
    P.O. Box 797, 3500 AT Utrecht
    The Netherlands
    
    fax:  030-340738
    
    20)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
       CONSOLE-ING PASSIONS: TELEVISION, VIDEO AND FEMINIST STUDIES
    
              April 3 & 4, 1992 University of Iowa - Iowa City
    
      CONSOLE-ING PASSIONS is the first annual conference on
    television, video and feminist studies.  It welcomes papers that
    foreground questions of sexual and other cultural differences.
    Possible areas include feminist perspectives on:  TV and lesbian
    studies; TV and gay studies; TV and video history; TV and
    constructions of ethnicity, race and sexuality; TV, video and
    postmodernism; TV and "girl" subcultures; media pedagogy;
    international TV; policy and regulation; TV's production of
    social knowledge.
    
      250 word proposals are due November 1, 1991 and copies should
    be sent to the following two addresses:
    
      Lauren Rabinovitz, Department of Communication Studies;
    105 Communication Studies Bldg.; University of Iowa; Iowa City
    52242.
    
      Mary Beth Haralovich, Dept. of Media Arts; Modern Language
    Bldg; University of Arizona; Tucson, AZ 85721.
    
      The proposals will be selected by the program committee:  Julie
    D'Acci (University of Wisconsin); Jane Feuer (University of
    Pittsburg); Mary Beth Haralovich (University of Arizona); Lauren
    Rabinovitz (University of Iowa); Lynn Spiegel (University of
    Wisconson).
    
      For further information contact Lauren Rabinovitz
    at (319) 355-0579.
    
    21)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
    *************************************************************
    **                                                         **
    **            H  Y  P  E  R  T  E  X  T   '9  1            **
    **                                                         **
    **                  15 - 18 December 1991                  **
    **                                                         **
    **                    San Antonio, Texas                   **
    **                                                         **
    **             A D V A N C E    P R O G R A M              **
    **                                                         **
    *************************************************************
    
               BIENVENIDOS A SAN ANTONIO Y HYPERTEXT '91!
    
    Welcome to San Antonio and the third ACM conference on
    Hypertext!  The conference and program committees have been
    hard at work over the last year and a half to bring you this
    outstanding conference.  The technical program has been
    expanded to allow more participation and interaction by all
    attendees and La Fiesta de las Luminarias (Festival of
    Lights) provides a magical atmosphere along the Paseo del
    Rio (River walk) in San Antonio. We have arranged the
    conference schedule to allow ample time for attendees to enjoy
    this historic city on the banks of the San Antonio River.
    
    Hypertext '91 provides a blend of traditional and innovative
    programs.  Papers and Panels will explore recent advances in
    hypertext technologies.  Courses allow leading practitioners
    to share their knowledge with the hypertext community.
    Posters provide attendees an opportunity to talk one-on-one
    with researchers about recent results and on-going work, and
    Demonstrations are a forum for first-hand experience with new
    systems.  The Hypertext '91 Video program will be a
    compilation of refereed videos which will be shown
    continuously throughout the conference.  For 1991, this
    traditional core is augmented by Technical Briefings which
    will provide in-depth presentations on interesting hypertext
    systems.
    
    In addition to this outstanding technical program, the
    Hypertext '91 conference will provide several social events
    and a unique opportunity to experience beautiful San Antonio
    in its holiday splendor.
    
    Bienvenidos a San Antonio!  Bienvenidos a Hypertext '91!
    
    For additional information, send email to:
    
      ht91@bush.tamu.edu
    
    or contact:
    
      John J. Leggett, General Chair
      Hypertext '91 Conference
      Hypertext Research Lab
      Department of Computer Science
      Texas A&M University
      College Station, TX 77843 USA
    
      voice: 409 845-0298
      fax:   409 847-8578
      email: leggett@bush.tamu.edu
    
    22)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                    DERRIDA on LISTSERV@CFRVM.BITNET
                   Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction
    
       This is to announce a new list devoted to a discussion of
    Jacques Derrida and deconstruction.
    
       To subscribe, send a one line message to listserv@cfrvm.bitnet
    with the text:
    
    subscribe derrida [your full name]
    
       If I can be of any assistance, please contact me.
    
       Owner:  David L Erben
               dqfacaa@cfrvm.bitnet
               dqfacaa@cfrvm.cfr.usf.edu

     

  • Marketing / Reading Males

    Charles Stivale

    Wayne State University
    <cstival@cms.cc.wayne.edu>

     

    Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden, eds. Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1990.

     

    Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, eds. Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990.

     

    While pondering different lines of approach for a review of two collections of essays on the implications of “(male) feminist criticism” and on the “gender(ed)” construction of canonical male writers, I stare at the front covers of each. The title Engendering Men–on a black background in sharp, white script, the letters of MEN in bold print, with the subtitle under and slightly alongside MEN, in much smaller, uniform blue print–contrasts with the Claridge/Langland cover: a wide band of gray on the left and a thin band of gray on the right border a central strip in pink hue containing the same photograph twice, at top and at bottom. Within and across the top of the upper left rectangle, next to the word “OUT,” are the black letters “OF BOUNDS,” under which, in thinner black letters on the pink background, is the subtitle Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. As for the cover illustrations on each, over one-third of the cover above the names “Boone and Cadden” shows a reproduction of a painting by Joaquin Sorolla entitled Children at the Beach. The subject, three naked boys lying on their stomachs, legs spread and buttocks exposed, on wet sand and in extremely shallow water, is a scene of youthful repose that contrasts with the images on Out of Bounds: the photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, reproduced twice and overlaid with a pink hue, depicts the right body profile of a naked, muscular male climbing (or descending) a barely visible ladder, with a fully loaded bricklayer’s basket weighing down heavily on the right shoulder and its pole extending vertically downward along the body beyond the bottom of the photo.

     

    My contemplation of these “packages” relates not only to the strategies of these editions themselves, but also to the act of reviewing collections on (en)gender(ed) males and their criticism within the “cyberspace” of PMC. Assuming my role as electronic pitchman, I wish to re-view these texts in terms of their valence as products of the marketplace, to draw on overlaps and interweaves between the projects, to locate dissonances within and between them, in short, to study these collections as assembled productions. The Boone/Cadden title relates directly to marketing strategies announced in the introduction: with momentum provided by a “friendly push from Elaine Showalter, an established feminist critic who had the savvy to recognize a good opportunity for her less experienced colleagues” (1), the editors’ goal is “to make more visible the efforts of all those individual men throughout the academy who have already begun the task . . . of reconceptualizing themselves as men and hence as critics of the literary and cultural texts that we have inherited and are in the process of recreating. In engendering ourselves, in making visible our textual/sexual bodies, we thus acknowledge our part in a movement whose time, we hope, has come” (7). In form and content, then, this title is explicit about seizing the time and need for the product, and the cover illustration emphasizes this move: boys nakedly displayed and bonding in enjoyable (perhaps even productive) repose. Furthermore, inside facing the title page is another painting in black, white and gray tones (George Platte Lynes’s Charles Nielson with J. Ogle (behind glass)) presenting a rear view of a naked standing male figure, the right arm slightly bent and touching a translucent glass. Behind this, facing the first naked male is a second; his left hand meets the first male’s right on the glass in a mirror effect, and the male gaze that we can see is trained directly at the face opposite him, the other gaze remaining invisible to the viewer.

     

    Mirror images, male bonding, bodies and gazes reaching yet separate, in confident repose yet prepared for activity–the package enveloping and preceding Engendering Men relates directly to the contributors’ stance vis-a-vis feminism as articulated by the editors: “Feminism has engendered us, even as we strive to engender a practice that might not always be the same as feminist practice, but that remains in contiguity with its politics” (1). Just as the editors are careful to note that the “we” invoked in the introduction “does not and cannot always encompass the variety of voices and opinions gathered here under the aegis of ‘engendering men’,” they also insist that the subtitle points to an ongoing process of reaching while not yet touching, “work that by its very nature is yet in search of is own (im)proper ‘name’” (2). Citing Adrienne Rich, the editors see feminism as “a matter of vision and revision,” entailing “new ways of interacting with our worlds and our lives, our literatures and our cultures” and constituting a “revolutionary task in which both men and women can–indeed must–participate if we are to create a nonsexist future” (3). This activity, however, remains distinct from feminism, drawing on multiple methodologies, enunciated in multiple voices, seeking “to create a field of study that, as yet, remains amorphous and . . . a question” (3), much like the relations of male bodies in the two liminary illustrations.

     

    The strain of such exertion is illustrated much more evidently on the cover of Out of Bounds: under a certainly brutal weight and ungainly means of transport, the photographs bordering the pink rectangle from above and below depict the message that progress is slow and painful, hampered by the male’s limited means and burden. Curious, then, that in the introduction, what the women editors describe is their own conceptual exertion throughout the successive definitions of their project. Following the 1986 special MLA session on “Male Feminist Voices,” they had to revise the original assumption that antipatriarchal activity, e.g. male writer’s resistance to the phallic mode, “would necessarily encompass feminism” (3), choosing a new title, Out of Bounds, to indicate the possibilities of “liberation of both sexes from gender proscriptions” (5). However, since no uniform feminist methodology for inquiry unites the collected essays, the editors had to move beyond the old subtitle, Male Writers and Feminist Inquiry, and adopt the current one to foreground the main thesis of “gender in the writings of male canonical authors sensitive to the limitations of language in their culture” as well as the project’s context, “criticism offered up by women and men inscribed, inevitably, by same conditions they seek to question” (5).

     

    The cover illustrations would correspond, then, to this collection’s explicit “justification”: that “whereas ‘man’ has indeed functioned as the nodal point for traditional literary criticism of the past centuries, man as a gendered, cultural creature has received precious little attention. And to take feminist criticism seriously as a method that places gender at the heart of things is to insist that to ignore the question ‘What is it to be a man?’ is to imperil both the rigor and the integrity of feminist theory and practice” (7). Although not sharing a single feminist methodology, these essays address the focal issue of selected male canonical writers: “What do male writers who feel fettered by the patriarchal literary tradition do to escape a language implicitly– often explicitly–defined as their own?” (11). The editors argue that “the generative–we would call it ‘feminist’–act for the male writers of our study, then, is . . . breaking down or dismantling the terms and forms that have preserved the status quo of two genders” (12). We can view the cover as illustrating acts of male exertion with its feminist tinge that the essays emphasize, the cover figure enveloped by a pink haze in the difficult and careful process of “dismantling” linguistic limitations and gender proscriptions imposed by their culture.

     

    That the editors of Out of Bounds choose to include treatments only of canonical writers engaged in or in conflict with this dismantling process is, to my mind, a strength of the collection for its marketing strategies, but possibly a source of frustration for scholars and students seeking pat answers to questions on gender and patriarchy. For the editors insist that another goal of the collection is to find a way to discuss dualities, “masculine/ feminine, female/male, male feminist/female feminist, homosexual/ heterosexual” without “reinforcing, at however a covert level, a dualism that always, in the end, keeps people in their place” (9). One strategy to achieve this goal is “to allow to stand, in this volume, multifarious uses of these gender/sexual terms, pinned down through the context of each individual essay.” It is up to the individual essayists and, by extension, the readers to cope with/against “terms that would succeed in polarizing– or simplifying–their arguments” (9). So this collection, organized in chronological reference to the writers studied, offers numerous possibilities for mixing, matching and confronting the essays, approaches, and definitions: to name but a few, James Phelan (on masculine voice in Thackerey’s Vanity Fair) vis-a-vis Margaret Higonnet (on woman’s voice in Hardy’s Tess); Claridge (on the Romantic female as situated by Shelley) vis-a-vis William Veeder (on the Realist Henry James’s identification with the feminine); and two strange volume-fellows (more on this later), Frank Lentricchia (on Frost) and Joseph A. Boone (on Durrell).

     

    In contrast, the organization of the Boone/Cadden collection emphasizes a definite solidarity, even confidence, in grouping its essays into four thematic clusters. While I could quibble about what seems to be the editors’ arbitrary assignment of some essays to a specific section rather than to another, this collection is clearly of the utmost interest for seminars and scholarly research, providing needed definitions of diverse positions and extensive questioning that scholars and critics must henceforth pursue in future feminist research. However, some uneasy tensions arise in the editors’, and especially Boone’s, introductory essays regarding the field (male feminist criticism) that they hope in some way to delineate. In a bracketed preface to his essay “Of Me(n) and Feminism: Who(se) Is the Sex That Writes?,” Boone explains that the essay originally expressed, in 1987, his “uneasiness about the way in which men’s relation to feminist criticism was at the time being politicized in academic circles” (11). Despite Boone’s relief at discovering “that some of my most immediate worries seem less relevant in light of the two [sic] years that have intervened” thanks to current work contributing to the constitution of “male feminist criticism,” the editors still rely on “the reappearance” of Boone’s essay (previously published in Linda Kauffman’s 1989 Gender and Theory [Blackwell] edition) and its “less relevant” anxiety. In fact, they state that this essay serves as “an overview of the whole phenomenon of ‘male feminist criticism’ as it has evolved at conventions and in anthologies over the last few years” (4, my emphasis). This claim for the essay’s breadth is astounding in itself and all the more so given the volume in which it appears, one that includes essays that question the very possibility of such an essentializing gesture. Moreover, Boone’s essay itself reproaches one critic (Elaine Showalter) for such generalizing moves (15) and constructs its own narrative of exclusion and difference in relation to the emergence of the field that the essays purport to outline.

     

    The depiction of this “whole phenomenon of ‘male feminist criticism’” relies on Boone’s identification of a “gap between the ‘me’ and ‘men’ in ‘me(n)’” (13), and through its exposure, “we can perhaps open up a space within the discourse of feminism where a male voice professing a feminist politics can have something to say beyond impossibilities and apologies and unresolved ire” (12). Thus, the “reappearance” of this essay allows Boone to recycle a limited and privileged narrative of “the debate surrounding men and feminism in [his] own ‘workplace’” (13). The five steps of this experience are posed as “seemingly random moments”: Elaine Showalter’s now canonical 1983 essay, “Critical Cross-Dressing”; the 1984 MLA sections on “Men in Feminism”; “another MLA panel on ‘male feminist voices’ in which [Boone] participated in 1986” (13); the Alice Jardine/Paul Smith Men in Feminism collection; the aforementioned Kauffman collection “for which this essay was conceived.” Boone ostensibly seeks to render visible the “‘me(n)’ gap” as a “discontinuity that has in turned inspired me to question the discursive formations in the literary critical institution whereby the concept of men and feminism, transformed into a territorial battlefield, has attained an ‘impossible’ status” (13). “Impossible” for whom? With the quotation marks retained, Boone refers to Stephen Heath’s assertion in Men in Feminism, “Men’s relation to feminism is an impossible one.” Yet if, as Boone suggests and to which the following essays bear witness, these anxieties are no longer entirely relevant to the emergence of this field, recycling this essay must serve other ends than to describe the “whole phenomenon.”

     

    To this strategy, I apply Boone’s own criticism of “the hidden, or not-so-hidden, agendas” of “many of the contributors to Men in Feminism,” i.e. the “use of the subject ‘male feminism’. . . as their[/his] pretext to wage other critical wars,” male feminism then becoming “the ultimately expendable item of exchange that merely gets the conversation going” (20). Boone’s own agenda and “unresolved ire” are suggested, in fact, by the “moments” chosen as constitutive of the emergence of the “whole phenomenon.” Consider the fifth moment, the “kind of coda” in which Boone discusses “the form– and formulation” of the Kauffman collection. The invitation letter to contribute to this collection “inevitably” reproduced, says Boone, the discomfort of a division between “male essayists” answered by “female theorists.” For his “peace of mind” both in the original and now in the recycled essay, Boone cleverly chooses to “include [him]self among the ‘female theorists’ . . . in hopes of creating a bit of healthy confusion, a field of imaginative play that might contribute to the liberation of our current discourses on and around the subject of ‘men and feminism’” (21). How this self-inclusion accomplishes this goal was and is still not entirely clear, but a significant gap in the later, revised version is Boone’s omission of any mention that, following Gender & Theory‘s format, Toril Moi articulated therein a pithy response to his original text. However, rather than employ this revised version to respond to Moi’s criticism–notably, of the essay’s anecdotal “parochialism,” of its sub-text “structured over a series of oppositions: old/young, visible/invisible, known/unknown, speaking/silent and so on” Gender and Theory 186)–Boone (and Boone/Cadden in the introduction) simply elide any reference to this response, relieving the “unresolved ire” instead through criticism of Kauffman’s volume.

     

    This dissonance in Boone’s essay emerges in another example of his experience of the “‘me(n)’ gap” that occurred as sole male participant not just in any MLA special session, but the one from which Claridge and Langland’s volume resulted. Boone bases his critique first on “the very construction of the panel” (“reinstat[ing], once again, a male-female opposition,” 17), then on questions that the organizers “might have opened up” (18) that he gladly provides. But Boone’s return to another source of “unresolved ire,” the personal circumstances of the panel’s constitution, suggests that his objections are not so much theoretical (“man” was there reconstituted as “a homogeneous entity”) as personal, that this man was the fall-guy (18). Although not yet published at the time Boone revised the essay on “Me(n) and Feminism,” the Claridge/Langland volume nonetheless receives an oblique shot: while the volume, says Boone, “promises to move beyond its panel format in exciting directions”– for example, “several male contributors, none easily assimilable to the other, are being included, and at least some will be talking about men’s experiences” (21)– the transition sentence preceding Boone’s comments on Kauffman’s collection still provides a warning (to whom?) related if only by contiguity to the Claridge/Langland volume: “The danger is always there of reinstating those potentially blinding symmetries that a feminist understanding of difference should instead encourage us all as feminists to unravel, to move beyond” (21).

     

    The overlap of Boone’s participation in each volume offers an further possibility of textual juxtaposition. A contemporary male critic undergoing particular scrutiny in the Boone/Cadden volume is Frank Lentricchia; in “Redeeming the Phallus: Wallace Stevens, Frank Lentricchia, and the Politics of (Hetero)Sexuality,” Lee Edelman examines not only Lentricchia’s predominantly heterosexual reading of Stevens, but also the critic’s polemic with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on feminist criticism. About Edelman’s fine reading that employs Wallace Stevens’s poetry as a strategic textual exemplar–“an instrument of analytic leverage that can help to articulate a critique of those gestures whereby criticism refuses or denies its own positioning within a framework that a gay theory might enable us to read” (37)–, Boone/Cadden comment: “Edelman’s essay takes a recent interview with Frank Lentricchia as its point of departure in order to analyze one way in which feminism has been attacked so as to appropriate for straight men a universal copyright on cultural subversiveness” (4, my emphasis). One notices here a distinct shift of Edelman’s focus, away from gay theory and toward the attack on feminism, away from Stevens toward Lentricchia. Boone/Cadden continue: “Edelman counters this strategy with one of his own–a reading of Wallace Stevens that critiques Lentricchia’s male sexual positioning and posturing) from an explicitly gay perspective” (5, my emphasis). Quite true, if understandably reductive, but why the unnecessary parenthetical editorial comment?

     

    The implicit agenda of the editors is explicitly provided in Boone’s bracketed preface to his essay: having been relieved of some “worries” by the new productivity in the field of “male feminist criticism,” Boone also concludes that the earlier emphasis on “the issue of naming–whether to take on the label, for instance, of ‘male feminism’–now strikes me as perhaps less urgent than measuring the degree of commitment to a feminist politics demonstrated in these men’s newly engendered methods of analysis” (11, my emphasis). What the tools of this “measurement” might be are not clear, but whereas the contributors to Engendering Men, by dint of the inclusion of their essays, no doubt “measure up” to the standards of the emergent field, Lentricchia clearly does not. It is understandable, then, that from Boone’s perspective, “none” of the male contributors to the Claridge/ Langland volume are “easily assimilable to the others” since the demonstration therein of “the degree of commitment to a feminist politics” would no doubt be found wanting, especially given the implicit requirement of discussing “men’s experiences” met only by a few of those contributors (men and women). However, in light of Lentricchia’s “privileged” position in Engendering Men as anti-feminist fall-guy, an added textual confrontation available in Out of Bounds for classroom debate would be Lentricchia’s “The Resentments of Robert Frost” with Boone’s essay on Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, if only for their distinct approaches for exploring the focal authors’ expression of male desire.

     

    To return to the liminary illustrations of Engendering Men, there is clearly much more going on than meets the eye underneath the placid surface of males in the solidarity of contemplative repose. One suggestion for readers of this collection is to move from Boone’s essay to the final one by Robert Vorlicky, “(In)Visible Alliances: Conflicting ‘Chronicles’ of Feminisms,” on the need for and possibilities of alliances (male/female, hetero-/homosexual). This essay serves as a splendid statement of the complex relations addressed throughout the volume and would have been a more fitting opening essay. While both volumes speak to questions vital to postmodern concerns, they market these in distinct ways that respond to perceived demands from readers/consumers and also create choices for their engagement with each set of texts. On one hand, the consumer might read essays in each volume as isolated from the others and reap certain, if limited, benefits; on the other hand, through the juxtaposition and confrontation of the volumes’ essays, the reader will encounter the tension inherent to the emergence of new fields of inquiry. However, as I have suggested, one also discovers the multiple difficulties of alliances and the distinct, often irreconcilable, differences in the processes of (en)gender(ing) due in no small part to the collision of ethical concerns with personal agendas.

     

  • Privacy And Pleasure: Edward Said on Music

    Dan Miller

    North Carolina State University
    <dcmeg@ncsuvm>

     

    Said, Edward W. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 109 pp. $19.95.

     

    Edward Said’s 1989 Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine, published as Musical Elaborations, are meditations on classical music in the Western tradition. They confront a sharp antinomy: on one hand, music is an intensely solitary and subjective experience for the performer or listener; on the other hand, music is also public occurrence, fully implicated in the social and cultural world. Said sets out to resolve the antinomy; he intends to show that, however private the experience of music may seem, it never escapes social context and functions. But as Said pursues that resolution, difficulties arise. He often moves from the private to the public dimensions by modulations that are themselves more musical than logical. Some of the most assured passages in the book assert the solitary, not the social, pleasures and powers of music. Said is often more successful at describing the ways in music eludes social appropriation than he is at demonstrating how it serves social ends. As a result, the argument of Musical Elaborations is strangely, powerfully at odds with itself: it wants to hold that classical music is a fully social enterprise, but it cannot help celebrating music in solitude. But while these lectures tend to undermine their own conclusions, they also succeed in a way that Said did not intend. His case for the socially determined nature of music actually serves to diagnose weaknesses in current, socially-oriented cultural analysis.

     

    Musical Elaborations is a richly varied book. It mixes theoretical speculations in both musicology and literary theory with autobiography. Foucault and Adorno mingle with Brahms and Wagner. Music criticism, sometimes technical and sometimes impressionistic, joins with literary criticism, and both intertwine with narrative and remembrance. These are personal essays, loose in structure, unapologetic in their subjectivity. While Said calls himself an amateur in musicology, he is clearly among the most expert amateurs. His columns on music have appeared for several years in The Nation, and, as he delivered these lectures, he played brief passages on the piano to illustrate his points.

     

    At issue throughout the book is the postmodern insistence, exemplified by Foucault, on the social construction of art and individuality. Ostensibly nonrepresentational and highly formal, highly individualized in its composition and its performance, classical music offers the most challenging test case for social analysis. Said notes that music writing, governed by the assumption that classical music develops according to its own internal and formal logic, independently of social history, has been relatively untouched by recent developments in literary and cultural theory. His goal is to treat music as a cultural field and to see (or hear) music as always implicated in social distinctions and roles, in questions of national and regional identity, in its own institutions, in the dispositions of cultural power. For Said, music is marked by the fluidity of its affiliations: it always has a social setting and role, but settings and roles are always changing, always temporally and spatially variable. What Said calls the “transgressive” character of music–“that faculty music has to travel, to cross over, drift from place to place in a society, even though many institutions have sought to confine it” (xix)–is its ability constantly to re-affiliate itself and establish new connections. Music plays a central role in the constitution or, in a term Said borrows from Gramsci, “elaboration” of a social order, and as such it normally works to preserve social power and relations. But it does so through its transgressive ability to break from its social context and function in other contexts.

     

    For Said, the essential, and most paradoxical, instance of music is the performance. Said points out repeatedly how rare moments of musical transcendence take place only in one of the most socially ritualized, unchanging, often stultifyingly conservative institutions imaginable: the concert itself, with its highly restricted performance repertory, with its absolute separation of roles (performers are not composers, listeners are usually not performers themselves, and composers are not performers, in part because they are, almost as a rule, dead), and with the long, specialized training of performers aimed at a level of sheer expertise far beyond ordinary musical abilities. Performance is an “extreme occasion,” an irreproducible event, divorced from normal life, highly ritualized and specialized, devoted to almost superhuman virtuosity. It is at once social and solitary: both performer and listeners are, when the performance succeeds, alone with the music, yet all are alone together, by virtue of the social institutions that make performance possible. Said recognizes that, in many ways, the modern concert represents a profound de-socialization of music since it rests upon a debilitating division of musical labor among performers, listeners, and composers. Yet, for Said, only at the moment of overpowering performance can music break out of the very social constraints that make it possible.

     

    Said is fascinated by musicians who seek extreme control, who dominate both the music and the conditions of performance. While Said notes how appropriate Arturo Toscanini’s style was for an American broadcasting corporation intent on creating a mass audience for classical music, it is the rigorous logic of Toscanini’s musical vision that attracts Said’s attention: “What Toscanini seems to me to be doing . . . is trying to force into prominence, or perhaps enforce, the utterly contrary quality of the performance occasion, its total discontinuity with the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life” (20). In the music and career of Glenn Gould, Said finds again the power of discontinuity and the force of individual will effecting the break. In his “retirement” from public playing and withdrawal into exclusively filmed and recorded performance, Gould created “a sort of airless but pure performance enclave that in turn paradoxically kept reminding one of the very concert platform he had deserted” (23). As in Toscanini’s control, so in Gould’s almost mathematically precise fingering, Said discovers a world apart, almost redemptively divorced from normal life. Said notes that Gould’s ideals of “repose, detachment, isolation” (29) are symptoms of an art condemned to social marginality, yet Said is himself drawn to these ideals.

     

    Said extols those moments–points of completion in a composer’s musical evolution, times of mastery in performance, instants of complete absorption in listening–when nothing else but music in its purity remains. And at those moments, music breaks free of the social field: there are “a relatively rare number of works making (or trying to make) their claims entirely as music, free of the many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially tyrannical pressures that have limited musicians to their customary social role as upholders of things as they are. I want to suggest that this handful of works expresses a very eccentric kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by uncommon, perhaps even excessive, displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render music socially superfluous and useless–to discharge it completely–but to recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act of freedom” (71). Said’s cases in point are interesting: Webern’s Variations, Bach’s “Canonic Variations,” and a work that normally seems immersed in cultural context and value, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. Absolute virtuosity, rigorous musical development (though variations and elaborations), “pure musicality in a social space off the edge” (72) that is hardly still social at all–these represent escape and freedom. There is, Said allows, some truth to the Romantic view “that music to a consummate musician possesses a separate status and place . . . that is occasionally revealed but more often withheld” (xix-xx).

     

    While much of Musical Elaborations is an argument against Theodor Adorno and the view that modern music, exemplified by Schoenberg, represents a fatal rift between culture and society, Michel Foucault makes his presence felt throughout the book. Said acknowledges the Foucauldian nightmare of a social order shaped and dominated by power even in its apparently most secret and individual recesses, producing opposition only to manage and contain it. Yet here, as in other books and essays, Said works toward a social vision that allows real possibilities of change and some degree of escape. For Said, both Foucault and Adorno are guilty of a totalizing theory does little to contest the totalizing society it confronts. “No social system,” Said writes, “no historical vision, no theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives or practices that exist within its domain. There is always the possibility to transgress” (55). Even Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, epitome of musical elaborating a social order, contains its own transgression: “Read and heard for the bristling, tremendously energetic power of alternatives to its own affirmative proclamations about the greatness of German art and culture, Die Meistersinger cannot really be reduced to the nationalist ideology of its final strophes stress” (61). Music itself is the last and best hope, it seems, for transgression.

     

    The extraordinary performance, the virtuoso as master, the singular event and individual, absolute music, the moment of complete transgression–these are the motifs of Romanticism, musicological idealism, and individualist aesthetics, exactly the targets of Said’s polemic. Said confesses that the language of idealism tinges these lectures, but he never acknowledges the degree to which the book is divided against itself:

     

    Let the word "melody" . . . serve as a name both for an actual melody and for any other musical element that acts in or beneath the lines of a particular body of music to attach that music to the privacy of a listener's, performer's, or composer's experience. Here I want to emphasize privacy and pleasure, both of them replete with the historical and ideological residue of that bourgeois individuation now either discredited or fully under attack. (96)

     

    For Said, there is no music without melody, that intensely particularized utterance that is “authorial signature” (95)–even of a composer for whom melody in the normal sense is not primary–and mark of all that is least social and most a departure from the cultural field. Even Glenn Gould, archly anti-Romantic in style and repertory, is, as Said describes him–the eccentric genius who turns his back on the world and any trace of normal life, who constructs for himself a life of pure art and, in so doing, creates (and destroys) himself–a perfect instance of late Romanticism. Musical Elaborations is clearly not a defense of individualist aesthetics, but it does suggest that much of the traditional language of music’s (and perhaps, by extension, art’s) inwardness, autonomy, originality, and uniqueness cannot be jettisoned without substantial loss. Said’s recourse to idealism, in an intellectual climate (created in large part by Said himself) dominated by programmatic anti-idealism, indicates something more interesting and powerful than a lapse in logic. The postmodern vocabulary may allow Said no language to describe musical interiority other than traditional Romanticism, even though what he strives to say may no longer be Romantic.

     

    Said begins his third chapter, “Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation,” by invoking Proust’s remembrances of music past and of memories brought to life by music:

     

    Proust's recurrences inevitably point away from the public aspects of an occasion--sitting in a concert hall or salon, for instance--to its private possibilities; for example, the recollection, often shared, often lonely, of pains, anguish, bodies, miscellaneous as well as musical sounds, and so on. I find this characteristic tendency in Proust very moving, obviously because in its poignancy and psychological richness it has helped me to comprehend a great deal about my own experiences of music, experiences that seem to me like an unceasing shuttle between playing and listening privately for myself and playing and listening in a social setting, a setting whose constraints and often harsh limitations . . . only suddenly and very rarely produce so novel, so intense, so individualized, and so irreducible an experience of music as to make it possible for one to see in it a lot of its richness and complexity almost for the first time. (76)

     

    He recounts how hearing Alfred Brendel play Brahms’ “Theme with Variations for Piano” led him, through a complex, apparently private and idiosyncratic course of associations, to other music (theme-and-variation pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Elgar), to other performances and versions of the same music (including part of a Louis Malle film score), to comparable musical effects (in Schumann, Wagner, Strauss), finally to “the voice and even the pianistic gestures of an old teacher, Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had come to Egypt (which is where I met him in the 1950s), after he had discovered the impending portent of fascism for him as a European musician and performer during the 1930s,” to his playing of a Brahms concerto, and then to “a whole tradition of teaching and playing that entered into and formed my relationship with Tiegerman, as it must have between him and his colleagues and friends in Europe” (90-91).

     

    There is an obvious point about this narrative, but it is one that Said never quite makes. The most moving private moment has shown itself to be fully social, though not social in the way Said has been using that term. Throughout the book, Said treats public and private, solitary and social, as simple, polar opposites. Inwardness and musical meditation are, almost by definition, non-social, anti-social. But his own story demonstrates that seemingly private experience is social at its heart. Even at the instant of greatest isolation and involvement, it is exactly the music of another being heard. Music here illustrates an extreme sociality, where self and other are so intimately tied and interwoven that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. In addition, the most private inevitably reveals itself as the most social and the most painfully historical (the story of Ignace Tiegerman resonates with Said’s references, elsewhere in the book, to the Palestinian dispossession and the role played in it by elements of European fascism). Said resolves the antinomy of public and private not in the way he had intended, through analysis of musical institutions and settings, but exactly where it seemed a resolution was least likely to be found, in what seemed to be pure inwardness and formal pleasure.

     

    Pushed to an extreme, “public” and “private” are no longer opposites. If we attend to what Said’s discussion actually shows, rather than what it asserts, we see that the tension between public and private remains, even as both are, in effect, different inflections of the social. Here social forces are refracted through individual experience and, unlike the obviously institutional dimensions of the concert, are powerfully interior. It is far from clear what sort of social analysis could genuinely illuminate the domain of inwardness, but Said has at least suggested the poverty of a postmodernism incapable of accounting for privacy and musical pleasure. If our concern, after Foucault, is with what is genuinely transgressive, then music and interiority and a certain kind of individualism cannot be discounted. Of course, what kind of individualism makes a considerable difference. There is a great difference between holding the individual and private experience are of value because they transcend social determinations and because they represent the complexity, hence the variability, of social structures. And the same holds true when the private experience is that of an artwork, musical or literary.

     

  • Confronting Heidegger

    Gerry O’Sullivan

    University of Pennsylvania

     

    Zimmerman, Michael. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 306 pp.

     

    In the wake of the “affaire Heidegger,” prompted by the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme, Michael Zimmerman poses a fundamental question in his recent book, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art–how can students of Heidegger continue to assert the value of his thought given his “postwar refusal to abandon what seems such a reactionary understanding of Western history and his equal failure to renounce unequivocally a political movement that wrought such unparalleled misery”?

     

    Such an inquiry is nothing new for Zimmerman, whose 1981 book, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity dealt directly with the issue over the course of a cogent chapter entitled “National Socialism, Voluntarism, and Authenticity.” In fact, the seeming novelty of the “affaire” itself testifies to an unfortunate lack of historical perspective on the part of many of its leading participants.

     

    For years prior to the public debates surrounding the Farias study, many of Heidegger’s own students (among them Otto Poggeler, Heinrich Ott and Paul Huhnerfeld) pointed out the often disturbing consistencies between the philosophical project of their mentor and the political project of National Socialism. Indeed, as early as 1970, Joachim Fest had discussed Heidegger’s outright complicity with the NSDAP in The Face of the Third Reich.

     

    But as David Carroll has suggested in his foreword to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and the “jews”, the most recent French version of the Heidegger affair may not have been so much prompted by the Farias book as “programmed”– designed to undermine the work and thought of all those in any way indebted to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics.

     

    While Carroll’s take on the timing of the debate may seem a bit too intentional, he raises some rather interesting institutional, political and historical questions about the “place” of Heidegger in contemporary scholarship. Given the shape and focus of the discussion in France, it would seem that–in many ways–Heidegger’s ignominious affiliation with the Nazis and his silence on the Holocaust may not have been the point of the polemic, but merely an occasion to attack those cast as heirs. In this case, one must deal with the seeming indecency of an intentional “double-forgetting.”

     

    Zimmerman’s book, on the other hand, begins with what must be one of the clearest and most thoroughgoing considerations of Heidegger’s historical and political context written to date, relating Heidegger’s critique of “productionist metaphysics” and his thinking on technology to his affiliation with National Socialism. But Zimmerman, unlike Farias, does not reduce the whole of Heidegger’s writings to a mere expression or reflection of Nazism. While clearly identifying the various fascist and reactionary strains running throughout the writings, Zimmerman also undertakes a retrieval or recuperation of what he believes to be still valuable insights on Heidegger’s part–a kind of “what-is-living, what-is-dead” exercise.

     

    To this end, Zimmerman engages the texts of Heidegger both on their own terms and in relation to the writings of his contemporaries, an interpretive gesture which allows him to, in his own words, step outside of “the one-dimensional hermeneutic circle that is typical of the way in which most of Heidegger’s commentators have explained his concept of modern technology” (249).

     

    As Zimmerman points out, most of Heidegger’s readers have chosen to ignore the political implications of his thinking on technology in favor of a continual reading and rereading of the early and later writings, granting a kind of suprahistorical character to the works and allowing the corpus to dictate the conditions of its own perception. Zimmerman sidesteps this kind of hermeneutic self- foreclosure by decentering Heidegger as merely “one important voice in a cultural conversation into which Heidegger himself had been ‘thrown’.”

     

    This is not to say that Heidegger’s politics are themselves construed by Zimmerman as a manifestation of Geworfenheit or “throwness.” Rather, his reflections on modernity, technology and the work of art are placed within the setting of what Jeffrey Herf has described as “reactionary modernism,” the technological-romantic branch of German conservatism which sought to replace the calculative rationality of the Enlightenment with the self-sacrifice and spirit of an individualistic, though properly Germanic, Volkstechnik.

     

    Heidegger’s views on technology and industrial society underwent significant changes between the publication of Being and Time and the writings which appeared after the so-called Kehre or “turn.” As Zimmerman points out, the ambiguity of Heidegger’s account of “everydayness” in Being and Time was largely attributable to his unwillingness, or inability, to delineate between an account of everyday life which purported to reveal its timeless, essential and “transcendental” features and one which amounted to a politically charged critique of everydayness under the historically specific circumstances of capitalism and urban-industrial society.

     

    Read in this way, then, Being and Time provided a negative evaluation of life in industrial society while attempting to retain its tacit claim to being a work of phenomenological description. It also, in the assessment of Winfreid Franzen, appealed to conservative intellectuals “because it addressed them theoretically, personally, and existentially without calling upon them to do anything specific.” In fact, Heidegger’s thematization of the frailty of individual Dasein in the face of the omnivorous they-self commended total secession as the only possibility of self-assertion.

     

    But Zimmerman’s analysis of the reactionary, albeit addled, agenda of Being and Time stops there, and he moves (perhaps too quickly) onto a consideration of Heidegger’s debt to the writings of Ernst Junger. Zimmerman neglects to make explicit the problematic of Heidegger’s “conservative revolution” in philosophy as identified by Pierre Bourdieu in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s attempt to overthrow Kant’s overthrowing of metaphysics was, according to Bourdieu, typical of a strategy peculiar to “conservative revolutionaries” like Junger, a strategy which consisted in “jumping into the fire to avoid being burnt, to change everything without changing anything, through one of those heroic extremes which, in the drive to situate oneself always beyond the beyond, unite and reconcile opposites verbally, in paradoxical and magical propositions.”

     

    Hence, says Bourdieu, Heidegger sought to escape historicism by asserting the essential “historicity” of the existing, and then inscribed history and temporality within Being which remains, even in Heidegger, both ahistorical and eternal. Such a seemingly radical overcoming as that accomplished by Heidegger simply “allows everything to be preserved behind the appearance of everything changing, by joining opposites in a two-faced system of thought, which is therefore impossible to circumvent, since, like Janus, it is capable of facing challenges form all directions at once: the systematic extremism of essential thought enables it to overcome the most radical theses . . . by moving to a pivotal point where right becomes left, and vice versa.” Therefore, there may have been more to the fundamental inaction encouraged by Being and Time than that allowed, or interrogated, by Zimmerman.

     

    Zimmerman’s discussion of Heidegger’s relationship to the writings of Ernst Junger is, however, both elegant and persuasive. Heidegger, according to Zimmerman, drew upon representations of technology and the machine age contained in the essays and fictions of Junger who, like Spengler, had sought to discover metaphysical principles behind history which were “deeper” than those suggested by Marxism– mythical, elemental and irrational forces beyond the alleged determinism of scientific materialism or bourgeois economism.

     

    Between 1934 and 1944, Heidegger developed his own conception of technology in constant and ongoing dialogue with Junger’s work, which argued that the industrial transformation of the earth was the empirical manifestation of a hidden, world-transforming power akin to the Spenglerian version of Nietzsche’s will to power. This power, according to Junger, currently took the form of the Gestalt of the worker (Junger alternately defined Gestalt as a stamping, imprinting, typing, or symbolic “totality” which embraced “more than the sum of its parts”).

     

    For Junger, as for Spengler, world history was a spectacle. And the central figure in the then-unfolding drama of “total mobilization” was the worker-soldier, a passionate yet steely character ever willing to surrender to the atavastic will, whether on the factory floor or the battlefield. Junger, like the Futurists, developed a full-blown aesthetics of horror. Writing in War as Inner Experience (1922) and elsewhere, he sought to discover the “truth” of warfare as something done for its own sake, thus justifying both the horrors of modern warfare and Germany’s defeat in World War I as components of the same grand design and the upsurging of primordial will.

     

    Heidegger both appropriated and transformed Junger’s masculinist rhetoric. While approving of Junger’s critiques of both Marxism and bourgeois decadence, his affirmation of a new and elite humanity and the necessity for an authoritarian Gemeinschaft, Heidegger rejected his internationalism and saw the dream of the world factory as simply being the final phase of the “productionist metaphysics” inaugurated by the Greeks. In response, Heidegger began to develop his own notions of spiritual work, national work service and the need for an “authentically” German science as early as the famed Rectoral address of 27 May 1933.

     

    Heidegger’s later reflections on technology, work and art continued to be influenced by his dialogue with Junger’s writings, according to Zimmerman. Just as Junger had seen the work of the eternal will in the horrors of technological warfare, Heidegger glimpsed the “self-concealing being of entities in the horrifying meaninglessness of entities in the technological era,” whereby everything was reduced to “the same undifferentiated raw material for industrial production.”

     

    Likewise, Heidegger responded to Junger’s rhetoric of the irresistable upswelling of primal Will by arguing that the “power” confronting humanity was, in fact, the “overwhelming being or presencing of entities,” the overwhelming force (Walten) of physis as presencing or being. This force, claimed Heidegger, brought about the almost martial struggle to “found” a world, to delimit the overpowering presencing of entities in order to let them “stand forth” as determinate, whether through the handiwork of technology or art, or the intervention of the poet, thinker or–at least prior to the late 1930s–politician.

     

    Heidegger’s language in 1935, following that of Junger, was decidedly martial in tone: “To apprehend . . . means to let something come to one, not merely accepting it, however, but taking a receptive attitude toward that which shows itself. When troops prepare to receive the enemy, it is in the hope of stopping him at the very least, of bringing him to stand [zum Stand bringen]” (79).

     

    Junger’s failure to grasp the nature of this presencing, and his confusion of the “fluid ‘motion’ of the synchronic event of presencing (Anwesen)” with the diachronic “hardening” of this presencing into specific historical modes of “being present” (Anwesenheit), led Heidegger to reject Junger’s notion of Gestalt (as epochal “imprinting”) as yet another master name in the history of metaphysics.

     

    So, says Zimmerman, Heidegger’s response to Junger’s essay, “Uber ‘Die Linie‘” in The Question of Being, was to discount the writer’s failure to grasp the nature of the ontological difference while recapitulating many of the same themes found in his works: “While Heidegger spoke of the history of being, and Junger of the history of the Will to Power, both believed that the ‘multifarious transformations’ assumed by being or the Will to Power in different epochs presented ‘the heroic spirit with an engrossing drama.’” Both also believed that they were equipped to bear witness to this historical “play” of transformations while the rest of humanity blindly succumbed to the imperatives of the imprinting of the age of the worker.

     

    It was through Junger’s “aesthetics” of history and the Gestalt of the worker, claims Zimmerman, that Heidegger was led to consider Nietzsche’s thinking on the nature of art. In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger came to thematize the Greek conception of art as techne, or measure-giving disclosure, in response to the “degenerate” modes of modern art and industrial production.

     

    Not surprisingly, Heidegger read the first version of “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1935, not long after Hitler’s Nuremberg address, “Art and Politics.” Both Hitler and Heidegger stressed the importance of Greek art as a model for a “restored” and authentic aesthetic practice. And insofar as Heidegger believed that the art of the Greek temple opened or disclosed the world of the polis “in which entities could first manifest themselves in their own specific shapes and forms, and in which Greek humanity could make the decisions that would determine its destiny,” writes Zimmerman, both Hitler and Heidegger agreed on the relationship between art and political life.

     

    Where Heidegger parted company with Hitler, however, was on the point of art’s relationship to history and eternity. Hitler’s vision of the thousand-year Reich was to be embodied in planned public works of art, totalitarian “temples” attesting to the permanence of the Nazi vision. Zimmerman points out that for genuine art to “work,” according to Heidegger, it must reveal the fragility and mortality of human existence. Hence, Hitler remained, in the estimation of Heidegger, under the sway of foundationalist metaphysics.

     

    Against such myths of eternity and pure presence, Heidegger turned to the “originary” Greek conception of art as techne, a work of the hand which resists reduction to a “mere product” by virtue of its self-sufficiency and disclosive power. Such “authentic” production and “freeing” disclosure gave way, eventually, to the distortions inherent in “productionist metaphysics” which, states Zimmerman, casts the world as little more than a “standing-reserve” awaiting subjugation.

     

    Like the National Socialists, the reactionaries and fascists, Heidegger was concerned with the inherent or essential relationship between poetry and production. The cure for rootlessness, social fragmentation, nihilism and alienation was not to be found in a workers’ revolution, but rather in a workers’ state transformed by the saving and disclosive power of art as handicraft. In such a situation, the ills and evils of modernity–associated in Heidegger’s mind with the industrialism and rootlessness of Bolshevism (and, concomitantly, “cosmopolitan Judaism”) and the inauthentic freedoms of the liberal welfare state–would be forever swept away by the power of authentic art and authentic technology to disclose new worlds and possibilities.

     

    Apart from its political pedigree, Heidegger’s critique of instrumental rationality is appealing to Zimmerman, and for several reasons. His anti-foundationalism, which denies a rational basis for the technological way of life, suggests to Zimmerman that things could be otherwise: “Discovering the groundlessness of the technological era makes possible the openness–and the anxiety–necessary for the arrrival of a new, post-modern era.” Zimmerman also sees continuity between Heidegger’s attention to handiwork and the analysis of “micropractices” in Foucault, both of which, he believes, offer alternatives to the homogeneity of the technological world.

     

    Zimmerman concludes Heidegger’s Confrontation With Modernity with a hopeful, though cautious, call for dialogue among feminists, deep ecologists and students of Heidegger’s work, all of whom are involved, according to Zimmerman, in developing new narratives about non-alienated, and non-oppressive, social and ecological relationships. Much can be learned, claims Zimmerman, from the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit and the hermeneutical insistence upon the finitude, and contingency, of knowing. But Heidegger’s failures remain in the foreground: “Sensitive to the dangers of nihilism posed by the dissolution of previous foundations, Heidegger attempted to find a non-absolute, historical ‘ground’ to guide his own people. Unfortunately, this attempt ended in disaster.”

     

    This is as comprehensive an overview of Heidegger’s views on modernity, technology, politics and art as one will find anywhere, and an extremely valuable contribution to recent scholarship on Heidegger and the debates occasioned by his commitment to National Socialism. But several questions remain.

     

    Zimmerman tends, often in passing, to include Marxism among the various manifestations of “productionist metaphysics” at work in the history of the forgetting or “oblivion” of being–what Heidegger termed the Seinsvergessenheit. At this point Zimmerman himself can be said to succumb to a totalizing or hypostasizing gesture regarding the disputed character of production in Marxist theory. Marx recognized that the capitalist mode of production was a system of multiple determinations, demanding multiple logics. One can read Marx himself against the kind of conceptual identity attributed to him by Zimmerman, via Heidegger.

     

    Zimmerman also fails to indicate what it is that he means by “mode of production.” To use shorthand developed by Harold Wolpe in The Articulation of Modes of Production, this could be a “restricted” use, covering only forces and relations of production, or an “extended” use, including forces and relations of production and their conditions of existence. Only the latter tends toward the kind of economic reductionism slighted by both Zimmerman and Heidegger, and assumes that the economy is, always and already, the predetermined site of primary contradiction.

     

    Neglected, too, is Marx’s point–underscored by Marcuse –that neither nationalization or socialization alter, by themselves, technical rationality as embodied (often irrationally) in the productive apparatus. A shift in ownership does not bring alienation to an end, as Zimmerman seems to imply in his critique of Marxism. The technological structure itself must change. At this point, one wishes that Zimmerman had included more recent Marxist theory in his dialogue, as it might have added some specificity to the Heideggerian critique.

     

    But perhaps specificity remains, and will always remain, the glitch in the Heideggerian machinery. Heidegger’s fundamental inablity to account for social institutions may stem from the reactionary tendencies identified by Bourdieu in Being and Time, including the impulse to always cast “the social” negatively, interms of das Man or the they-self. (Adorno’s underthematization of the social leads to similar problems for his analyses, as Axel Honneth has recently shown). One wonders how and where the world-disclosing, world-transforming power of authentic art and technology can finally work if not across the social field.

     

  • Spew: The Queer Punk Convention

    Bill Hsu

    University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
    <hsu@csrd.uiuc.edu>

     

     

    SPEW. The first queer punk fanzine convention. May 25 1991. Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago.

     

    "NO panels. NO workshops. NO keynote address. VANLOADS of noisy dykes and fags."

     

    While hardcore in the early ’80s was mostly a straight white male phenomenon, gender-bending had often been a feature of punk in the ’70s. Queer punks were ostracized by both the mainstream gay communities (for being punks) and the mainstream hardcore communities (for being queer). Letters from queer-identified punks began appearing in punk fanzines in the mid-80s, usually provoking responses from homophobic punks. Queer versions of the traditional punk fanzines started soon after.

     

    Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, the bastion of politically progressive hardcore culture, has occasional columns by Tom Jennings of HOMOcore (one of the first queer punk zines), and gave some coverage to the queer punk scene in its April 1989 “Sexuality” issue. The original plan was to devote a full issue to queer punks, but apparently lip service is all the hardcore establishment is willing to give.

     

    Queer punks built their own network, with their own fanzines and events. There are still relatively few openly queer punk/hardcore bands, but some established bands are supportive; Fugazi and MDC have played at HOMOcore benefits. Queer punks have encountered only limited acceptance in the hardcore establishment. Some have found more support from gay activist groups such as ACTUP and Queer Nation, and the more radical arts communities.

     

    The queer punk “movement” is not as strong in Europe as it is in North America, perhaps because the punk fanzine network is stronger in the US and Canada, and it was through this network that queer punks started organizing. Also, the European hardcore scene has strong ties to anarchist youth movements and tends to be less homophobic; perhaps queer punks in Europe have found a more supportive environment in European hardcore communities, and do not feel the need to establish their own network. Most of the queer punk fanzines that I’m aware of (and that attended SPEW) are based in the US or Canada.

     

    For SPEW, Randolph Street Gallery was divided into a display area for zines and merchandise, a video area and a performance area. Most of the major queer punk zines were in attendance: JDs (one of the first and most visible, usually featuring G.B. Jones’ stylish photographs and graphics and Bruce La Bruce’s gritty and affecting writing), the exuberant and ornery Bimbox, the campy and literate Thing, Vaginal Creme Davis’ hilarious Fertile LaToyah Jackson, etc. Most zines that were not attending sent recent issues and merchandise for display. Chicago’s ACTUP and Queer Nation both had tables.

     

    The performance area buzzed all afternoon with readings and music. Novelist Dennis Cooper, who had performed earlier that week at Club Lower Links and Medusa’s, read again from his brilliant new book Frisk and from older work. He was a nervous reader, shuffling his feet around and stubbing his toes on the floor (“from a distance people think I’m a kid.”) The delivery was mostly deadpan and lowkey, and he was charming and funny.

     

    The other readings were not as interesting. Many of the readers are excellent writers, but they were not very careful about how their texts came across when read, and what kind of delivery was necessary for good effect. Drag was once again subversive and dangerous rather than merely polite: Joan Jett Blakk (Chicago “mayor” in drag) and Elvis Herselvis (the female Elvis impersonator) performed to backing tapes, and Vaginal Creme Davis (a 6’6 African-American self-styled “blackstress”) did her usual hilarious cabaret song-and-dance routine, with boisterous gospel and blues wailing. Club Lower Links regular Andy Soma was a religious icon almost with that Pierre et Gilles gloss.

     

    I missed most of the videos (spending more time in the performance room and at the tables), except for Bruce LaBruce’s No skin off my ass, which has been making the rounds at gay film festivals all over. Unfortunately the sound was very bad and I couldn’t understand much of the voice-overs. The film is in grainy black-and-white and very well-crafted. Bruce plays a hairdresser (GB Jones is his “sister”) who has a fling with a skinhead with the usual attitude (“I can’t be a fag, I’m a skinhead” etc etc). The usual comparisons have been with Warhol but the camera in No skin is much more active: there are some really nice tracking shots and very effective montages. More a punk Mala Noche with ear and nipple-piercing sequences than, say, Flesh or Chelsea Girls.

     

    The post-convention party at Hot House Gallery featured house and hiphop grooves from Thing dj’s, and performances from Joan Jett Blakk, Vaginal Creme Davis and Toronto all-female post-punk band Fifth Column. Fifth Column was without a guitarist and the first few songs with G.B. Jones on guitar and guests on lead guitar and drums (and supporting drum machine) were a little ragged, but the band really came together when G.B. Jones switched to drums. Fifth Column started sounding like their tight, vicious first album. At their best, they recall a raw garage-y Throwing Muses with more interesting rhythms. The set ended with their strongest songs, Kangaroo Court with the nervous jerky rhythms and their “hit”, Fairview Mall Story (about police entrapment of gay men in Toronto bathrooms).

     

    The event ended on a sour note: Steve Lafreniere, one of the main organizers, was stabbed in the back by passing gay-bashers. (He has since recovered.)

     

    I found it interesting that very few people from the traditional hardcore crowd were at SPEW. Instead, more of the attendees were from the “new allies” of the queer punk movement: ACTUPers, Queer Nationals, and radical queer artists and performers. Apparently, despite all the rhetoric about liberal/progressive politics, the hardcore establishment still has to come to terms with its homophobia.

     

  • Play It Again, Pac-Man

    Charles Bernstein

    State University of New York at Albany

     

    Your quarter rolls into the slot and you are tossed, suddenly and as if without warning, into a world of controllable danger. Your “man” is under attack and you must simulate his defense, lest humanity perish and another quarter is required to renew the quest.

     

    Drop in, turn on, tune out.

     

    The theories of video games abound: poststructuralist, neomarxian, psychoanalytic, and puritanical interpretations are on hand to guide us on our journey through the conceptual mazes spawned by the phenomenon. Acting out male aggression. A return, for adolescent boys, to the site of mom’s body. Technological utopia. As American as auto-eroticism. The best introduction to computer programming. No more than an occasion for loitering in seedy arcades. A new mind-obliterating technodrug. Marvelous exercise of hand-eye coordination. Corrupter of youth. Capital entertainment for the whole family. Not since the advent of TV has an entertainment medium been subjected to such wildly ambivalent reactions nor such skyrocketing sales.

     

    If the Depression dream was a chicken in every pot, today’s middle class adolescent’s dream is a video game in every TV.

     

    More and faster: better graphics and faster action, so fast you transcend the barriers of gravity, so vivid it’s realer than real.

     

    A surprising amount of the literature on video games has concerned the social context of the games: arcade culture, troubled youth, vocational training for tomorrow’s Top Gun. So much so that these scenarios seem to have become a part of video game culture: Nerdy kid who can’t get out a full sentence and whose social skills resemble Godzilla’s is the Star of the arcade; as taciturn as a Gary Cooper’s Sheriff, he gets the job done without designer sweaters or the girl.

     

    In the Saturday Night Fever of Computer Wizardry, achievement with your joy stick is the only thing that counts; success is solitary, objectively measured, undeniable.

     

    Or, say, a 1980s Horatio Alger. A failure at school, marginal drug experimenter, hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks with a no-future bunch of kids, develops $30 a day video game habit, can’t unplug from the machine without the lights going out in his head. Haunts the arcade till all hours, till the cops come in their beeping cruisers, bounding into the mall like the beeping spaceships on the video screen, and start to check IDs, seems some parents complained they don’t know where Johnny is and it’s pushing two. Cut to: young man in chalk-striped suit vice-prez for software devel. of Data Futurians, Inc. of Electronic Valley, California; pulling down fifty thou in his third year after dropping out of college. (Though the downside sequel has him, at 30, working till two every morning, divorced, personal life not accessible at this time, waiting for new data to be loaded, trouble reading disk drive.)

     

    Like the story boards of the games, the narratives that surround video games seem to promise a very American ending: Redemption though the technology of perseverance and the perseverance of technology. Salvation from social degeneracy (alien menace) comes in the form of squeaky clean high tech (no moving parts, no grease). Turns out, no big surprise, that the Alien that keeps coming at you in these games is none other than Ourselves, split off and on the war path.

     

    The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. Enter multitask electronic calculators which would work out obsessively repetitive calculations involving billions of individual operations, calculations that if you had to do by hand would take you centuries to finish, assuming you never stopped for a Coke or a quick game of Pac-Man. Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off, except the leisure industry begins to outstrip the labors of the day as video games become the main interface between John Q. and Beth B. Public and the computer.

     

    Instruments of labor removed from work-a-day tasks, set free to roam the unconscious, dark spaces of the Imaginary– dragons and assault asteroids, dreadful losses and miraculous reincarnations.

     

    If a typewriter could talk, it probably would have very little to say; our automatic washers are probably not hiding secret dream machines deep inside their drums.

     

    But these microchips really blow you away.

     

    Uh, err, um, oh. TILT!

     

    Okay, then, let’s slow down and unpack these equations one by one, or else this will begin to resemble the assault on our ability to track that seems so much at the heart of the tease of the games themselves.

     

    Spending Time or Killing It?

     

    The arcade games are designed, in part, to convince players to part, and keep parting, with their quarters. This part of the action feels like slot-machine gambling, with the obvious difference that there is no cash pay off, only more time on line. Staying plugged in, more time to play, is the fix. The arcade games are all about buying time and the possibility of extending the nominal, intensely atomized, 30-second (or so) minimum play to a duration that feels, for all impractical purposes, unbounded. Clearly the dynamic of the ever-more popular home games is different enough that the two need to be considered as quite distinct social phenomena, even though they share the same medium.

     

    Like sex, good play on an arcade video game not only earns extra plays but also extends and expands the length of the current play, with the ultimate lure of an unlimited stretch of time in which the end bell never tolls: a freedom from the constraints of time that resembles the temporal plenitude of uninterrupted live TV (or close-circuit video monitoring) as well as the timeless, continuous present of the personal computer (PC). In contrast, a film ticket or video rental buys you just 90 or 120 minutes of “media,” no extensions (as opposed to reruns) possible. Meanwhile, the home video game, by allowing longer play with greater skills, simulates the temporal economy of the arcade product while drastically blunting the threat of closure, since on the home version it costs nothing to replay.

     

    Video games create an artificial economy of scarcity in a medium characterized by plenitude. In one of the most popular genres, you desperately fight to prolong your staying power which is threatened by alien objects that you must shoot down. There’s no intrinsic reason that the threat of premature closure should drive so many of these games; for example, if your quarter always bought two minutes of play the effect of artificial scarcity would largely disappear. Is this desire to postpone closure a particular male drive, suggesting a peculiarly male fear? It may be that the emphasis on the overt aggression of a number of the games distracts from seeing other dynamics inherent in video game formats.

     

    Another dynamic of the arcade games is the ubiquitous emphasis on scoring. These games are not open-ended; not only do you try to accumulate the most points in order to extend play and win bonus games but also to compete with the machine’s lifetime memory of best-ever scores. If achievement-directed scoring suggests sex as opposed to love, games more than play, then it seems relevant to consider this a central part of the appeal of video games.

     

    An economy of scarcity suggests goal-oriented behavior: the desire for accumulation; this is what George Bataille has dubbed a “restricted” economy, in contrast to an unrestricted or “general” economy, which involves exchange or loss or waste or discharge. The drive to accumulate capital and commodities is the classic sign of a restricted economy. Potlatch (the festive exchange of gifts) or other rituals or carnivals of waste (“A hellava wedding!,” “Boy, what a Bar Mitzvah!”) suggest a general economy.

     

    While the dominant formats and genres of video games seem to involve a restricted economy, the social context of the games seems to suggest features of a general– unrestricted–economy. For while the games often mime the purposive behavior of accumulation/acquisition, they are played out in a context that stigmatizes them as wastes of time, purposeless, idle, even degenerate.

     

    These considerations link up video games with those other games, in our own and other cultures, whose social “function” is to celebrate waste, abandon, excess; though the carnival or orgiastic rite is clearly something that is repressed in a society, like ours, where the Puritan ethic stills hold powerful sway. What redeems many sports from being conceived as carnivals of waste is the emphasis on athletics (improvement of the body) and the forging of team or group or community spirit (building a community, learning fair play)–two compensatory features conspicuously absent from solitary, suggestively antiphysical video gaming.

     

    In a society in which the desire for general economy is routinely sublimated into utilitarian behaviors, the lure of video games has to be understood as, in part, related to their sheer unproductivity. Put more simply, our unrestricted play is constantly being channeled into goal-directed games; how appealing then to find a game whose essence seems to be totally useless play. Yet it would be a mistake to think of the erotic as wed to de-creative flows rather than pro-creative formations: both are in play, at work. Thus the synthesis of play and games that characterizes most available video games addresses the conflictual nature of our responses to eros and labor, play and work.

     

    So what’s really being shot down or gobbled up in so many of the popular games? Maybe the death wish played out in these games is not a simulation at all; maybe it’s time that’s being killed or absorbed–real-life productive time that could be better “spent” elsewhere.

     

    If The Massage Is The Medium and the Genre Is the Message, Who’s Minding the Store?

     

    Like movies, especially in the early period, video games are primarily characterized by their genre. The earliest arcade video game, Pong, from 1971, is an arcade version of ping-pong, and so the progenitor of a series of more sophisticated games based on popular sports, including Atari Football, Track and Field, 720 [degrees] (skateboarding), and Pole Position (car racing). (Perhaps driving simulation games are a genre of their own; they certainly have the potential to be played in an open-ended way, outside any scoring: just to drive fast and take the curves.)

     

    Quest or “fantasy” adventures, typically using a maze format, is another very poplar genre, especially in the home version. Arcade versions include Dragon’s Lair, Gauntlet, and Thayer’s Quest. Dragons, wizards, and warriors are often featured players, and each new level of the game triggers more complex action, as the protagonist journeys toward an often magical destination at the end of a series of labyrinths. In the home versions, where there may be up to a dozen levels, or scenes, the narrative can become increasingly elaborate. Still, the basis of this genre is getting the protagonist through a series (or maze) of possibly fatal mishaps. In its simplest form, these games involve a single protagonist moving toward a destination, the quest being to complete the labyrinth, against all odds. So we have Pac-Man gobbling to avoid being gobbled, or Donkey Kong‘s Mario trying to save his beloved from a family of guerrillas who roll barrels at him, or, in Berzerk, humanoids who must destroy all the pursuing robots before reaching the end of the maze.

     

    But the genre that most characterizes the arcade game is the war games in which successive waves of enemy projectiles must be shot down or blown up by counterprojectiles controlled by joystick, push button, or track ball. Some of the more famous of these games included Star Wars (a movie tie-in), Space Invaders (squadrons of alien craft swoop in from outer space while the player fights it out with one lone spacecraft that is locked in a fixed position), Asteroids (weightless, drifting shooter, lost in space, tries to blast way through meteor showers and occasional scout ship), Defender (wild variety of space aliens to dodge/shoot down in spaceman rescue), Galaxian (invaders break ranks and take looping dives in their attacks), Stratovox (stranded astronauts on alien planet), Centipede (waves of insects), Missile Command (ICBM attack), Robotron: 2084 (robots against humanity), Seawolf (naval action), Zaxxon (enemy-armed flying fortress), Battlezone (so accurately simulated tank warfare, so the press kit says, that the Army used it for training), and, finally, the quite recent “total environment” sit-down, pilot’s view war games–Strike Avenger, Afterburner, and Star Fire.

     

    A related, newer genre is the martial arts fighting-man video games, such as Double Dragon and Karate Champ, where star wars have come home to earth in graphically violent street wars reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s mystically alluring Kung Fu action movies: another example of film and video game versions of the same genre.

     

    Discussions of video games rarely distinguish between medium and genre, probably because the limited number of genres so far developed dominate the popular conception of the phenomenon. But to imagine that video games are restricted to shoot-’em-ups, quest adventures, or sports transcriptions would be equivalent to imagining, seventy years ago, that the Perils of Pauline or slapstick revealed the essence of cinema.

     

    A medium of art has traditionally been defined as the material or technical means of expression; thus, paint on canvas, lithography, photography, film, and writing are different media; while detective stories, science fiction, rhymed verse, or penny dreadfuls are genres of writing. This is altogether too neat, however. Since we learn what a medium is through instances of its use in genres, the cart really comes before the horse, or anyway, the medium is a sort of projected, or imaginary, constant that is actually much more socially and practically constituted than may at first seem apparent.

     

    When trying to understand the nature of different media, it is often useful to think about what characterizes one medium in a way that distinguishes it from all other media–what is its essence, what can it do that no other medium can do? Stanley Cavell has suggested that the essence of the two predominant moving-image media–TV and movies–are quite distinct. The experience of film is voyeuristic–I view a world (“a succession of automatic world projections”) from a position of being unseen, indeed unseeable. TV, in contrast, involves not viewing but monitoring of events as its basic mode of perception–live broadcast of news or sports events being the purest examples of this property.

     

    It’s helpful to distinguish the video display monitor from TV-as-medium. Several media use the video monitor for non-TV purposes. One distinction is between broadcast TV and VCR technologies that, like PCs, use the television screen for non-event-monitoring functions. Video games, then, are a moving-image medium distinct from TV and film.

     

    In distinguishing medium and genre, it becomes useful to introduce a middle term, format. Coin-op and home-cassette video games are one type of–hardware–format distinction I have in mind; but another–software– difference would be between, for example, scored and open-ended games, time-constrained and untimed play. Similar or different genres could then be imagined for these different formats.

     

    The Computer Unconscious

     

    The medium of video games is the CPU–the computer’s central processing unit. Video games share this medium with PCs. Video games and PCs are different (hardware) formats of the same medium. Indeed, a video game is a computer that is set up (dedicated) to play only one program.

     

    The experiential basis of the computer-as-medium is prediction and control of a limited set of variables. The fascination with all computer technology–gamesware or straightware–is figuring out all the permutations of a limited set of variables. This accounts for the obsessively repetitive behavior of both PC hackers and games players (which mimes the hyperrepetiveness of computer processing). As a computer games designer remarked to me, working with computers is the only thing she can do for hours a day without noticing the time going by: a quintessentially absorbing activity.

     

    Computers, because they are a new kind of medium, are likely to change the basic conception of what a medium is. This is not because computers are uniquely interactive–that claim, if pursued, becomes hollow quite quickly. Rather, computers provide a different definition of a medium: not a physical support but an operating environment. Perhaps it overstates the point to talk about computer consciousness but the experiential dynamic in operating computers–whether playing games or otherwise–has yet to receive a full accounting. Yet the fascination of relating to this alien consciousness is at the heart of the experience of PCs as much as video games.

     

    Video games are the purest manifestation of computer consciousness. Liberated from the restricted economy of purpose or function, they express the inner, nonverbal world of the computer.

     

    What is this world like? Computers, including video games, are relatively invariant in their response to commands. This means that they will always respond in the same way to the same input but also that they demand that the input be precisely the same to produce the same results. For this reason, any interaction with computers is extremely circumscribed and affectless (which is to say, all the affect is a result of transference and projection). Computers don’t respond or give forth, they process or calculate.

     

    Computers are either on or off, you’re plugged in or your out of the loop. There is a kind of visceral click in your brain when the screen lights up with “System Ready,” or your quarter triggers the switch and the game comes on line, that is unrelated to other media interactions such as watching movies or TV, reading, or viewing a painting. Moreover–and this is crucial to the addictive attraction so many operators feel–the on-ness of the computer is alien to any sort of relation we have with people or things or nature, which are always and ever possibly present, but can’t be toggled on and off in anything like this peculiar way. The computer infantalizes our relation to the external, re-presenting the structure of the infant’s world as described by Piaget, where objects seem to disappear when you turn your back to them or close your eyes. For you know when you turn your PC on it will be just like you left it: nothing will have changed.

     

    TV is for many people simulated company, freely flowing with an unlimited supply of “stuff” that fills up “real time.” Computers, in contrast, seem inert and atemporal, vigilant and self-contained. It’s as if all their data is simultaneously and immediately available to be called up. It is unnecessary to go through any linear or temporal sequence to find a particular bit of information. No searching on fast forward as in video, or waiting as in TV, or flipping pages as in a book: you specify and instantly access. When you are into it, time disappears, only to become visible again during “down time.” Even those who can’t conceive that they will care about speed become increasingly irritated at computer operations that take more than a few seconds to complete. For the non-operator, it may seem that a 10-second wait to access data is inconsequential. But the computer junkie finds such waits an affront to the medium’s utopian lure of timeless and immediate access, with no resistance, no gravitational pull–no sweat, no wait, no labor on the part of the computer: a dream of weightless instantaneousness, continuous presentness. The fix of speed for the computer or video game player is not from the visceral thrill of fastness, as with racing cars, where the speed is physically felt. The computer ensnares with a Siren’s song of time stopping, ceasing to be experienced, transcended. Speed is not an end in itself, a roller coaster ride, but a means to escape from the very sensation of speed or duration: an escape from history, waiting, embodied space.

     

    The Anxiety of Control/The Control of Anxiety

     

    Invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity are not qualities that generally characterize human information processing, although they are related to certain idealizations of our reasoning processes. Certainly, insofar as a person took on these characterizations, he or she would frighten: either lobotomized or paranoid. In this sense, the computer can again be seen as an alien form of consciousness; our interactions with it are unrelated to the forms of communication to which we otherwise are accustomed.

     

    Many people using computers and video games experience a surprisingly high level of anxiety; controlled anxiety is one of the primary “hooks” into the medium.

     

    Since so many of the video game genres highlight paranoid fantasies, it’s revealing to compare these to the paranoia and anxiety inscribed in PC operating systems. Consider the catastrophic nature of numerous PC error messages: Invalid sector, allocation error, sector not found, attempted write-protect violation, disk error, divide overflow, disk not ready, invalid drive specification, data error, format failure, incompatible system size, insufficient memory, invalid parameter, general failure, bad sector, fatal error, bad data, sector not found, track bad, disk unusable, unrecoverable read error; or the ubiquitous screen prompts: “Are you sure?” and “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

     

    The experience of invoking and avoiding these, sometimes “fatal” errors, is not altogether unlike the action of a number of video games. Just consider how these standard PC software operating terms suggest both scenarios and action of many video games and at the same time underscore some of the ontological features of the medium: escape and exit and save functions (“You must escape from the dungeon, exit to the next level and save the nuclear family”), path support (knowing your way through the maze), data loss/data recovery (your “man” only disappears if he gets hit three times), defaults (are not in the stars but in ourselves), erase (liquidate, disappear, destroy, bombard, obliterate), abandon (ship!), unerase (see data recovery), delete (kill me but don’t delete me), searches (I always think of John Ford’s The Searchers, kind of the opposite of perhaps the most offensive of video games, “Custer’s Revenge”), and of course, back-ups (i.e. the cavalry’s on its way, or else: a new set of missiles is just a flick of the wrist away).

     

    The pitch of computer paranoia is vividly demonstrated in the cover copy for a program designed to prevent your hard drive from crashing: “Why your hard disk may be only seconds away from total failure! Be a real hero! Solve hard disk torture and grief. You don’t need to reformat. You don’t need to clobber data. How much these errors already cost you in unrecoverable data, time, torture, money, missing deadlines, schedule delays, poor performance, damage to business reputation, etc..”

     

    Loss preventable only by constant saving is one PC structural metaphor that seems played out in video games. Another one, though perhaps less metaphoric than phenomenological, revolves around location. Here it’s not loss, in the sense of being blipped out, but rather being lost–dislocation–as in how to get from one place to another, or getting your bearings so that the move you make with the controls corresponds with what you see on the far-from-silver screen. Or else the intoxicating anxiety of disorientation: vertigo, slipping, falling, tumbling….

     

    What’s going on? The dark side of uniformity and control is an intense fear of failure, of crashing, of disaster, of down time. Of not getting it right, of getting lost, of losing control. Since the computer doesn’t make mistakes, if something goes wrong, it must be something in you. How many times does an operator get a new program and run it through just to see how it works, what it can do, what the glitches are, what the action is. Moving phrases around in multiple block operations may not be so different from shooting down asteroids. Deleting data on purpose or by mistake may be something like gobbling up little illuminated blips on the display screen of a game. And figuring out how a new piece of software works by making slight mistakes that the computer rejects–because there’s only one optimum way to do something–may be like learning to get from a 30-second Game Over to bonus points.

     

    If films offer voyeuristic pleasures, video games provide vicarious thrills. You’re not peeking into a world in which you can’t be seen, you are acting in a world by means of tokens, designated hitters, color-coded dummies, polymorphous stand-ins. The much-admired interactiveness of video games amounts to less than it might appear given the very circumscribed control players have over their “men.” Joy sticks and buttons (like keyboards or mice) allow for a series of binary operations; even the most complex games allows for only a highly limited amount of player control. Narrowing down the field of possible choices to a manageable few is one of the great attractions of the games, in just the way that a film’s ability to narrow down the field of possible vision to a view is one of the main attractions of the cinema.

     

    Video games offer a narrowed range of choices in the context of a predictable field of action. Because the games are so mechanically predictable, and context invariant, normal sorts of predictive judgments based on situational adjustments are unnecessary and indeed a positive hindrance. The rationality of the system is what makes it so unlike everyday life and therefore such a pleasurable release from everyday experience. With a video game, if you do the same thing in the same way it will always produce the same results. Here is an arena where a person can have some real control, an illusion of power, as “things” respond to the snap of our fingers, the flick of our wrists. In a world where it is not just infantile or adolescent but all too human to feel powerless in the face of bombarding events, where the same action never seems to produce the same results because the contexts are always shifting, the uniformity of stimulus and response in video games can be exhilarating.

     

    In the social world of our everyday lives repetition is near impossible if often promised. You can never utter the same sentence twice not only technically, in the sense of slight acoustic variation, but semantically, in that it won’t mean the same thing the second time around, won’t always command the same effect. With video games, as with all computers, you can return to the site of the same problem, the same anxiety, the same blockage and get exactly the same effect in response to the same set of actions.

     

    In the timeless time of the video screen, where there is no future and no history, just a series of events that can be read in any sequence, we act out a tireless existential drama of “now” time. The risks are simulated, the mastery imaginary; only the compulsiveness is real.

     

    Paranoia or Paramilitary?

     

    Paranoia literally means being beside one’s mind. Operating a computer or video game does give you the eerie sensation of being next to something like a mind, something like a mind that is doing something like responding to your control. Yet one is not in control over the computer. That’s what’s scary. Unlike your relation to your own body, that is being in it and of it, the computer only simulates a small window of operator control. The real controller of the game is hidden from us, the inaccessible system core that goes under the name of Read Only Memory (ROM), that’s neither hardware that you can touch or software that you can change but “firmware.” Like ideology, ROM is out of sight only to control more efficiently.

     

    We live in a computer age in which the systems that control the formats that determine the genres of our everyday life are inaccessible to us. It’s not that we can’t “know” a computer’s mind in some metaphysical sense; computers don’t have minds. Rather, we are structurally excluded from having access to the command structure: very few know the language, and even fewer can (re)write it. And even if we could rewrite these deep structures, the systems are hardwired in such a way as to prevent such tampering. In computer terms, to reformat risks losing all your data: it is something to avoid at all costs. Playing video games, like working with computers, we learn to adapt ourselves to fixed systems of control. All the adapting is ours. No wonder it’s called good vocational training–but not just for Air Force Mission Control or, more likely, the word processing pool: the real training is for the new regulatory environment we used to call 1984 until it came on line without an off switch. After that we didn’t call it anything.

     

    In the machine age, a man or woman or girl or boy could fix an engine, put in a new piston, clean a carburetor. A film goer could look at a piece of film, or watch each frame being pulled by sprockets across a beam of light at a speed that he or she could imagine changing. A person operating a threshing machine may have known all the basic principles, and all the parts, that made it work. But how many of us have even the foggiest notion–beyond something about binary coding and microchips and overpriced Japanese memory–about how video games or computers work?

     

    Yet, isn’t that so much Romantic nonsense? Haven’t societies always run on secrets, hidden codes, inaccessible scriptures? The origins of computers can be traced to several sources. But it was military funding that allowed for the development of the first computers. Moreover, the first video game is generally considered to be Spacewar, which was developed on mainframes at MIT in the late 1950s, a byproduct of “strategic” R&D (research and development), and a vastly popular “diversion” among the computer scientists working with the new technology.

     

    The secrecy of the controlling ROM cannot be divorced from the Spacewar scenario that developed out of it, and later inspired the dominant arcade video game genre. Computer systems, and the games that are their product, reveal a military obsession with secrecy and control, and the related paranoia that secrets will be exposed or control lost. Computers were designed not to solve problems, per se, not to make visually entertaining graphics, not to improve manuscript presentation or production, not to do bookkeeping or facilitate searches through the Oxford English Dictionary. Computers have their origins in the need to simulate attack/response scenarios. To predict trajectories of rockets coming at target and the trajectory of rockets shot at these rockets. The first computers were developed in the late 1940s to compute bombing trajectories. When we get to the essence of the computer consciousness, if that word can still be stomached for something so foreign to all that we have known as consciousness, these origins have an acidic sting.

     

    Which is not to say other fantasies, or purposes, can’t be spun on top of these origins. Programs and games may subvert the command and control nature of computers, but they can never fully transcend their disturbing, even ominous, origins.

     

    So one more time around this maze. I’ve suggested that the Alien that keeps coming at us in so many of these games is ourselves, split off; that what we keep shooting down or gobbling up or obliterating is our temporality: which is to say that we have “erring” bodies, call them flesh, which is to say we live in time, even history. And that the cost of escaping history is paranoia: being beside oneself, split off (which brings us back to where we started).

     

    But isn’t the computer really the alien–the robot– that is bombarding us with its world picture (not view), its operating environment; that is always faster and more accurate than we can ever hope to be; and that we can only pretend to protect ourselves from, as in the Pyhrric victory, sweet but unconvincing, when we beat the machine, like so many John Henrys in dungarees and baseball hats, hunching over a pleasure machine designed to let us win once in while?

     

    The Luddites wanted to smash the machines of the Industrial Revolution–and who can fail to see the touching beauty in their impossible dream. But there can be no returns, no repetitions, only deposits, depositions. Perhaps the genius of these early video games–for the games, like computers, are not yet even toddlers–is that they give us a place to play out these neo-Luddite sentiments: slay the dragon, the ghost in the machine, the beserk robots. What we are fighting is the projection of our sense of inferiority before our own creation. I don’t mean that the computer must always play us. Maybe, with just a few more quarters, we can turn the tables.

     

  • A Dialogue on Dialogue, Part I

    Georg Mannejc, Anne Mack,

    J.J. Rome, Joanne McGrem,

    and Jerome McGann

    University of Virginia
    jjm2f@prime.acc.virginia.edu

     

                Gilbert:    Dialogue . . . can never lose for the
                            thinker its attraction as a mode of
                            expression.  By its means he can both
                            reveal and conceal himself . . . .  By
                            its means he can exhibit the object from
                            each point of view . . . or from those
                            felicitous after-thoughts . . . give a
                            fuller completeness to the central
                            scheme, and yet convey something of the
                            delicate charm of chance.
    
                Ernest:     By its means, too, he can invent an
                            imaginary antagonist, and convert him
                            when he chooses by some absurdly
                            sophistical argument.
    
                Gilbert:    Ah! it is so easy to convert others.  It
                            is so difficult to convert oneself.  To
                            arrive at what one really believes, one
                            must speak through lips different from
                            one's own.  To know the truth one must
                            imagine myriads of falsehoods.
                                    --Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as
                                  Artist.  A Dialogue.  Part II."
    
                            That mask!  That mask!  I would give one
                            of my fingers to have thought of that
                            mask.
                                    --Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew76

    GM: And so we will find it possible to get beyond the magical idea of knowledge–the idea of knowledge as control and mastery, the ideal of that idea. Instead we shall have this display and celebration of our differences.

     

    AM: Our differences about what?

     

    GM: About any subject we choose to take up. This talk of ours, these conversations, what are they grounded in? Not the pursuit of truth (that old ideal of philosophy and science), not the pursuit of power (that old ideal of magic and technology). They are grounded in the pursuit of meaning, in hermeneutics and the desires of interpretation. And interpretation proceeds according to a dialogical rather than a systems-theoretical or systems- correcting model. Dialogues are governed by rules of generosity and ornamentation, not rigor and method.

     

    AM: Who today would challenge the virtues of a dialogic model? The star of Bakhtin stands in the ascendant. But what are you saying, exactly? Is this a call for an unrestricted play of interpretation? Does anything go? Will all the Lord’s people be queueing up for a haruspicator’s license?

     

    GM: That’s a cheap sneer I’d expect from Hilton Kramer, not from you. In fact, our most ancient and sophisticated interpretive traditions call for nothing less than the reader’s complete freedom. In Hebrew midrash, as we know, reading is “divergent rather than convergent . . . moving rather than fixed . . . always opening onto new ground . . . always calling for interpretation to be opened up anew.” Many still “understand the conflict of interpretation as a deficit of interpretation itself, part of the logical weakness of hermeneutics.” This “prompts the desire to get `beyond interpretation’ to the meaning itself . . . . [But] my thought is that this very [desire] implies a transcendental outlook that has, in Western culture, never been able to accept the finite, situated, dialogical, indeed political character of human understanding, and which even now finds midrash to be irrational and wild.”1

     

    The need to possess the truth, the fear of doubt and uncertainty. It is the fear from which Arnold fled, in the middle of the nineteenth-century–the fear of a democratic conversation that would proceed without the benefit of governing touchstones. Its psychological form appeared to Arnold as the spectrous dialogue of the mind with itself. And he had reason to fear such a dialogue, for it can be unnerving or even worse. It can overthrow altogether what one takes to be the truth: the soul of the world’s culture suddenly brought face to face with the mask of the god’s anarchy–and with that mask appearing, in its most demonic guise, as a polished surface reflecting back the image of one’s own self, the hypocrite lecteur loosed upon the occidental world in Arnold’s day by Baudelaire.

     

    JJR: [speaking to GM] You call this a “celebration” of differences, but to me it seems more a clash, and thus a struggle toward that truth you are so ready to dispense with. Dialogue is less a carnival than a critical exchange in which the errors and limits of different ideas are exposed by their conflict with each other. It is all very well to float above this struggle, observing it as a rich display of energy, a celebration of itself. Thus we become the romantic inheritors of the deities of Lucretius. I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all. (Tennyson, “The Palace of Art,” 21-12) But in the world where our talk goes on, we are not gods; we are, as you suggested, political animals. Your ivory tower of interpretation is a particular political position, and the fact is that I do not agree with it. Unlike yourself, I believe these conversations are grounded in the pursuit of truth, and do involve the struggle of power.

     

    GM: I am not interested in the contemplative life. Dialogue involves various persons and is, as I say, necessarily political. What I mean to “celebrate”–and I don’t apologize for it–is the power of dialogue to harness ideas, to generate new and interesting forms of thought.

     

    JJR: But you don’t seem inclined to make the necessary distinctions or discriminations. Some “forms of thought” are more interesting than others, some are trivial, some are not. What is important about dialogue is that it helps to expose those distinctions, to sort them out. For instance, I wouldn’t say that your ideas about dialogue are trivial or uninteresting; but I would say they are wrong. There’s the difference between us. Would you say I was wrong in these ideas–are you prepared to argue that I am wrong in my judgments about your judgments?

     

    GM: Yes, you are wrong.

     

    JJR: Why, how? Indeed, on your showing, how could I be wrong?

     

    GM: Because what I was saying has nothing to do with being right or being wrong. That’s another matter entirely.

     

    JJR: Another “language game”?

     

    GM: Perhaps–why not?

     

    JJR: Because under those conditions, as I said before, “anything goes.” Shift the language game and what was “wrong” becomes something else–it becomes, perhaps, “interesting” or “uninteresting,” or perhaps even “right.”

     

    Don’t misunderstand me. I am as aware as you are that context alters the status and even the meaning of what we see and what we think. The “pursuit of truth” is towards an imaginable (as opposed to an achievable) goal. We have to be satisfied with what we can acquire– knowledge, the historical form of truth. Nevertheless, that goal, “the truth,” must be imagined if certain kinds of intellectual activities are to be pursued.

     

    AM: Truth as a necessary fiction? You are as unscrupulous as Georg when you try to manipulate us with that metaphor of “knowledge, the historical form of truth.” Does the “truth” you want to “imagine” exist in the same order as the “knowledge” you say we can gain? If it doesn’t, how do we get it?

     

    JJR: We don’t “get” it, as if by a process of discovery. We construct the truth, we imagine it. Or do you imagine that the work of imagination is somehow less real–less human and historical–than the work of knowledge?

     

    And what about your metaphor: “necessary fiction”! The implication being, apparently, that what we imagine is somehow less substantial than what we labor to discover and construct. How did Keats put it? “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth–whether it existed before or not.”2 Created work, whether primary–like the material universe–or secondary–like history itself, or Plato’s dialogues, or the bible: these are not fictions in the sense you seem to suggest. They are original forms of Being–and in the case of secondary creations like poetry, original forms of Human Being. Knowledge–science–is not their source, could not bring them into existence. Rather, knowledge takes these things (as well as itself) for its subject.

     

    And this is why I stand with Plato and Socrates on the matter of dialogue and conversation. Dialogue is how we pursue the truth through the clash of different views. It is our oldest tool for testing–and correcting–the limits and the powers of our ideas.

     

    AM: But there are important “intellectual activities” in which “the truth” will not be, must not be, “imagined.”

     

    JJR: You mean, I suppose, things like scientific or technological acts of construction.

     

    AM: I have no competence to speak about such matters, and I wasn’t thinking about them at all. I had in mind Plato’s dialogues, the bible: creative and poetical work in general.

     

    JJR: Well, if you wanted to surprise me, you have. I would have thought it obvious that these works are the very and perhaps even the only ones in which “the truth” will and must be “imagined.”

     

    AM: You are so obsessed with the idea of “the truth” that you impoverish your own imagination. And so you misunderstand me–as usual.

     

    I wasn’t suggesting a distinction between poetry and imagination, but between imagination and truth. And by that distinction I was asking you to re-think the way imagination acts in a poetical field. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not, cannot, and must not be “truth.” Rather, it seizes appearances, phenomena, facticities. The physique of the poetical event: from the elementary phonic values of the letters and syllables, through the entire array of verbal imagery, to the shape of the scripts and all the physical media–material as well as social–through which poetry is realized. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not truth, it is the image of a world. The question of truth may and will be brought to bear on that world, as it is always brought to bear on our larger world; but that question is not brought to bear in or by the poetry itself. God does not put questions of truth to his creations, and neither do poets. As Blake’s prophet of the poetical, Los, says: “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Jerusalem 10:21).

     

    JJR: Perhaps divine creation may be imagined as a seizure of pure beauty. Man’s creations, in any case, are nothing of the sort. Poetry, for instance, being a form of language, comes to us (as one might say) “legend laden” with the conflicts of truth and error, good and evil. Whatever one thinks of primary worlds, all secondary ones are ideological.

     

    GM: And interpretation is the method we have for engaging these kinds of acts–just as science and philosophy are ways we have for engaging with other kinds of human activities.

     

    AM: [speaking to GM] What nonsense. Poetry, Interpretation, Science, Philosophy: these are medieval distinctions in that kind of formulation. They will get us nowhere.

     

    Besides, there is a difference, even on your showing, between poetry and its interpretation–between, for instance, the bible and its commentators. Or don’t you think so? Is there not an inspired text–the poem–that is different from the reading of that text–the interpretation?

     

    GM: Of course, but it is not a difference whose “truth” we can ever be clear about. Because it is a difference which is always being defined ex post facto, that is, under the sign of its interpretation. The bible itself– every poem we engage with–already comes to us under hermeneutical signs. “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline”: Shelley’s famous remark involves a profound understanding of the nature of texts.3 If we ask of the bible, for example, “where in this work can the Word of God be found,” we will not get a clear answer. Because the concept of location is a secondary and interpretive concept. When skeptics debunk the bible’s pretension to be “the Word of God” by pointing out the endless diaspora of its texts, their insight– though not their conclusion–is acute. The Word of God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

     

    The same must be said of all imaginative works–of every work that comes before us under the sign of creation. The bible is merely the master work of all those works–the originary revelation of “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”4

     

    JJR: If that’s so, then ideology–good and evil, truth and error–must be involved in that eternal act of primary creation. Which makes perfect sense since–as Blake saw so clearly–god and the gods are creatures of Man’s imagination.5 Stories to the contrary–like the story in Genesis–are just exactly that–stories to the contrary.

     

    But I’m digressing into theology and maybe even deconstruction, and neither discipline interests me very much. What does interest me is another, related implication I see in your remarks. I put it as a question: what is the status of error, evil, failure in poetical work? Like yourself, most are happy to imagine the carnival of interpretation, the dialogue of endless errant reading. But if the primary texts are themselves errant and ideological, how are we to read them? Certainly not as transcendent models. They seem, in this view, more like images of ourselves: confused, mistaken, wrong–and perhaps most so when we imagine them (or ourselves) reasonably clear and correct. If poetry delivers the best that has been known and thought in the world, it falls sadly short of our desires.

     

    GM: Perhaps what Arnold meant was that it gave us the best of all possible worlds–where the possibilities are understood, from the start, as finite and limited. That, in any case, seems to be Shelley’s point in his remarks about composition and inspiration.

     

    JJR: And perhaps the optimal of this possibility comes not from poetry’s “perfection” so much as from the completeness of its self-presentation? Then the shortfall of desire would arrive without the illusion that it could have been otherwise. And it would arrive that way because the message and the messenger–the poems themselves–are implicated in that shortfall of desire. So we come to Shelley once again: when composition begins, inspiration is already on the wane–you know the rest.

     

    GM: Ah yes, the mind in creation is as a failing code.

     

    AM: But suppose, as Jay said earlier, that the poems are “errant and ideological”–just like the interpretations of the poems? Shelley was never happy about the didactic aspects of his own work, even though he–quite rightly too–could never abandon his didacticism. His theory of inspiration waning through composition seems to me part of the long-playing record he left us of his uneasiness on this score.

     

    Most professors tend to read his theory in a Kantian light–by which I mean they hold out an ideal of poetry that transcends ideology and didacticism. Look at the way Browning is read, for instance. His dramatic monologues, we are told, escape the didactic subjectivism of Browning’s early romantic mentor. So a poem like “My Last Duchess” becomes a model of poetic objectivity.

     

    GM: Quite rightly too.

     

    AM: Well, to me the poem is nothing but a little Victorian sermon.

     

    GM: You can’t be serious.

     

    AM: I couldn’t be more serious. “My Last Duchess,” for instance, is largely constructed as a critique of aristocratic pride, which Browning associates with the desire to possess and control. The villainy is especially heinous, according to this poem, because of its object: an adorable woman. But note that the poem is completely uncritical in its association of the woman with beauty. Her value comes from her beauty–which is why the Duke has enshrined her in, and as, a work of art.

     

    Implicit here is the notion–one finds it all over Browning’s poetry–that life (as opposed to art) is a primary value, and that art’s office is to celebrate and broadcast this primary value.

     

    GM: Do you have any problem with that?

     

    AM: I’m not devaluing the poem, I’m just reading it. But I could point out that some excellent readers– Baudelaire comes immediately to mind, and so does Lautreamont–would surely find Browning’s sermon insufferable, and would just as surely choose to take the Duke’s part.

     

    But leaving that aside, I have to point out another implication of the poem. The Duke is judged harshly by the text because he wants to keep the Duchess to himself. This desire is seen as especially wicked because of the way the Duchess is presented: as a lovely and spontaneous creature who enjoys and is enjoyed by the company of all classes. Now this representation of the Duchess is not so different from the Duke’s representation in one crucial respect: both take her as a thing of beauty that might be a joy forever, both take her–essentially– as an aesthetic image. The poem does not judge the Duke harshly for thinking her adorable–Browning’s poetry never does that–but only for wishing to keep her for his private pleasure.

     

    GM: In short, the poem seems to you sexist.

     

    AM: No question about it. It is not a bad poem because of its sexism, of course. But it is ideological for that (and other) reasons–by which I simply mean it is a poem that makes moral representations which someone might reasonably acknowledge. . . .

     

    JJR: And contest. * * * *

     

    JM: Sorry about that–the tape ran out. But I’ve put in a new one now, so let’s go on.

     

    AM: Just as well too, that interruption. We started talking about dialogics and interpretation and then wandered off into Browning and the ideology of poetic form.

     

    GM: But we also started with Bakhtin in our minds, and in his work dialogism is a function of the (primary) fictions, not of the (secondary) interpretations. Hermeneutics as dialogical is our appropriation of Bakhtin.

     

    AM: Don’t say “our,” say “your.” To me there is a sharp difference between the poetical and the interpretive field, though the two interact. But it is not a dialogical interaction because–as Socrates once pointed out to Protagoras–the texts of the poets don’t talk to us.6 We interrogate them. For their part–like Arnold’s Shakespeare–they abide our question. Of course we can choose to imagine our primary texts as “intertexts” and thus treat them as if they were “dialogical.” This is what Bakhtin does with novels, and he does it very well. But we should be clear about the metaphoric license he is taking when he treats fictional works as dialogical.

     

    GM: And so we find ourselves in a wonderfully Derridean situation. Interpretation–like this conversation of ours–is dialogical, and now reveals itself as the prior (substantive?) ground for the metaphoric extension of dialogics to fictional work and poetry.

     

    JJR: Composition as prior to inspiration?

     

    GM: Why not? It’s simply another way of saying that scripture is philosophically prior to Logos.

     

    JM: May I ask a question? It may seem absurd, I realize, and somewhat beside the point of what you’re talking about. But I don’t see how we can not ask this question now that the conversation has completed a kind of Heideggerian circle.

     

    What is a dialogue? I have a tape in my hand with an electronic record of the first part of this conversation.7 And as I listen to you talk, I watch the turning of the new spool, I watch a record being made of people talking. It makes me think a distinction has to be drawn somewhere that is not being drawn–perhaps a distinction between what we might call “conversation” on one hand and “dialogue” on the other.

     

    Maybe what we’re doing now is not “dialogue.” At any event, it seems very different from the following. Here, read this. * * * * AN ABC OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY. A DIALOGUE. by SHERI MEGHAN

     

    A: As Moses Hadas always used to say: “The only interesting talk is shop talk.”

     

    B: All shops are closed shops, more or less. Suffocating. If you’re not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation?

     

    C: Well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. Then the shop talk might seem very interesting indeed.

     

    A: But it wouldn’t be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. And if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer.

     

    B: A blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. And more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late- 20th century academe. Enlightened halls, open–or so their citizens like to think–to every kind of talk.

     

    A: And so they are.

     

    B: Only if the talk is framed in a certain way. The academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. Its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). It is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. It is the country for old men. Children, whether of woman or of Jesus born, do not come there–unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness.

     

    C: They do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective.

     

    B: Socrates in his trance, Alcibiades in his cups?

     

    C: They will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state–the Outsiders that are within. Admired and hated, sought and feared; finally–because every state, every closed shop, is what it is–expelled.

     

    B: And what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? Is it not the ultimate dream of Wissenschaft that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become–field work? In the ancient world of Plato that sick dream appeared as the Socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of Wordsworth’s Newton, “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” Mary Shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as Victor Frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of Frankenstein’s soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider’s–in this case, a woman’s–sense of the pitiful.

     

    C: So you don’t care for ethnographers either.

     

    B: Well, they are our latest Faustian types. Benevolent colonialists. Today their shop talk–it is called Cultural Studies–has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. As if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer.

     

    A: That “critical observer” you are imagining is the real illusion. All observers are inside the shop. If they weren’t they wouldn’t even know about the shop, couldn’t see it, and hence couldn’t talk at all. Shop talk is “interesting” because people share their differences.

     

    C: So for you it is not merely that “The only interesting talk is shop talk”; more than that, “Shop talk is all there is!”

     

    A: Exactly. But some shop talk is more interesting than other shop talk.

     

    C: And what makes it more interesting?

     

    A: Every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. The most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking–talking about them, or talking in their terms.

     

    B: But where do those new and interesting conversations come from? Inside the shop?

     

    A: Evidently.

     

    C: Why “evidently”? Is the rapt Socrates inside or outside? And what about Alcibiades–drunk or sober? We all remember how, and where, he died.

     

    B: Inside or outside, it doesn’t matter. The point is that every shop must be something other than what anyone, inside or outside, could think or imagine it to be. The shop must be, in some sense, beside itself. Irrational. Other than itself. Otherwise it cannot accommodate–either conceptually or experientially– anything “new.”

     

    A: Put it that way if you like. Shop talk is often irrational. Just so you don’t bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials.

     

    B: Have it so if you like. Just so you don’t insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. No shop–no academy–can do so. Otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. Later, when the damage is done, the priests–let us say, the professors–will indulge their shop talk of explanations.

     

    * * * *

     

    JM: This dialogue was originally presented in the spring of 1990, at a conference on Herder that was held in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meghan presented it at a panel discussion that took up the (very Herderian) question of interdisciplinarity.

     

    JJR: It seems to be a kind of position paper making an ironical critique of the form, or idea, of position papers as such. Perhaps in order to ask that critical reflection precede the taking of positions.

     

    GM: Or perhaps to make a game of critical reflection as such. I was at the conference, Joanne, and I think you ought to tell everyone that the dialogue was not given by anyone named Sheri Meghan. It was written and delivered by Jerome McGann. Sheri Meghan is just a mask– part of the dialogue’s ABCs.

     

    JM: I wasn’t trying to conceal that fact. The masquerade is crucial.

     

    GM: Maybe so, maybe not. But what about McGann? Was he just playing around, making a parade of cleverness?

     

    AM: Right. If it’s all just a masquerade, what’s the point? The dialogue’s ironies just get more ingrown. And look at the conclusion, where nothing is concluded: C stands altogether silent at that point, while A and B simply make a pair of smart, dismissive remarks.

     

    JM: You’re all missing my point. I ask again: what is a dialogue, what is this dialogue? Or suppose I ask: where is it? Right now we have been reading it as a printed text I passed out. In 1990 it was delivered orally by McGann (in his Meghan masquerade) at the Herder conference. It seems to me that the dialogue is not at all the same thing under those two different conditions. When it was orally presented, it was–surely–part of McGann’s way of taking a position–whatever that position was, however we define it.

     

    GM: The position of not taking a position.

     

    JM: If that’s what he was doing, it’s a position. But let me set your question aside for a moment–only for a moment, I promise. Whatever McGann was doing at the Herder Conference, here the dialogue has become part of my taking a position. Those two positions–whatever they are–may be symmetrical, but they probably aren’t. At least they don’t seem so to me. I introduced McGann’s text here because I wanted to interrogate the idea of dialogue–to get us to interrogate it–in a different light.

     

    It’s the tape machine that set me thinking this way. Here we’re talking and there our talk is being gathered and edited and turned into something new. I want to say this: our talk is being translated from conversation into dialogue.

     

    GM: Of course. Because the talk is being given a secondary, as it were a literary, form.

     

    JM: But the point is that every secondary world, every mimetic construction, comes to us under the watchful eyes of its recording angel. Isn’t this what the ancients meant when they said that memory is the mother of the muses?

     

    Let’s assume that the splendid dialogues of Oscar Wilde have no originary “conversational moment.” Let’s assume, in other words, that they neither carry nor erase the memory of such a moment. Let us assume they are pure inventions. Even so, they cannot escape their recording angel. For they will always be a record of themselves. Even as pure invention they set down a documentary record of what went into the construction of their fictionality.8

     

    Nor must we imagine that this documentary moment can be separated off from the fictional moment. An abstract separation can be made for special analytic purposes. Whatever the usefulness of such an abstraction, it will obscure and confuse the record that the fiction is making of itself–and hence will obscure and confuse the fiction.

     

    GM: I don’t understand exactly what you’re talking about, Joanne. What’s this idea about fiction making a record of itself?

     

    JM: Simply that all imaginative work appears to us in specific material forms. Many people–even many textual scholars–don’t realize the imaginative importance of those material forms. Blake’s work reminds us that the way poems are printed and distributed is part of their meaning. That process of printing and distribution is essential to “the record that fiction makes of itself.” It locates the imagination socially and historically. When Emily Dickinson decided not to publish her poems, when she decided to gather her handwritten texts into a series of “little books” which she kept to herself, those acts and their material forms comprise part of the record her work makes of itself. They are a crucial framework which Dickinson constructed for making her meanings, and which we need if we are to understand and respond.

     

    I could give you similar examples from all the writers I know well. Which is why I say that a recording angel presides over the transcendental imagination. Her descent to earth in the twentieth-century came, as usual, in masquerade. She once appeared, for example, as Bertolt Brecht, whose great project was to re-establish the theatrical unity of knowledge and pleasure, truth and beauty, instruction and entertainment. His guiding principle–it took many practical material forms–was what he called “the alienation effect.” By it he wanted to encourage the audience’s critical awareness of the entire fictional presentation. This required the theatrical event to document itself at the very moment of its dramatization. “Footnotes, and the habit of turning back to check a point, need to be introduced into playwriting” in order to break the hypnotizing spell of aesthetic space, where spectators (or readers) are not encouraged “to think about a subject, but within the confines of the subject.”9

     

    Brecht called his project “epic theatre” because it introduced what he called a “narrative” element into the dramatic space. This narrative documents what is happening on the stage, adds footnotes to the action, supplies references. Now it seems to me that dialogue might be distinguished from conversation along similar lines. Dialogue puts conversation in a literary frame, and by doing this it documents its own activities: literally, gives them a local habitation and a set of names.10

     

    GM: There’s nothing especially novel about all this. What you describe is just the “moment of reflection” that hermeneutics has always recognized in literary work. It’s the moment that interpretation seeks to extend and develop through the (re)generation of meanings.

     

    JJR: No, it’s much more than that. Brecht’s (or is it Joanne’s?) recording angel operates according to Feuerbach’s eleventh thesis, where the point is not simply to “interpret the world” but to “change it.” Brechtian theatrics are socialist and polemical throughout–as we see in the following passage, which Joanne did not choose to quote, even though it is the continuation of one of the texts she was reading to us. Brecht distinguishes between the (old, passive) “dramatic” theatre and the (new, engaged) “epic” theatre: The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too–Just like me–Only natural–It’ll never change–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable–That’s great art . . .–I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it–That’s not the way. . .–It’s got to stop–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary–That’s great art. . .–I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. (Brecht on Theatre, 71) Brecht’s documentation is not positivist–a matter of keeping good records; it’s interventionist. The recording angel is a figure of judgment and even apocalypse, a figure come to reveal secrets of good and evil that have been hidden, if not from the beginning of time, at least throughout human history. The angel opens up the book of a new life, turns the world upside down. The outcome is anything but the pluralist heaven of hermeneutics.

     

    GM: Well, you could have fooled me. Here I’m talking in a dialogue that labels itself as such, in the best Brechtian fashion. Joanne makes a parade of her self- consciousness about dialogues and conversations; she wonders “what” a dialogue is, “where” it is? But what and where am I? Surely I’m plunged in the very “heaven (or hell) of hermeneutics” itself–a paradise of pluralism and shop talk.

     

    I mean, whose play are we acting in here? Joanne tells us in a charming metaphor that “a recording angel” made “her descent to earth . . . in masquerade.” But all this is no metaphor, my friends. All this is a masquerade! Let’s set the record straight about that at any rate. Let’s add another Brechtian label and get everything out front. We’ll call this “The Puppet Theatre of Jerome McGann.”

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Did you think I was trying to conceal myself? Surely it’s been evident right along that all of this–you four in particular–are what Blake used to call the vehicular forms of (my) imagination. Masquerade allows us to turn concealment into purest apparition. It is manifest deception.

     

    GM: Fair enough, but then what is this masquerade all about, what are you trying to get across? You may say you’re not trying to conceal yourself, but you let us go on arguing and discussing different ideas and we begin to forget all about you. We even begin to think that we are different–different from each other, different from you. But we’re not, we all come out of the same rag and bone shop.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Well, just knowing that is pretty interesting. Especially today when “the star of Bakhtin has risen in the West.” People and texts are supposed to be the repositories of conflicting voices–or at any rate different voices. Rainbow coalitions and so forth. Richness in diversity. But there is always (what did Ashbery call it?) a “Plainness in Diversity” and it’s just as well to be aware of it, don’t you think?

     

    GM: Who cares what I think–“I” don’t think at all. The question is, what do you think!

     

    JEROME MCGANN: I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

     

    GM: I’m just a textual construct.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: So you say–a puppet in a puppet theatre. Whereas I’m flesh and blood, of course.

     

    AM: Sometimes I think we have more life than we realize– or at least that we might have more. Thou wert not born for death, immortal bird, No hungry generations tread thee down. I’m that bird, I think. What did Shakespeare say? Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme. Flesh and blood is all very well, but texts have their own advantages.

     

    GM: We don’t think, we have no identities. He does. Whatever we do is done for us. Someone will read me and tell me what I mean. It’s true that different people might make me mean different things. We’ve all been told about the openness of the text and the freedom of the reader. But what do I care about reader responses? They make us seem little more than empty tablets, waiting to be written on.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: As I said, I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

     

    GM: What are you getting at?

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Thinking only gets carried out in language, in texts. We sometimes imagine that we can think outside of language–for instance, in our heads, where we don’t exteriorize the language we are using in language’s customary (oral or scripted) forms. But the truth is that all thought is linguistically determined.

     

    You whine about being a textual construct. But you’re able to think for precisely that reason. And so am I, and so are we all. We’re all textual constructs.

     

    GM: What sophistry.

     

    JM: On the contrary, what truth! We really do think because we are textual constructs, and we do so because thinking is the play of different ideas, the testing of the limits and the possibilities of ideas. Why complain that this masquerade seems, in one perspective, a professor’s monologue? It’s not the only way to see it. In any case we are testing limits and possibilities.

     

    GM: No we’re not. He is–if anyone is.

     

    JM: What about someone listening to all this, or reading it?

     

    GM: Sure, but they’re flesh and blood too. It’s people who think, not texts, not the masks that people fashion and put on.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: But my idea is that texts are the flesh and blood of thought–that we are all masked creatures. I’ve written this dialogue–constructed even an ingrate like yourself–to pursue that thought, or perhaps I should say to have it pursued, maybe to be pursued by it.

     

    Take yourself, for instance. You’re always surprising me. You think you’re just a puppet, but the truth is that I often don’t know what you or I or anybody else here might do or say next. This whole last five minutes of conversation we’re having. I never planned it, never even thought about it until a friend of mine read what you called my puppet theatre and queried its masquerade in ways I hadn’t thought about. And then she challenged me about it, and we talked back and forth, and I came back at last to you. And so I started writing some more–writing what we’re arguing about now.

     

    How did those changes happen? There’s a writer– let’s call him me; and there’s a reader–my friend; and then there’s all of us, we textual constructs. Don’t we have any responsibility in this masquerade?

     

    AM: But you’re not one of us! And the answer is no, we don’t. The responsibility is all yours, yours and your friend’s, and all the other (re)writers and (re)readers of texts.

     

    But I agree with you in this much anyhow: we aren’t blank tablets or empty signs. We are characters, we have histories. If masks are disguises, they take particular forms. It makes a big difference what face you put on when you engage in masquerade.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: So, Georg, don’t ask me what I think about all this. Interrogate the masks if you want to know that. The question is not: “Why do you move in masquerade?” We all do. The question is: “Why does your masquerade take the form that it does? Why these characters and not others?”

     

    AM: But there are other questions as well. Odd as it might seem, Jerome, one might not be especially interested in what you thought about this dialogue, or what you had in mind for it. The dialogue isn’t yours, isn’t even your friend’s. The dialogue is an independent textual construct and has a life of its own–indeed, has many lives of its own. All texts do. Dialogue is interesting because it dramatizes the presence of those multiple lives and their competing voices.

     

    Bakhtin used to say that novels were dialogical but poems were monological. But he was wrong in this. In a sense, poetry is far more “dialogical” (in Bakhtin’s sense) than fiction just because poetry asks us to pay attention to the word-as-such, to focus on the text as it is a textual construct. Poetry thus makes us aware of the masquerade that is being executed by even the most apparently transparent of texts. By this text, for instance–Robert Frost’s well known jingoist lyric “The Gift Outright.” The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours, In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. That was written during the height of the Second World War–a pretty piece of patriotism. But the text says much more than it realizes because language always stands in a superior truth to those who use the language. Blood spilled in this poem’s land becomes the sign of the right of possession. But who is the “we” of this poem, what are those “many deeds of war”?

     

    One word in this text–“Massachusetts”–reminds us that this supremely Anglo-American poem cannot escape or erase a history that stands beyond its white myth of Manifest Destiny. That central New England place, Massachusetts, is rooted in native american soil and language, where the very idea of being possessed by land– rather than possessing it or conquering it in martial struggles–finds its deepest truth and expression. Unlike “Virginia,” “Massachusetts” is native american, red- skinned. Colonized by another culture and language, that word (which is also a place and a people, red before it could ever be white) preserves its original testimony and truth;11 and when it enters this poem, it tilts every white word and idea into another set of possible meanings and relations. “Virginia,” for example, which is a lying, European word12–a word whose concealments are suddenly revealed when we read it next to “Masssachsetts.” When I read this poem, those “many deeds of war” include the Indian Wars that moved inexorably “westward.” In this poem, I think, all blood is originally red.

     

    Where do such different voices come from? Language speaks through us, and language, like Tennyson’s sea, moans round with many voices. In “The Gift Outright” we see how some voices come unbidden–come, indeed, as outright gifts so far as the intentionality of the authored work is concerned. Because the poem’s rhetoric is preponderantly and unmistakably Euro-American, “Massachusetts” sends out only a faint signal of the (otherwise great) hidden history the word involves. And it is important that we see the signal come so faintly and obliquely–so undeliberately, as it were–when we read the poem. The faintness is the sign of important historical relations of cultural dominance and cultural marginality. The whole truth of those relations, imbedded in this text, would not be able to appear if Frost had not given his white, European mythology over to his poem’s language, where it finds a measure of release from its own bondage. A measure of release.

     

    This is why I care about what you think, Jerome–and also about what you don’t think. Because you’re one among many–in the end, one of us. As you say, a textual construct.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: “Zooks, Sir! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of.”

     

    Notes

     

    1. See Gerald L. Bruns,”The Hermeneutics of Midrash,” in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina Schwartz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 196-7.

     

    2. See Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 1958), I. 43.

     

    3. See “A Defence of Poetry”, in Shelley’s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (U. of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1954), 294.

     

    4. See S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1983), I. 304.

     

    5. See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 11.

     

    6. See Plato’s Protagoras 347c-348a.

     

    7. The text here is not based directly on the tape referred to by McGrem, but upon the printer’s-copy typescript. The latter may or may not give an accurate and complete record of the original conversation. Our text appears to begin in medias res, so it may not represent the whole of “the first part” of the conversation that was apparently on the tape McGrem mentions.

     

    8. None of Joanne McGrem’s interlocutors queried her on this point. But one would like to know if she meant that the documentary record is complete. To us, such completion seems hardly possible.

     

    9. Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (Hill and Wang: New York, 1964), 44. The emphasis here is McGrem’s, not Brecht’s.

     

    10. At this point one might hazard the following descriptions of the different positions being taken in the dialogue. Mannejc sees interpretation as dialogue; Rome sees criticism (critique) as dialogic; Mack seems to regard poetry, or imaginative writing generally, as dialogical; and finally McGrem turns the distinction completely around and argues that dialogue is poetry, or at any rate that it is a non-informational form of discourse.

     

    11. The word names the tribe which ranged the Boston area, and it means something like “near the great hill.” The reference is, apparently, to the Great Blue Hill south of the city.

     

    12. I believe the phrase “a lying, European word” must be an allusion to Laura Riding’s great poem “Poet: A Lying Word” (the title piece in the volume Poet: A Lying Word [Arthur Barker Ltd.: London, 1933], 129-34).

     

  • “A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt”: The Reader-trap Of Bianca In Gravity’s Rainbow

    Bernard Duyfhuizen

    Univ. of Wisconsin–Eau Claire
    <pnotesbd@uwec>

     

    No matter how much we work on Gravity’s Rainbow, our most important interpretive discovery will be that it resists analysis–that is, being broken down into distinct units of meaning. To talk about Bianca is to talk about Ilse and Gottfried; to try to describe the Zone is to enumerate all the images of other times and places that are repeated there. Pynchon’s novel is a dazzling argument for shared or collective being–or, more precisely, for the originally replicative nature of being.
     

    –Leo Bersani

     

    Leo Bersani is right about Gravity’s Rainbow‘s resistance to analysis, yet if we pursue the “dazzling argument” in the particular case of Bianca, we find not only more than Bersani acknowledges but also elements for a strategy for reading Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern text. This strategy rests on the formal element of the “reader-trap”: stylistic and thematic techniques that on the one hand court the conventional readerly desire to construct an ordered world within the fictional space of the text, but that on closer examination reveal the fundamental uncertainty of postmodern textuality. Rather than reducing a reader-trap to a “distinct unit of meaning,” readers must adopt for GR a postmodern strategy of reading in which the reader avoids privileging any specific piece of data because the text, in its implied poststructuralist theory of reading, thematically attacks the tyranny of reductive systems for knowing the world. The reader must engage the play of differance encoded in GR‘s textual signs to avoid falling into traps of premature narrative closure.

     

    What makes Bianca a reader-trap? First, she is part of a matrix of intersecting stories that could be labeled the “Tales of the Shadow-Children,” a matrix which produces the stories that readers construct about Bianca, Ilse Pokler, Gottfried, and by analogy Tyrone Slothrop. She becomes simultaneously a represented character(complete with genealogical relations) and a trace of textuality (an arrangement of semiological relations that is never totally fixed). This double nature of her character is figured the first time we hear of her when Slothrop, under the alias of Max Schlepzig (Bianca’s putative father), reenacts with Margherita Erdmann the moment of Bianca’s conception during the rape scene at the end of the movie Alpdrucken (393-97). As a shadow- or movie-child, Bianca maps onto these other children; thus what we know about one (both from referential and semiological epistemologies) depends on what we know about the others. Bianca’s mother, for instance, sees “Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure…clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero” (484). As readers, if we want to avoid the trap of correspondences, we must mark the intersections and the double exposures, even though the effect produced is often an increased undecidability.

     

    Second, Bianca is coded as one of Pynchon’s examples of the dehumanizing effects of perverse fetishism:

     

    Of all her putative fathers--Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrucken Night, on the other--Bianca is closest [. . .] to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, [. . .] you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker... She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.1
     
    (472; bracketed ellipses added)

     

    As is often the case in GR, the passage closes off by shifting to a second-person address that may be directed at Slothrop, who has just left her after their sexual encounter, but also seems to address–through images of sexual imperialism and a reference to Pokler that could not yet be part of Slothrop’s consciousness–the text’s male narratees and ultimately its male reader/voyeurs. I will defer until the final section of this essay the significant questions of gender and reading presented by this passage and others like it.2 Indeed, this issue may itself be one of the most problematic aspects of Pynchon’s writing. The question–Who are the narratees of this text?–cannot be left unanswered.

     

    Lastly, Bianca is a reader-trap because of her relationship with Slothrop. If GR has, besides the V-2 rocket, a “central” protagonist around whom readers try to construct systems of meaning by following his picaresque adventures, Slothrop is it. Bianca is one of his many sexual experiences, one that is doubly coded by its analogy to Gottfried’s launch in rocket 00000 and her alignment with the “lost girls”–the Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won’t interpret (567)–who haunt his journey through the Zone. Bianca must be read, therefore, within yet another play of representational and semiological doubling–a mapping onto that is both the same-and-different from shadow-child mapping–as she maps onto Darlene, Katje Borgesius, Geli Tripping, and even her own mother, Margherita. The text underwrites this process of mapping when Bianca is viewed as “silver” (484), the same color as Darlene’s star on Slothrop’s map (19) and as her mother’s “silver and passive [screen] image” (576), or with Greta’s (Margherita’s) mapping onto or merging into “Gretel” and finally “Katje” within Blicero’s sado-masochistic fantasy (482-86), which maps in turn onto Slothrop’s relations with both women. Bianca holds a special place within this metonymic play of sameness and difference, because her loss produces the most profound change in Slothrop’s behavior–he is finally freed of the will to erection that has dominated his psychological life ever since his childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf. Paradoxically, however, at the moment he might have a chance to formulate his own identity, Bianca’s loss prefigures Slothrop’s ultimate dissolution–indeed, after his encounter with Bianca, “Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter” (509). His experience with Bianca and his subsequent loss of her bring him, as we will see, face-to-face with his unconscious fears of his own death and bring the reader to confront the deconstruction of the semiotic codes that form Slothrop’s and Bianca’s textual representations.

     

    Bianca appears on the stage of the narrative in two consecutive episodes of GR (3.14-15). We meet her aboard the Anubis as seen through Slothrop’s eyes:

     

    He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes...help, help. Why do these things have to keep coming down on him? He can see the obit now in Time magazine--Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.(463)

     

    The text’s focalization through Slothrop codes Bianca as a fetish, a “Lolita” if you will, and we later learn these heels are “spiked” (466), and the silk stockings are connected to “a tiny black corset” with “Satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework” (469). As the narrator comments later–in a passage metonymically structured to connect Bianca, Margherita, Blicero, the S-Gerat (a rocket part Slothrop has been seeking), Laszlo Jamf, Imipolex (the plastic from which the S-Gerat was made), and the Casino Hermann Goering (where Slothrop lost Katje)–“Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn’t” (490).

     

    Yet from a different perspective, Bianca’s fetishized outfit is a repetition of her mother’s outfit during her first encounter with Slothrop, when they reenact Bianca’s conception on the torture-chamber set of the film Alpdrucken:

     

    All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps as points of osculation, mathematical kisses...singularities! (396)

     

    But the transition to the mathematical context leads this meditation on fetishism to an unsettling metaphor: “Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation? [. . .] And what’s waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of Greta’s stockings here?” (396-97).3 What’s waiting first is “his latest reminder of Katje”–whose sexuality is figured in the text as both metaphor and metonymy of the rocket: “Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life,” Katje told Slothrop (209)–but more significantly, it is Bianca who waits to teach Slothrop and the reader something about the trajectory of annihilation.

     

    Slothrop’s vulnerability “to pretty little girls” is foregrounded early in GR when he comforts a little girl rescued from a V-2 hit, comfort she returns by smiling “very faintly, and he knew that’s what he’d been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they’d found her down in the middle of” (24). The moment of kindness, so crucially redemptive in Pynchon’s fiction, figures as Slothrop’s primal response, and while in London, before his paranoia has gone out of control, Slothrop can care directly. Once he reaches the Zone, however, his ability to connect becomes problematic as in the opening of part 3 when, by burning human/doll’s hair, he conjures out of the shadows a dancing child he maps onto Katje: “he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms” (283). Both these children prefigure Bianca, but the empirical reality of the first has been replaced by the hallucination of the second, a slippage between fantasy and reality that dogs Slothrop through the rest of the text and especially in his encounter with Bianca. Neither is the reader immune to this slippage which s/he may seek to repress by evoking the trap of an overtly mimetic strategy of reading.

     

    However, before Bianca takes center stage, Slothrop wanders off to listen to some gossip about Margherita, told by the woman whose handy cleaver almost dumped him into the river. But what he hears sounds like the voice of the text’s narrator offering a simple binary solution to the problems of narrativity and signification in the text:

     

    "Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That's the key, that's the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, they do not work." "That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time." (464)

     

    If the “silly bitch” can be seen dialogically as a reflexive figuration of the narrator, then this “voice” may be, for a brief and estranged moment, Pynchon dialogically and reflexively commenting on his own text. We soon discover that the voice belongs to Miklos Thanatz who serves as a figure of narrative intersection: Margherita’s husband, Bianca’s stepfather, and–though we don’t know it yet– witness to the firing of rocket 00000. Indeed, Thanatz begins to tell Slothrop precisely what he and the reader have been desiring to hear, the magical names of Gottfried and Blicero, but….

     

    “About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child” (465). Margherita forces Bianca to perform a Shirley Temple imitation, and when she refuses to perform again, Bianca is publicly punished with a steel-rulered-bare-bottomed spanking–which triggers one of GR‘s set pieces: the everything’s connected orgy on board the Anubis. Bianca’s representation of “Shirley Temple,” in contradistinction to that “Shirley Temple smile” that warmed Slothrop’s heart in London, is a grotesque infantilization that ironically seeks to erase the war years and their horror, yet its perverse eroticism (accentuated by cultural contexts of sexual vulnerability that come through Slothrop’s point of view) precisely makes manifest the war/perversion dynamic explored in various other scenes that test the edge of a reader’s erotic tolerance. Clearly Bianca’s exploitation as a sexual object is a same-but-different version of Katje’s exploitation by Blicero or Pointsman, or Bianca’s mothers by von Goll for the film Alpdrucken.

     

    The public humiliation of Bianca is one of GR‘s many moments of theatre. Indeed, Slothrop wonders whether “somebody [is] fooling with the lights” as Bianca “grunts” through her Shirley Temple routine (466). The lights are, in fact, being fooled with: Slothrop’s perceptual creation of Bianca as an overtly fetishized Shirley Temple is the emblem in the text of errant reading. Slothrop’s specular projection of Bianca as infantile nymphet is a mise en abyme for the reader-trap the text is about to spring, a trap that this piece of theatre–focalized so thoroughly through the gaze of a male spectator–helps to mask.

     

    Throughout GR Pynchon demarcates the public and the private stages. On the public stage the character performs for others, even when the character is unaware of an audience (Slothrop under surveillance, for instance). The public performance usually originates from some form of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation. Since many of these performances align with what prevailing cultural formations would define as deviant sexuality, we can discern an analogy with “pornography,” but only at the level of story (although occasionally Pynchon has been accused of pornography at the level of discourse) and with a clear recognition of how conditioned Western patriarchal culture is to the semiotics of pornographic representation. Although “Pavlovian conditioning” may explain part of the dynamics of response to the pornographic, unwholesome pornography in GR is not necessarily in the sexual act itself or in its textual representation; it is, instead, in the systems of power and control that motivate the act–the ubiquitous “They” who operate just outside of view. This public stage is contrasted with the private moment, the free exchange of comforts–but this too is a conflicted stage, as the conventional entrapped reading between the private moment of Slothrop and Bianca makes clear.

     

    When Slothrop wakes up the next day (and in the next episode), Bianca is with him, offering herself as a manifest wish-fulfillment to his lust. This private “performance” for Slothrop nearly closes the “distance” between himself and Bianca, who now replaces her mother in a liaison that is not free from metaphoric and metonymic overtones of incest (Slothrop, impersonating Max Schlepzig, has already reenacted Bianca’s conception). But Bianca’s gift of sexual intercourse is also a plea for help. She suggests they “hide,” “get away,” quit the game which for Slothrop has ceased to be fun. For him, this act of kindness activates his socialized guilt–to be offered “love” is more than the Zone will allow. So Slothrop “creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites” (470). In leaving Bianca he makes a mistake that he will not realize until after he hears “Ensign Morituri’s Story” (474-79), but by then it is too late.

     

    Importantly, before he leaves Bianca, Slothrop’s consciousness is the nearly exclusive narrative filter for this tryst in which something “oh, kind of funny happens [. . .]. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it’s going on–but later on, it will occur to him that he was–this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock” (469-70). Of course the mediated narrative discourse that shifts Slothrop’s “later” thoughts into the present of this scene estranges the text and marks it as more hallucination than representation. Yet this startling image has trapped more than one reader into a perspectival blindness. Because Bianca’s character is primarily focalized through Slothrop, she functions at that edge of textual consciousness between fetishized objectification and hallucination. Bianca may “exist” (470) for Slothrop at this moment, but she, more quickly than Slothrop himself, soon slips into the textual unconscious, only to be recalled by dream and hallucination.

     

    If we grant that we cannot know Bianca because of the narrative filters of fetish and hallucination, can we even be sure–in a perfectly pynchonian paradox–of the certainty of our fantasy? It turns out we cannot because the text set this reader-trap long ago, and it is only by reading the cross mapping of her textual representation that we can see how the reader might misperceive Bianca and why many critics have misread her. More significantly, uncovering this reader-trap also uncovers the questions of gender and reading in GR.

     

    * * * * *

     

    When Bianca first appears, Slothrop calculates her age–an amazing feat in itself, given her get-up at the time–as “11 or 12.” Many readers hardly question this incongruous perception because the fetishistic plot, its theatrical representation, and its semiotic codes overdetermine the narrative at that moment. Moreover, the narrative concretizes our perception of a “preadolescent Bianca” by its descriptive references to her: “the little girl,” “a slender child,” “little Bianca [. . .] tosses her little head [. . .], her face,round with baby-fat,” and her “baby breasts working out the top of her garment” (469-70). Bianca is not the only female character who is perceived by Slothrop and other men in child-like terms. From the very first references to Slothrop’s map–“perhaps the girls are not even real” (19; emphasis added)–to his meeting again with Darlene (115), to his first sight of Katje (186), to his first awareness of Geli Tripping (289), to Trudi and Magda (365), to Stefania Procalowska and others aboard the Anubis (460, 466-68), and eventually to Solange/Leni Pokler (603) Slothrop encounters females as girls. Even Margherita, who is clearly older than Slothrop, is introduced as “his child and his helpless Lisaura” (393).4 In the semiosis of reading, these “girls” engage in a play of mapping that lays bare the repetition compulsion of the narrative as it underwrites the sexual politics of the Zone which finally come to a crisis in Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca, and it underwrites the sexual politics of reading.

     

    What does this infantilization signify? Could it be a collective fear of coming-to-age during the war and the later post-war systems of arrangement? One reading, a rather romantic one, might have it that to be young is still to hold a piece of innocence, but examined more closely, even this hopeful image rings hollow. If we accept Bianca’s age as Slothrop gives it, an incongruity emerges: Bianca’s erotic and sexual maturity (she, like many of Slothrop’s lovers, is more active than he is) dislocates these child-like representations. On the one hand, these images may be exaggerations projected from Slothrop’s fetishizing focalization; on the other hand, Bianca symbolizes the “child of the War,” the darling of those permitted to view Goebbel’s private film collection (461). She is one of Pynchon’s most poignant emblems of the human destruction caused by war. However, if we dislocate our reading and consider Bianca through cross-mapping with Ilse,her shadow sister, we discover that she was most likely born in 1929 and is much closer to 16 or 17 than she is to “11 or 12.”5

     

    If uncovering her likely age resituates our reading in one direction, freeing us from the trap set by Slothrop’s peculiar point of view, Bianca’s disappearance from the fictional universe after her liaison with Slothrop is equally vexed; indeed, McHoul and Wills state that “The fate of Bianca highlights the problem with reading Gravity’s Rainbow…. One will never know just what does happen to her” (31).6 Bianca has told Slothrop she knows how to hide (470), but her next “appearance” is brief and problematic:

     

    Slothrop will think he sees her, think he has found Bianca again--dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the Anubis starts a hard roll to port, and even at this stage of things--even in his distance--he will lunge after her without thinking much, slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side. (491; emphasis added)

     

    What actually happens here is hard to say–Slothrop does end up over the side, but does Bianca? Slothrop only “think[s]” he sees her–she is becoming insubstantial already–and her vanishing is a symbolic erasure. But is it she who “vanishes under chalky lifelines” or Slothrop who “slip[s] . . . under” while she “vanishes”?7 As McHoul and Wills note, it “hinges on how one reads the syntax” (31).

     

    All life lines in GR are subject to erasure, but traces are left in the mind–especially Slothrop’s– and in the text. The traces are sometimes known only by their absence; for instance, 170 pages after this scene, in a passage that challenges how readers produce meaning in GR, we read: “You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis” (663). Bianca is missing from this passage if one wants a textual construction (a statement from the here dramatically foregrounded narrator) that will affirm that Bianca did indeed go over the side during the storm; at the same time this passage suggests a natural causality–“the same storm”–for Slothrop going overboard, putting into question but not necessarily overturning the likely possibility that someone had “flipped” him over the side. However, in the deconstructionist logic of the reader-trap, Bianca’s absence from this textual representation cannot definitely tell us whether she remained on the Anubis either.

     

    Bianca’s traces always test our readerly desire for causality. After Frau Gnahb rescues Slothrop from his trip overboard, he falls asleep and “Bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him. ‘You’re really in that Europe now,’ she grins, hugging him. ‘Oh my goo’ness,’ Slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like Shirley Temple’s, out of his control. It sure is embarrassing. He wakes to sunlight” (492-93). Momentarily we breathe a sigh of relief “thinking” that she has made it, but her speech pattern is identifiably Slothrop’s and he has adopted her Shirley Temple voice. Something’s not right, and when “he wakes,” he is alone, and we see this trace of Bianca as a dream. Later that morning, when Slothrop meets von Goll, he “fills von Goll in on Margherita, trying not to get personal. But some of his anxiety over Bianca must be coming through. Von Goll shakes his arm, a kindly uncle. ‘There now. I wouldn’t worry. Bianca’s a clever child, and her mother is hardly a destroying goddess’” (494). Meant to “comfort” Slothrop, von Goll’s characterizations allow Slothrop to repress his anxiety for the moment, but as we will see, the return of the repressed is not far away. Given the text’s compulsion to repeat within a same-but-different logic of mapping, the reader aligns this Bianca/Slothrop escape fantasy with the Ilse/Pokler escape fantasy (420-21). In that startling scene at Zwolfkinder, the narration does not signal its shift into a fantasy mode, and some critics have been trapped and have taken literally the scene of “amazing incest” that precedes the escape fantasy–a reading that would seriously undermine Pokler’s eventual moral position in the text.

     

    The most disturbing trace of Bianca re-enters the narrative when Slothrop returns to the Anubis to pickup a “package” for von Goll (530-32).8 As he returns to the site of his tryst with Bianca, Slothrop descends into the private hell of his own consciousness. Motivated by a return of his repressed “Eurydice-obsession” (472), Slothrop seemingly discovers the dead Bianca’s body, but like Orpheus he cannot bring his Eurydice back from the dead. But does he discover her? Nearly the entire scene takes place in total darkness (the specular image is unrepresentable), but the psychic reminders force Slothrop to confront his betrayal of Bianca and his fears of her death, and his possible implication in that death. Through a gauntlet that metonymically repeats Brigadier Puddings ritual approach to the Mistress of the Night (Katje)–“the pointed toe of a dancing pump,” the “ladder,” “stiff taffeta,” “slippery satin,” “hooks and eyes [. . .] lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger.”

     

    He rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead. Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea. He turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. No matter which way he tries to move now...cold nipples...the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume and shit and the smell of brine...and the smell of...of... (531)

     

    “When the lights come back on” (532) (recall Slothrop’s earlier concern that someone was “fooling” with the lights), we receive no confirmation that the text represented whatever actual events Slothrop experienced–indeed, I would argue he only experiences this nightmare psychologically. The confusion of sensory images conflates two deaths for Bianca: death by drowning and death by hanging. But the text never deploys the signifier “Bianca” in this scene; instead, the text offers a set of metonymies that may or may not signify the “presence” of Bianca’s body. “When the lights come back on,” Slothrop does not directly see her; he sees only the “brown paper bundle” he was sent to retrieve, its enigmatic contents a mise en abyme for his experience and an emblem for the best way to read this scene. The scene closes with a last challenge to specular acts of reading: “But it’s what’s dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight…and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?” (532). As with the two ellipses that mark the close of the longer passage just quoted, the ellipsis points here mark the site of absence, the dead-white page showing through the text and yet another site of repetition if we recall the opening of Bianca and Slothrop’s tryst: “In the corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red” (468). But can the text and its reading, linear like a ladder “back up and out,” be “really as empty” as it looks? The reader can let this scene either remain enigmatic or decide the undecidable–to paraphrase Tchitcherine much later in the text: “[It] could be anything. I don’t care. But [it’s] only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter” (702). Bianca last “existed” for Slothrop at the moment of decision when he climbed the ladder to leave her (470-71) and at the moment on deck when he “lunge[s]” to save her (491) only to lose her–does she exist elsewhere?

     

    Many readers read mimetically the scene of Slothrop’s return to the engine-room of the Anubis, stating that he does in fact discover Bianca’s body; some are even convinced that Margherita has murdered her daughter. Yet reading in this way misses the psychological dynamic the text builds around Slothrop’s anxiety over the intersection of sexuality and death that haunts his experience. It misses the text’s implicit questioning of Western culture’s perverse fetishization of the child. It is no stray detail that Slothrop dreams of a conversation with the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland when Bianca comes to him–as Henkle observes, “we all know about Lewis Carroll’s supposedly illicit feelings toward little girls; we all understand what Shirley Temple’s fetching little dance steps aroused” (282).9 Moreover, a mimetic reading misses the postmodern narrative function of Bianca’s decharacterization to the level of a cipher and trap for readers who want teleologically to complete her story by a represented death scene.

     

    After Slothrop’s return to the Anubis, Bianca’s trace enters the narrative only four more times. The first trace appears when the text lists some of the wishes Slothrop, now headed for Cuxhaven, makes upon evening stars. The seventh wish is “Let Bianca be all right [. . .]” (553). Either Slothrop has no certainty of Bianca’s fate or he is repressing what he knows; the case is complicated by the coupling of the Bianca wish with “[. . .] a-and–Let me be able to take a shit soon.” The text seems to be laying a trap for the Freudian reader–the ass-bites of their first encounter (469) and the smell of “perfume and shit” that Slothrop calls up in the engine room (531)–who may want to argue that Bianca’s memory has become cathected with Slothrop’s anal fixation. Can any reader ever forget Slothrop’s hallucinatory journey down the toilet in 1.10? That drug-induced nightmare, which occurred because of Pointsman’s involvement, connects back to Slothrop’s childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf (when he should have been moving through the anal stage of his psychosexual development, Jamf may have been displacing the smell of Slothrop’s own feces with the smell of Imipolex–if indeed that was the stimulus used).10 I suggest this set of connections may be a trap because reading GR through Freud calls for paradigms of totalization that the text will inevitably undercut even though structures of wish-fulfillment and dreamwork proliferate in the narrative. Interestingly, however, the Bianca wish is preceded by a significant Slothrop wish, although it is at the same time a bad pun on the shit-wish: “Let that discharge be waiting for me in Cuxhaven.” This wish (ultimately to return home to his mother?) will not come true in its literal form, but the quest for it leads Slothrop almost into Pointsman’s plot for his castration and to his last dream of Bianca.

     

    The second trace of Bianca occurs when Slothrop meets Franz Pokler:

     

    Well, but not before [Pokler] has told something of his Ilse and her summer returns, enough for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca's dead flesh.... Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann's silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as Pokler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm--how could they not be the same child? She's still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room...still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams. (576-77)

     

    This time Slothrop’s memory contravenes his wish only 23 pages earlier as he is “taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca’s dead flesh.” This passage appears to confirm Bianca’s death. However, while we come upon this cross-mapping alert to the alignment of Ilse and Bianca, for Slothrop this is a new coincidence that, because of Pokler’s significance to the S-Gerat plot, instantly feeds his paranoid paradigm of reading: “how could they not be the same child?” Moreover, “She” (Bianca/Ilse) will now, if not already, “work among your [Slothrop/Pokler/the reader’s] saddest dreams.”

     

    The third trace is in the cross-mapping dreams of Slothrop and Solange/Leni Pokler: “Back at Putzi’s,” after Slothrop has unwittingly escaped castration but not received his wished-for discharge,

     

    Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwolfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees. And "Solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni's early dream of her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy.... (609-10)

     

    This is one of the text’s most positive images–Leni’s early dream (156) seems to be moving from the story to the discourse as the dialogic narrative erases the distinction between the character and a narrator who appears to extend to the reader the small comfort of knowing Ilse will be all right. Ironically, Leni will never know within the space of the text what the narrator says (nor will Franz know it), but the small chances for mercy are crucial to holding back the bleakness that is otherwise so pervasive in this fictional universe. If Ilse makes it, does Bianca? It depends on how much plot producing power we grant to textual cross-mapping and dreaming in our readerly formation. As we will see with Thanatz’s ordeal riding “the freights,” this hopeful image of “a few small chances of mercy” might vanish. We’ll never know for certain either way; our reading decisions on such points may say more about our readerly desires than about what the text says.

     

    Slothrop’s dream clearly maps onto Pokler’s experience with Ilse at Zwolfkinder in 3.11, but its shift into the unknown room (significantly not where “Once something [the Imipolex conditioning?] was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless” [285]) seems to be a shift to a life-affirming set of natural images–trees and singing birds. Slothrop’s greater attention to nature and its restorative powers has been building since the time of his wishes on evening stars (“Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally” [552]), and it will become his distinctive emblem in the fourth part of GR. Lastly, Bianca maps onto Leni’s dream because, in a passage I will examine in the next section, she too has a dream that shares the central image of the “passage by train” (471), but the narrator here has no discourse of comfort and we know Bianca has been “used.” Her traces are problematic because they cannot be disentangled from Slothrop’s psychic processes of coping with his experience of betraying her confidence and not providing her a small chance for mercy. Thus the experience takes different shapes in his mind, which is then mediated for the reader by the narrative discourse that arranges sets of textual associations and intersections that establish paradoxes at best. The last traces of Bianca, however, do not come to us through Slothrop’s consciousness–Thanatz, Bianca’s step-father, provides the last traces, and although these cannot confirm her life or death, they deepen her character and extend the textual network of her narrative function as shadow-child.

     

    Thanatz first recalls Bianca while he “rides the freights” with other DP’s and longs to molest “a little girl”–he fantasizes the event using Bianca as a reference: “pull down the slender pretty pubescent’s oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throat back Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it” (669-70). The passage recalls Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca (469-70), though it may represent only Thanatz’s desire to molest and not a memory. Thanatz then recalls his experiences with Blicero on the Heath and the firing of rocket 00000 (the story he tried to tell Slothrop), but this leads him to make a connection Margherita had also made: “He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now he’s forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn’t know which child he lost first, or even [. . .] if they aren’t two names, different names, for the same child [. . .] that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca, are the same” (671-72). As his confusion grows he conjures up one last (and the text’s last) specular image of Bianca, returned to the fetishistic coding of a masculine gaze: “a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for…will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love–” (672). The shift to the second person problematizes this last image; is it addressed to Thanatz or to the reader?

     

    What do we gain by discovering Bianca’s age, questioning her textual appearance and disappearance, and reading her last traces–her “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”? First we see that characters in GR are semiotic systems as much as they are represented entities produced by characterological reading. Moreover, they are constructs produced by other characters; Bianca is always a hallucination, a movie-child of others’ fantasies and fetishes. Second, individual plots are the result of characters mapping onto one another to form a semiotic matrix of representation. Third, we must reread Slothrop’s relationship to Bianca and to the other women in the text. And lastly, the concept of the reader-trap allows us to read the differance at play in GR and to see conventional strategies of reading deconstructing as patterns of stable meaning dissolve amid fragmented and conflicting traces. The reader-trap reveals Pynchon’s text as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, proclaiming its aesthetic and narrative richness in the uncertainty generated by its complexity, but the question of gender and reading, of GR, still remains.

     

    * * * * *

     

    If we grant that GR encodes a narrative transaction between mimetic representation and fantasy, then we must also ask whose fantasies are these? and, Do these fantasies evoke different reading responses? As the example of Bianca shows, Slothrop’s (and in the end Thanatz’s) fantasies and hallucinations overdetermine her representation until she loses personality and becomes a fetish, a figure of cultural formation: the child as erotic object. Although recognizing and avoiding the reader-trap allows a reader distance to read beyond the fetish, to attempt to read character as a system of signs that mean only in relation to other signs, we must ask how this strategy of rationalizing textualization engages the reader’s sensibility, and specifically how it interacts with the reader’s gender formation.11

     

    If the reader-trap of Bianca’s representation in GR, as I have argued, is to read her as a fetish–a representation similar to those associated with her mother and with Katje–then we must also recognize the predominantly masculine gender perspective in the text. Cast in the role of male voyeur (figured in the text by Ensign Morituri), the reader is presented with the dilemma of becoming complicit or resistant. The textualization that limits Bianca to only the role of fetish underwrites a sexual politics that operates at different levels in our acts of reading. There is no denying that Bianca gets “used” in and by the text, but in the power struggle between fetishistic and resistant reading, a struggle the reader-trap helps to stage, we can discover a dialogic strategy of reading GR.

     

    Although reading GR teleologically can lead to misreadings, it is hard to ignore the power of plot as a means of organizing textual material. Thus one way of reading Bianca is to see her as a projection of Slothrop’s needs–innocence and fetish all mixed up. His abandonment of her after their encounter (just as he has abandoned all the other women before) is in a metonymic sequence that underwrites the dysfunctional nature of his sexuality caused by his childhood conditioning. He stays longest with Margherita because she represents a mother who both satisfies his Oedipus complex and satisfies his need– through a logic of transference–to punish his real mother for the conditioning she allowed his father (“pernicious pop”) to submit him to. The subtext of incest in his encounter with Bianca overloads his psyche to the point that he recalls the event as a moment of becoming totally phallic and being fully incorporated into the object of desire. Their mutual orgasm symbolically represents a rebirth for Slothrop though he realizes this (if at all consciously) too late to save Bianca.

     

    Slothrop must first hear Ensign Morituri’s story (474-79), which tells him of Margherita’s pre-war alter ego of Shekhinah–a destroying Angel who psychotically murdered Jewish boys–an alter ego Morituri believes Slothrop has resurrected when he was brought on board the Anubis. Slothrop’s immediate response is to worry about Bianca: “‘what about Bianca, then? Is she going to be safe with that Greta, do you think?’…. But where are Bianca’s arms, her defenseless mouth[?]…. There is hardly a thing now in Slothrop’s head but getting to Bianca” (479-80). But she has disappeared, and although he believes she is only hiding and that he will find her, he must also listen to Margherita’s story (482-88). Her story takes him as close as he will come to the truth of the S-Gerat and Imipolex, but also to the truth about Katje and Blicero and Gottfried. When she tells of her last days on the Heath, the various metonymic chains of plot clash, allowing Slothrop to break through a barrier of dependency. Slothrop doesn’t enact his own talking cure; instead, he experiences a listening cure as the stories of Margherita finally extinguish his will to erection. But it is too late:

     

    He's lost Bianca. Gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morning. It matters, but how much? Now that Margherita has wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship,s toilet, of her last days with Blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the S-Gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf. That if he's seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. (490)

     

    Although granted this realization, Slothrop is in too far, and try as he might, he cannot quit the game; he cannot extricate himself from Their trap.

     

    But that does not mean that he is not changed by his experience. The loss of Bianca breaks the metonymic chain of Slothrop’s womanizing. When he joins Haftung’s dancers– who comment like a Greek chorus on the apparent sexism in the text: “‘Tits ‘n’ ass,’ mutter the girls, ‘tits ‘n’ ass. That’s all we are around here’” (507)–he does not have one of his trademark, hyperbolic sexual encounters. The same goes for the girl (“about seventeen,” Bianca’s age) he encounters when he becomes the archetypal pig hero, Plechazunga (571-73), and for his encounter with Solange/Leni at Putzi’s (603, 609-10). As far as Slothrop is concerned, Bianca marks a closure of the sexual excess that has been a major pattern of his character.12 But seeing how she has changed Slothrop is only half the story; we must still look at the one moment in the text that seemingly represents Bianca’s consciousness–a moment in which she achieves subjectivity and steps beyond her figuration as fetish.

     

    As Slothrop hesitates on the ladder leading away from Bianca, the text marks his “Eurydice-obsession,” but more importantly this leads to a meditation (possibly in Slothrop’s consciousness, at least focalized through him) on representation: “‘Why bring her back? Why try? It’s only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for Them.’ No. How can he believe that? It’s what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy’s based on that…but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay” (472). The passage raises the issue of Bianca’s representation and our ability to tell the difference among the various images of her that complicate our readerly process for assigning her signifiers a referential signified, what one might be tempted to call “the real thing.” If we read “They” in this passage as the patriarchy, then the sexual “economy” of objectification and fetish is uncovered. The cover story of the erotic nymphet must be turned aside to understand the “differ[a]nce between a boxtop and its image.” The pun here is crude; the “boxtop” metaphorically represents Bianca’s hymen that has been torn open, not simply to get at what was inside but also to be transferred into another system of exchange–a system that claims correspondence between a signifier (boxtop) and a representation of a signifier (“the one you draw for Them”). No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. The law of the patriarchy prohibits the reading of the void–the “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”–because to read the void is to find the text inscribed on the image, a text that is different from the one They allow.

     

    Bianca’s text is hard to read. As I have been arguing, the textual set of signifiers that stage her representation is a trap, one we can now delineate as the production of a nearly exclusive patriarchal gaze and the phallocentric addresses to a male narratee. This male narratee, like Slothrop at first and constituted by the text’s limited focalization through Slothrop, construes “Bianca” as a fetish and fails to construe her “true ontological being” (a representation we can only speculate about). One might well ask if such a construal is possible in postmodern texts or necessary to postmodern reading; I would say “yes” if one senses, as I do in reading “Bianca,” that the text represents, however inconclusively, another set of signifieds. There is a textual moment that, although problematic in many respects, may let us finally see “Bianca” (the inverted commas now marking this sign’s differance from the phallocentric sign that has dominated reading so far). As Slothrop turns his back on Bianca and heads up the ladder, “The last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him….”

     

    Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by the same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a Pullman, dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind's flank...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence.... In her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone. Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold. Horror in the brightest hour of afternoon...sails on the sea too small and distant to matter...water too steel and cold.... (471)

     

     

    The cross-references to Margherita are overt, and the repetition of Leni’s dream for Ilse is one more piece of their joint semiotic matrix. But “Bianca”‘s dream is less hopeful and symbolically more complex. Again we confront the problematic boundary between image (“nacreous wrinkling the films use”) and the real (“rain”), but in the paragraph’s modulating play of light, this cinematic metaphor forces a double displacement. What does it mean not only to dream in “black and white” (if we can conflate “visions” and “dream”), but also to dream in the overt stylization of German Expressionism? One almost expects her to dream through the film Emulsion J (387-88). But this is no dream of being in a movie; instead, it is the dream of the storyteller who dictates a tale of a “personal horror, tell[ing] it clearly in a way others can share.” In a text that most consider anything but “clear,” we might rationalize this tale’s absence; however, we must see that “Bianca” now represents the untellable, the feminine text that patriarchy tries to cover with such mythologies as the lunchwagon-counter girl Slothrop nostalgically recalls to place distance between himself and Bianca (471-72). Although “Bianca”‘s dream collapses that distance textually by setting itself in a “Pullman,” in an American context, we never know if it is enough to keep her from “the edge” and the “silver-salt dark” of drowning.

     

    A piece of “Bianca”‘s dictation does appear to reach us: “…when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence….” Set off by the text’s ever-present ellipses, this passage of narrated monologue suggests a representation of “Bianca” different from the fetishized image that has deluded our readerly senses to this point. If this is a fragment of her tale of “personal horror,” then possibly we have a dictation of her initiation to sexuality, the first violation of her childhood at the moment of puberty, a rape by someone (by Thanatz? we cannot know for certain, but we might be able to justify reading differently his trace of her quoted earlier [670]) who “loom[s] like a presence.” To produce such a reading is to see “Bianca”‘s tale as coming through the body, but in this case, rather than being the text others write upon, her represented dreamwork marks a differant layer to the textual formation of her character. From this angle, the “11 or 12” projection Slothrop estimated for her age could now be seen as a displaced image from the textual unconscious–an image that her abuser(s) have inscribed over the real signifier of “Bianca.” Furthermore, by engaging the play of differance, this brief passage stages the problematic of presence/absence for character formation: if “Bianca” is already absent, replaced by Bianca, and even Bianca “vanishes,” replaced only by traces formed by the sexual memories of men (the first male narratees of the text of her body), the gendering of “presence” and the power of formulating the Real is placed under question. Significantly, this placing under question is not only an extratextual interpretive move of GR‘s readers, but it is figured in the text by Slothrop’s own scattering and Thanatz’s existential breakdown over Blicero and the “reality” of Gottfried’s fate.

     

    Reading Bianca through the fetishized image of the body has been the dominant interpretation of her textual ontology, but the fragment of her dictation can guide us to reread these textual representations. One example should suffice to show how such a rereading may be deployed. Earlier I quoted the oft-cited passage of Slothrop’s memory of total phallicization–“he was [. . .] inside his own cock“; this sort of phallic writing of Slothrop’s body pervades the text and inevitably produces phallocentric strategies of reading. The penis-eyed view that follows, complicated by the sexual ideologies (displaced incest, sexual abuse, pornographic staging) that converge at this moment, leads the text to one of its most symbolically significant orgasms: “she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower’s summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?” (470). The focalization is through Slothrop, and the arresting slippage into the discourse system of the rocket stages once again the play of metaphor and metonymy, but this time with the inanimate rocket that has served as the center of Slothrop’s quest. Although Bianca “come[s]” too, the representation of her orgasm is absent–the “void” announced is the absence of the feminine voice that will counterbalance the “kingly voice” of annihilation by the most phallic weapon of war yet conceived.

     

    “Bianca”‘s dream takes us not to her orgasm, but to its aftermath, to “her ruined towers.” The “tower” is a pervasive metaphor and symbol in GR, and to pursue it would take this essay off on another set of tangents and cross-references. Nevertheless, we must observe in the last part of “Bianca”‘s passage (whether we are now in her dictation or again experiencing the mediation of the narrator is impossible to decide) that the symbols of “tower” and “light” will recur in the third line of the text’s closing hymn: “Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low / Find the last poor Pret’rite one…” (760). There are many ways to read these lines, one of which is to see an apocalyptic foreshadowing of either total annihilation or final judgment and redemption of the Preterite–the ellipsis points again ask us to engage the space of signification and the dynamic process of readerly desire: which reading do we want it to be? For “Bianca,” “the brightest hour of afternoon” has already passed, her textual trace has long vanished.

     

    Notes

     

    I would like to thank John M. Krafft, Terry Caesar, and Brian McHale who read earlier versions of this essay and provided helpful suggestions.

     

    1. For a thorough reading of this passage, see McHale, “You Used to Know,” 107-08.

     

    2. Pynchon has at least one passage, in which the narratee “you” is gendered as female, although the passage itself may refer analeptically to Leni Pokler’s childhood (she grew up in Lubeck [162]) and proleptically to Ilse’s trips with her father Franz to Zwolfkinder (398).

     

    3. Gravity’s Rainbow contains many meditations on fetishism; see in particular the nearly textbook description on 736 (cf. Freud). This description sets up Thanatz’s argument for “Sado-anarchism,” a reclaiming from the State of the resources of “submission and dominance” (737). Pynchon also explored fetishism in V. in the chapter “V. in Love” (see Berressem for a thorough reading of this chapter). Of course, Pynchon always places such meditations on the edge, slipping either into what McHale terms “stylization” Postmodern Fiction 21) or into parody, as Thanatz’s intertextual parody (though we might interpret Thanatz as unconscious of the implications of his parody) of “Freud” and Marx: “I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away” (737).

     

    4. Although Gravity’s Rainbow here and on 364 clearly identifies Margherita as “his Lisaura,” Bianca is also signified in this allusion to the character in Wagner’s Tannhauser, an opera which organizes yet another of the text’s semiotic matrices.

     

    5. Newman is the only reader I have come across that comes close to dating Alpdrucken (during the filming of which Bianca was conceived) as 16 years before the text’s present time (107), and Weisenburger dates Pokler’s recollection of Ilse’s conception as “ranging back over sixteen years, its analepsis beginning in the late twenties, in Berlin, where the German rocket program began as an apparently innocent club, the Society for Space Travel” (194).

     

    6. McHoul and Wills read many of the same passages I examine here, yet their characterological reading that suggests “it may be Bianca who mugs Slothrop when he boards the Anubis again later, that is if she hasn’t hanged herself” (31) is problematic to say the least.

     

    7. This issue is further complicated by the fact that a ship’s crew during a storm often rig “life lines” about the deck to keep people from being forced too close to the side during a “hard roll.”

     

    8. Kappel suggests this package is the S-Gerat (236) and Hume and Knight suggest it is a piece of Imipolex G (304); neither of these suppositions strikes me as convincing although they play on the symbolic matrix of Slothrop’s possible conditioning to the odor of the plastic. Nevertheless, both suppositions underscore the readerly desire for enigmas to be resolved.

     

    9. See De Lauretis for a reading of the Alice image in terms of the sexual politics encoded in film, and by extension, the power of desire in the male gaze–the primary determinant of the framed image of women in the cinema.

     

    10. At some point I hope to write about the noses in Gravity’s Rainbow; one only has to recall Slothrop’s “nasal hardon” (439) to see another thread of cross-references (my guess is that, maybe under the influence of Nabokov at Cornell, Pynchon has developed a deep affinity with Gogol, especially his short story “The Nose”–a clear forerunner of postmodernism–and his technique of skaz narration). As for “shit” in Gravity’s Rainbow see Caesar and Wolfley.

     

    11. Although a definitive feminist reading of Pynchon’s writing is yet to be done, see the following early formulations of gender questions: Allen 37-51, Jardine 247-52, Kaufman, and Stimpson.

     

    12. See my essay, “Starry-Eyed Semiotics,” for an account of how readers are trapped into reading Slothrop as a personification of sexual excess.

    Works Cited

     

    • Allen, Mary. The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.
    • Berressem, Hanjo. “V. in Love: From the ‘Other Scene’ to the ‘New Scene.’” Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986): 5-28.
    • Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations 25 (1989): 99-118.
    • Caesar, Terry. “‘Trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up’: Mindless Pleasures in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 14 (1984): 39-48.
    • Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
    • De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
    • Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “Starry-Eyed Semiotics: Learning to Read Slothrop’s Map and Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 6 (1981): 5-33.
    • Freud, Sigmund. Fetishism. 1927. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 21.
    • Henkle, Roger. “The Morning and the Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Clerc 273-90.
    • Hume, Katherine, and Thomas J. Knight. “Orpheus and the Orphic Voice in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 299-315.
    • Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
    • Kappel, Lawrence. “Psychic Geography in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): 225-51.
    • Kaufman, Marjorie. “Brunnhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Levine and Leverenz 197-227.
    • Levine, George, and David Leverenz, ed. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
    • McHale, Brian. “‘You Used to Know What these Words Mean’: Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow.” Language and Style 18.1 (1985): 93-118.
    • —. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
    • McHoul, Alec, and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.
    • Newman, Robert D. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986.
    • Pearce, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • —. V. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.
    • Stimpson, Catharine R. “Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon’s Early Fiction.” Levine and Leverenz 31-47.
    • Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1988.
    • Wolfley, Lawrence. “Repression’s Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon’s Big Novel.” Pearce 99-123.

     

  • Derek Walcott and the Poetics of “Transport”

    Rei Terada

    University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
    <rei.terada@um.cc.umich.edu>

     

    Most North American critics and reviewers have come to see Derek Walcott as a deservedly celebrated poet, “natural, worldly, and accomplished” (Vendler, 26).1 Yet this very appreciation of the orthodox values of Walcott’s work–its learning, assurance, and metrical proficiency–has obstructed consideration of Walcott’s place in the postmodern era. Enthusiastic critics usually discuss Walcott as a “literary” poet and an imitator of the poetic past who perpetuates rather than reverses a traditional formalism.2 Indeed, the surface of Walcott’s language does not seem postmodern. Yet Walcott is obviously also a late twentieth-century postcolonial obsessed on the thematic level with cultural and linguistic displacement–a concern sometimes held to be a hallmark of postmodern literature.3 The vast majority of the small body of critical literature concerned with Walcott’s poetry dwells upon this dilemma, straining to reconcile the subversive postcolonial with the relatively conventional versifier.4 His readers most often argue that Walcott ponders displacement on the thematic level, but on the rhetorical level nostalgically denies it.5 By this logic, rhetoric and content in Walcott’s poetry fulfil contradictory psychological demands: either his forms speak the truth or his themes do, but not both. Other readers, meanwhile, believe that Walcott synthesizes perceived oppositions, or adopts the space between them as his own.6

     

    The difficulty in categorizing Walcott’s poetry is more interesting, however, for what it discloses of our own persistent discomfort at discrepancies between form and content. While most of postmodernism’s would-be definers do attempt to correlate formal and thematic properties, the uneasy relation between rhetoric and principle in Walcott prompts one to question the correspondences between rhetoric and principle that attempts to locate postmodernity may assume. If Walcott’s poetry dramatizes the postmodern knowledge of displacement without enacting it, this could indicate either that Walcott’s poetic contradicts itself (and thus that Walcott is only halfheartedly postmodern), or that definitions of postmodern language in terms of its estrangement from “ordinary” language are inadequate. Indeed, defining postmodernity by estrangement poses problems. It usually means, in practice, identifying postmodernity with literary language. The expectation that postmodern poets enact difference by manifest verbal dislocution also demands an orderly mutual echoing of content and rhetoric–precisely the kind of correspondence that postmodern literature tends to disavow.

     

    Walcott avoids separating “poetic” from “ordinary” language, but not by trying to make poetry sound ordinary. The poems do not aspire to transparency; they are as insistently figurative and artificial as they are intelligible. Indeed, James Dickey complains that Walcott seems at times unable “to state, or see, things without allegory” (8). Walcott acknowledges and at times even rues his dependence on allegory. He also fails, however, to find transparency in any kind of language whatsoever. Beginning with the intuition that poetry can only be allegorical, Walcott extends this knowledge to language as a whole. Although the poems reveal the inexorability of allegorical displacement without benefit of conspicuously postmodern linguistic disfiguration, the knowledge that perception can only be figurative–“allegorical” in de Man’s sense–and unstably so, is itself an essential insight of post- modernity. Walcott’s turns of thought here do infact resemble de Man’s. In Allegories of Reading de Man locates the poetic by means of figuration and in opposition to nonpoetic language, but in the same breath “equat[es] the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself” (10, italics mine), and in no time asserts that “Poetic writing . . . may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not in kind” (17). Walcott demonstrates what postmodern poetry might look like if it lived by these words. The overt disfigurations we associate with the poetry of an Ashbery or a Palmer would seem redundant in light of any real conviction that the disfigurations of allegory necessarily occur in all language. Walcott abstains from radically conspicuous forms of rhetoric not because he seeks transparency, but because of his conviction that any and all language depends upon rhetoric.

     

    Although Walcott does not confuse simplicity with transparency at any point in his career, his later poetry more explicitly dramatizes the ubiquity of “poetic” rhetoric–often because revaluation of the poet’s own work itself becomes a theme. “The Light of the World” The Arkansas Testament, 48-51), a wonderful example of tt’s late style, is more nearly Walcott’s ars poetica than any other single lyric. “The Light of the World” also considers the problems I’ve been discussing–the poet’s inevitable social and linguistic displacement and the relation of poetic to nonpoetic language–more completely than any other single lyric. The poem once again addresses Walcott’s persistent fear–expressed as early as “Homecoming: Anse la Raye” (1970; The Gulf, 84-86)–that poetry may be tragically removed from popular language (and indeed, from material life). But while Walcott more often deliberates this fear in terms of the poet’s social separation from his culture–by virtue of linguistic choice, or of his public’s literacy–“The Light of the World” assumes that poetry is based upon figuration, and inquires whether poetry’s reliance upon figuration divorces it from other linguistic forms.

     

    The poem’s aim to revaluate Walcott’s poetic is transparent, since Another Life, which first comprehensively narrates Walcott’s choice of vocation, turns upon its title phrase: “Gregorias, listen, lit / we were the light of the world!”7 Indeed, “another life” metamorphoses, in that volume, into “another light”: “another light / in the unheard, creaking axle . . . / in the fire-coloured hole eating the woods” (12.III.13-14, 17). In Another Life these phrases, “the light of the world,” “lux mundi,” “another light,” signify the passion, med by mortality, which drives both desire and creativity. In the course of the poem Walcott’s protagonist learns to sublimate passion into art which acknowledges its own origins in anxiety and ephemerality. Gregorias’ “crude wooden star, / its light compounded” by the “mortal glow” consuming it (23.IV.22-23), symbolizes such art in Another Life. “The Light of the World” even more explicitly represents Walcott’s art as a combination of transience and transport. Here the poet is a “transient” or tourist in his own culture, and the entire poem literally takes place in a “transport,” or van, between Castries and Gros Ilet. Although Walcott has not altered his own position regarding the value of these qualities, “The Light of the World” now asks whether reliance on figuration severs the poet from the community and the communal language with which he would most like to share transport.

     

    The poet is first inspired to think of the title phrase when he sees a beautiful woman sitting in the “transport” with him:

     

              Marley was rocking on the transport's stereo
              and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly.
              I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek
              streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait
              you'd leave the highlights for last, these lights
              silkened her black skin; I'd have put in an earring,
              something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she
              wore no jewelry. . . .
                 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
              and the head was nothing else but heraldic.
              When she looked at me, then away from me politely,
              because any staring at strangers is impolite,
              it was like a statue, like a black Delacroix's
              Liberty Leading the People, the gently bulging
              whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth,
              the heft of the torso solid, and a woman's,
              but gradually even that was going in the dusk,
              except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek,
              and I thought, O Beauty, you are the light of the
                                                        world! (48)

     

    Although the poet perceives her at first as an individual woman, “the” beauty–“the beauty was humming the choruses quietly”–in the next moment he begins trying ways of seeing her as art, manipulating her image in a series of framings and figurations: “If this were a portrait . . . . the head was nothing else but heraldic . . . . like a statue, like a black Delacroix’s / Liberty Leading The People . . . the carved ebony mouth.” At the end of this sequence of figures, the poet finally addresses her as Beauty itself. The unnamed woman is now named “Beauty” with a capital B, and seems completely assimilated to the poet’s conception of her. Indeed, Walcott’s deepening aesthetic possession of the woman coincides with the gradual disappearance of her physical self in deepening darkness. In the moment before she becomes Beauty, nothing remains but a “profile” and a highlight. It is entirely possible that in the moment Walcott apotheosizes her, she completely disappears. Beauty may be “the light of the world,” but the apotheosizing capacity of Walcott’s own language is firmly associated with darkness.

     

    Although in his address Walcott’s comparison attains to metaphor–the woman is Beauty–the similes leading up to this transfiguration had been conscious of the tension between the individual woman and Beauty: “if this were a portrait”; “you’d leave the highlights”; “she looked at me, then away from me politely”; “I’d have put in an earring, / . . . but she / wore no jewelry” (italics mine). Walcott’s conjunction in “the heft of her torso solid, and a woman’s,” marks an uneasy nexus of formal strength with individual vulnerability, and of solidity with femininity (the sense of straining double consciousness, of near-paradox, is even stronger in an earlier version8 where Walcott writes, “solid, but a woman’s”). Yet the woman’s individual vulnerability, her mortality–“even that [solidity] was going in the dusk”–itself reminds the poet of art. Another Life had celebrated precisely that art which allows one to perceive its temporality, its “going in the dusk.” Even though the poet apprehends the woman’s apartness (“she wore no jewelry”), he still can’t completely distinguish, at least on temporal grounds, between her mortal, breathing beauty and his own also fragile idea of Beauty. On the other hand, if he cannot hold on to the distinction between the two, neither can he grasp their identity. His momentary metaphorization of her slips at the very moment at which it is apparently achieved. He names her “O Beauty,” but only in “thought,” in darkness, and in the ambivalent rhetorical figure of (de Manian) prosopopoeia. Even the triumphant moment of her naming requires its highly conventional capitalization of “Beauty” and interjection of “O” in order to ensure its recognition as poetic triumph. The presence of the beholder intrudes between the reader and the ostensible triumph, and between the reader and the object supposedly completely beheld. In the next moment it is no longer enough that the woman be Beauty. Beauty itself needs renaming by a further figure, “the light of the world,” and disappears into this figurative excess. In later references the woman is once again only “the woman by the window,” “her beauty.”

     

    Walcott’s correlation between the poet’s expanding transport and expanding darkness magnifies the connotations of “transience.” The poet passes from town to a hotel “full of transients like [him]self” (51),9 and at the same time voyages from life toward death. If this protagonist is a tourist, however, we are all tourists, since this is “the town / where [he] was born and grew up” (49). As tourist, he travels through a society itself transient: St. Lucia, since it is now so “full of transients,” may not last much longer in its present form. Walcott represents St. Lucia at large by means of the female figures in “The Light of the World,” just as he calls the Antillean population by a series of female names in “Sainte Lucie” Collected Poems 1948-1984, 309-323). Luce, of course, means “light,” and Beauty in the poem is also tied to light. The woman in the transport therefore represents St. Lucia, which for Walcott coincides with Beauty. Walcott underscores the fragile temporal development of St. Lucia by depicting a series of women at various stages of life, moving from “the beauty” to “drunk women on pavements” and a thought of his mother, “her white hair tinted by the dyeing dusk” (49).10 These secondary women seem even more exposed, more obviously mortal than “the beauty.” These elegiac thoughts further give rise to a reminiscence of the Castries market in Walcott’s childhood, in which the poet-figure of a lamplighter prominently appears: “wandering gas lanterns hung on poles at street corners . . . the lamplighter climbed, / hooked the lantern on its pole and moved on to another” (49). In the earlier draft, Walcott accents the fragility of the lamplighter’s art–“the light . . . was poised to be lit / on the one hand, and on the next to go out,” like that of the “fireflies” which act as “guides” later in the poem.11 Finally, the transport’s forward motion gives the sensation (as in Bishop’s “The Moose” or Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”) that everyone inside the transport is being carried toward death: “The van was slowly filling in the darkening depot. / I sat in the front seat, I had no need for time.”

     

    At the same time that the transport functions as a sort of Charon’s ferry, however, “transport” is also a synonym for “metaphor,” whose etymology includes the notion of “carrying.” Moreover, it’s clear that Walcott means “metaphor” in its larger sense, to include all figuration, and accepts figuration as a defining feature of poetry–so that “metaphor” functions, as usual, as a figure for figuration. Then too, “transport” can mean “ecstasy,” which bears the connotation of sexual desire as well as of rapturous lyric inspiration. In other words, the poet’s desire for “the beauty” and his aspiration toward poetic and formal Beauty simultaneously carry him–and all kinds of “beauty” with him–toward equally simultaneous would-be possession and oblivion. The poem begins with an epigraph from Bob Marley, “Kaya now, got to have kaya now . . . For the rain is falling”; the earlier version shows that Walcott originally misheard Marley, believing, charmingly enough, that Marley was singing “Zion-ah, / I’ve got to have Zion- ah”–a rendering which magnifies the apocalyptic character of the transport. “Kaya” is marijuana, as it happens, but whether the desired object be marijuana or Zion, “kaya” functions tautologically here, simply as “the desired,” as whatever it is one has “got to have.” “Kaya” also functions, like poetic transport, as a vehicle toward the destination of simultaneous heightened elevation and oblivion. By this point Walcott has accomplished more than a delineation of concurrent desires. He has asked whether metaphorical transport, in its ecstasy, either leaves its supposed subjects behind to unecstatic life and death, or carries them to oblivion by sweeping them up with it. The potential conflict is particularly obvious and painful when the inspired poet’s subjects are St. Lucian, poor and, in this case, mostly female.

     

    Yet another female figure enters the scene at this point–an old woman qualified by experience to speak for “her people,” whose voice alone the poet represents:

     

              An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief
              hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere,
              some distance off, was a heavier basket
              that she couldn't carry.  She was in a panic.
              She said to the driver: "Pas quittez moi a terre,"
              which is, in her patois: "Don't leave me stranded,"
              which is, in her history and that of her people:
              "Don't leave me on earth," or, by a shift of stress:
              "Don't leave me the earth" [for an inheritance];
              "Pas quittez moi a terre, Heavenly transport,
              Don't leave me on earth, I've had enough of it."
              The bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows
              that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left
              on the earth, and would have to make out.
              Abandonment was something they had grown used to.
              And I had abandoned them, I knew that now. . . . (49-50)

     

    Several things are surprising about Walcott’s development of this metaphor (this transport). First, a North American critical audience will probably associate “transport” with politically undesirable transcendence and forgetfulness. But the old woman believes transport is “Heavenly,” a relief from her burdens, and so begs to be transported-and-not- abandoned–even though “abandon” is itself a synonym for “transport” when both mean “rapture.” At the same time, “abandon[ment]” in the negative sense inevitably accompanies figuration, since writing–substituting figuration for presence–marks the site of perpetually abandoned presence. Walcott further highlights the constitutional ambivalence of these words in his self-reversing line about shadows “that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left.” The line remains ambiguous in at least three ways. Walcott’s reversal could indicate the passage of time: it at first seems that all the shadowy bodies of villagers (also “shades” crossing between worlds) outside the transport will fit in; after a while, it does not. In addition, the first half of this line is “literal” (the passengers will not be left behind because they will get in the transport), and the second half “figurative” (they will be “left behind” because the poet will abandon them emotionally and linguistically). But, third and finally, “would” can also suggest preference or volition: they wanted transport, they wanted to be left on the earth. And this is what everyone is likely to feel: we want the universal, we want the particular. In “The Light of the World” (as in “The Schooner Flight,” whose protagonist Shabine is “nobody or a nation”), Walcott maintains a fierce consciousness of both poles.

     

    Further, if one believes that figuration is a specialized form of language which abandons the object world by its abstraction, it will confound one’s expectations that, as Walcott’s explication demonstrates, the “poetic” multiplicity of meanings in “transport” and “abandon” also occurs in the old woman’s speech. The old woman’s phrase is figurative to its core, as Walcott’s translation makes clear. “Pas quittez moi a terre” does not “denote” “Don’t leave me stranded.” Besides, “Don’t leave me stranded” is itself figurative, unless one’s friend is sailing away from the beach (as St. Lucia’s colonizers figuratively and literally did sail away). Translation begins by substituting supposed denotations, but can never end. Denotations, too, continually dissolve by mere “shift[s] of stress.” Likewise, poets sometimes do things for purely formal reasons, but Walcott recalls that people in his childhood neighborhood also “quarrelled for bread in the shops, / or quarrelled for the formal custom of quarrelling” (49).

     

    Walcott, rather like Wordsworth, is now moved by his own reflection that he “had abandoned them . . . had left them on earth,” to feel “a great love that could bring [him] to tears” (50). In this ecstatic experience of agape, of course, we reach yet another connotation of “transport.” Contrary to what one hears about agape, the poet’s love actually denies him oneness with the people around him. Instead, it takes the form of “a pity” that makes him feel his own isolation the more, the more hyperconscious he grows of “their neighborliness, / their consideration.” His pity, in other words, pulls him both toward and away from them, following the two directions of language–“tearing him apart,” as we so Orphically say. The poet suffers further when, in accordance with its mission as an engine of time, even those people who fit into the transport begin getting off. Each departure enacts a miniature death, and too clearly foreshadows the poet’s own:

     

                                             I wanted the transport
              to continue forever, for no one to descend
              and say a goodnight in the beams of the lamps
              and take the crooked path up to the lit door,
              guided by fireflies; I wanted her beauty
              to come into the warmth of considerate wood,
              to the relieved rattling of enamel plates
              in the kitchen, and the tree in the yard,
              but I came to my stop.  Outside the Halcyon Hotel.
              The lounge would be full of transients like myself.
              Then I would walk with the surf up the beach.
              I got off the van without saying good night.
              Good night would be full of inexpressible love.
              They went on in their transport, they left me on earth. (51)

     

    Another reversal occurs here, when, after having left his neighbors on earth through his language and his “transience” (his exile), his neighbors in turn leave the poet. One often encounters, in Walcott’s poetry, the idea that home can leave you. In the structurally similar “Homecoming: Anse la Raye,” the narrator already feels like “a tourist.” “Hop[ing] it would mean something to declare / today, I am your poet, yours,” he finds no one to listen to such a declaration except throngs of children who want coins or nothing. Caught in the impasse of this “homecoming without home,” “You give them nothing. / Their curses melt in air” (85). In contrast, fishermen cast “draughts” of nets, “texts” which help the children more ably than the poet’s. The poet can give the children only words, “nothing” in the way of coins; they return him, in kind, words which are curses.

     

    “The Light of the World” also features a mutual abandonment, the poet’s sense of pity and guilt, a confrontation between a “transient” and his people, and jealousy toward another artisan. Many critics, having cast Walcott in the role of “literary poet,” oppose him to the Barbadian poet Edward Brathwaite, a more “folkish” writer. In “The Light of the World,” Walcott compares himself to an apter and stronger competitor, Bob Marley. “Marley” is the poem’s first word; as the poem’s text stands under its epigraph from Marley’s “Kaya,” so Marley’s song–“rocking” (48), “thud-sobbing” (51), popular, choric, mnemonic– suffuses the whole transport. The “beauty was humming” Marley’s choruses, not Walcott’s; when the whole transport “hum[s] between / Gros-Ilet and the Market” (48), Marley’s song becomes indistinguishable from the motor which drives transport forward. This realization, as much as his confrontation with mortality, brings the poet “down to earth” (and leaves him there). The poet leaves his people on earth–that he could bear. What’s worse, he “le[aves] them to sing / Marley’s songs of a sadness as real as the smell / of rain on dry earth” (51), and the thought that they so gladly sing the songs of a competitor drives him to tears. The pill Walcott swallows here is, then, at least as bitter as that in “Homecoming: Anse la Raye.”

     

    But in “The Light of the World,” Walcott’s greater awareness of linguistic ambivalence and of tensions between universals and particulars far more precisely and gently renders a similar experience, without assuming a wishful intimacy or erasing difference. Walcott explores his own universalizing impulse most completely here. And in the end, the poem suggests that the “poetic” language of metaphor cannot be held apart from Marley’s language, from the old woman’s language, from all language. The poet faces insoluble problems of representation; and in a way, it doesn’t help that everyone who uses language faces these same problems and temptations. On the other hand, in the impossibility of controlling language and the inescapability of desiring to do so, as in the inescapability of death, we find a kind of community in poverty. The poem’s last stanza, which takes up after the poet has been “left on earth,” arrives like an extra gift, an unexpected bit of afterlife:

     

    Then, a few yards ahead, the van stopped.  A man
              shouted my name from the transport window.
              I walked up towards him.  He held out something.
              A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket.
              He gave it to me.  I turned, hiding my tears.
              There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give
                                                                them
              but this thing I have called "The Light of the World." (51)

     

    Again, as in “Anse la Raye,” the poet and his counterpart, representing his community, exchange virtually “nothing.” The man returns the cigarettes, while the poet turns speechless away: “There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them.” Walcott revises the Orpheus and Eurydice story here in a manner unflattering to the postmodern Orpheus.12 This Orpheus cannot take his Eurydice home because he is mortal himself, has no particular powers against death, and besides, she doesn’t belong to him and never did. He is too overcome to look back and deliberately leaves without parting, having accomplished nothing. In fact he assumes the passive position, so that the mortals (who have their own transport and their own music) look back at him. Much of this diminishment already occurs in Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.,” in which Eurydice reacts to news of Orpheus’ failure by asking, “Who?” As de Man points out,

     

    The genuine reversal takes place at the end of the poem, when Hermes turns away from the ascending movement that leads Orpheus back to the world of the living and instead follows Eurydice into a world of privation and nonbeing. On the level of poetic language, this renunciation corresponds to the loss of a primacy of meaning located within the referent and it allows for the new rhetoric of Rilke's "figure." (47)

     

    In Walcott’s as in Rilke’s version of the story, the poet figure retains little power or tragic dignity.

     

    Yet the two “nothings” the poet and the others in the transport exchange–unlike the “nothing” and “curses” in “Anse la Raye”–mean everything. This is how language works, conveying in spite of itself. The man’s gesture embodies all the warm “neighborliness,” “consideration,” and “polite partings” of his society which have moved the poet to write about it, and Walcott gives that society what he loves most, his lux mundi, beauty, poetry, even though he realizes that is all “but” nothing, and even a repetition of abandonment. Walcott’s description of the poet’s diminished powers sounds characteristically postmodern, if we understand postmodernism as a folding back from Modernism’s totalizing ambitions. But notice that this diminishment does not free the poet from communal responsibilities, or from his aesthetic and sexual desires.

     

    Poetic humility takes paradoxical forms. The more humbly the poet describes her or his own efforts, the greater she or he may believe poetry to be. In a way, Walcott’s recognition of the poet’s limitations makes his task even more ambitious, since it will be more difficult. Without the illusion of mastery over language, the poet still aims for communal relevance, beauty, and “truth”– which in “The Light of the World” means precisely recognizing the inescapability of rhetoric. Paradoxically, Walcott brings every poetic resource to bear upon the task of convincing us that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The performance is convincing–so convincing that it undoes its own point. Rhetoric here struggles to dismiss itself, and, predictably, cannot. Walcott’s last small “but” opens a floodgate through which poetic grandiosity and linguistic transcendence stream. Even by calling his poem “this thing,” he simultaneously metaphorizes and reifies it. By further calling “this thing” (already metaphorized by being called a thing) “The Light of the World,” Walcott enters the realm of undecidability. On the one hand, this last line is figurative and glorious: poems are, after all, the light of the world. On the other, it is merely literal and tautological. The title of the poem is, inarguably, “The Light of the World”; the phrase is a citation, referring us only to itself, and distances itself by its quotation marks from the notion of poetic glory. That is, since the title comprises a proper name, we cannot, as when Derrida writes of Ponge, “know with any peaceful certainty whether [it] designate[s] the name or the thing” (Derrida, 8). The reader cannot stand between these two interpretations to choose one. Neither can we decide whether “The Light of the World” actively produces and undoes these contradictions or whether these contradictions actively produce and undo it, for the process of disclosing the ubiquity of rhetoric also begins in self-knowledge and moves toward generalization, following the route of the universalizing impulse it queries. If Walcott’s interest in this particular query is postmodern, his postmodernity trails behind it Modernism’s tendency to universalize.

     

    But in this too Walcott’s example is at least instructive and at most representative. Attempts to define postmodernism solely by its difference from Modernism themselves echo Modern self-definitions. It may be typical of postmodernism to lose itself in the perspectivism of which it is so fond. According to Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism asks us to see “Historical meaning . . . today,” for example, “as unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional,” and at the same time “argues that, in fact, it has always been so” (67). If this is true, postmodernism can best be defined not as a noun, but as a verb; not as a set of attitudes or a grammar of rhetoric, but as inseparable from the propensity to read postmodernly. And if postmodern poetry characteristically inhabits and describes the circulation of these perspectives, Walcott’s metaphorization of himself as the figure of the contemporary poet will be difficult to assail.

     

    Notes

     

    1. For some representative reviews, see also Calvin Bedient, “Derek Walcott, Contemporary” Parnassus 9 [1981], 31-44); Paul Breslin, “‘I Met History Once, But He Ain’t Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott” TriQuarterly 68 [1987], 168-183); and Rita Dove, “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation’” Parnassus 14 [1987], 49-76).

     

    2. Vendler, for example, remarks that “Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Pound, Eliot, and Auden [follow] Yeats in Walcott’s ventriloquism” (23), and Sven Birkerts claims that “[Walcott] apprenticed himself to the English tradition and has never strayed far from the declamatory lyrical line. His mentors . . . include the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Hardy, and Robert Lowell (who himself sought to incorporate that tradition into his work)” (31).

     

    3. Linda Hutcheon notes that “On the level of representation . . . postmodern questioning overlaps with similarly pointed challenges by those working in, for example, postcolonial . . . contexts” (37), and that “Difference and ex-centricity replace homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis” (5).

     

    4. Both Vendler’s well-known review of The Fortunate Traveller and James Atlas’ New York Times Magazine story on Walcott, for example, are entitled “Poet of Two Worlds.”

     

    5. For Bedient, for example, Walcott’s language in “Old New England,” a poem in part about Vietnam, “places him curiously inside the dream, insulated there, enjoying it” (33).

     

    6. This last position is most often taken by Walcott’s fellow poets, especially Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney.

     

    7. Another Life, 23.IV.11-12; also 12.III.21-22. I will refer to Another Life by chapter, section and line number.

     

    8. Paris Review 101 (1986), 192.

     

    9. Walcott had written “tourists like myself” in place of “transients” in the earlier draft of “Light.”

     

    10. “[F]ading in the dying dusk” in the Paris Review.

     

    11. Fireflies are among the favorite creatures in Walcott’s bestiary. He first mentions them in poetry in “Lampfall” The Castaway and Other Poems, 58-59), where they represent a fluctuating, delicate curiosity: “Like you, I preferred / The firefly’s starlike little / Lamp, mining, a question, / To the highway’s brightly multiplying beetles” (59). In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, the Firefly “lights the tired woodsman home,” and annoys the Devil by his mercurial gaiety (when “The Firefly passes, dancing,” the Devil barks, “Get out of my way, you burning backside, I’m the prince of obscurity and I won’t brook interruption!” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 151]). In general, Walcott associates fireflies with the short-lived magic of words, whose meaning flashes on and off.

     

    12. Walcott explicitly reworks the Orpheus-Eurydice story in his new musical, Steel (produced at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991). There, it is Eurydice (a schoolgirl) who instructs Orpheus (a steel band musician) not to look at her as they revisit their childhood neighborhood.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bedient, Calvin. “Derek Walcott: Contemporary.” Parnassus 9 (1981), 31-44.
    • Birkerts, Sven. “Heir Apparent” [review of Midsummer], The New Republic 190 (1984), 31-33.
    • De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
    • Dickey, James. “Worlds of a Cosmic Castaway” [review of Collected Poems 1948-1984]. New York Times Book Review, 2 February 1986, 8.
    • Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
    • Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry. Ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1984.
    • Vendler, Helen. “Poet Between Two Worlds” [review of The Fortunate Traveller], New York Review of Books, 4 March 1982, 23-27.
    • Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
    • —. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965.
    • —. Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.
    • —. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
    • —. The Gulf and Other Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
    • —. “The Light of the World.” Paris Review 101 (1986), 192-95.

     

  • Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, “The Ends of Print Culture” (a work in progress)

    Michael Joyce

    Center for Narrative and Technology, Jackson, MI
    <Michael_Joyce@UM.CC.UMICH.EDU>

     

    Adapted from a talk originally given at the Computers and the Human Conversation Conference, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, March 16, 1991

     

    For a period of time last year on each end of our town, like compass points, there was a mausoleum of books. On the north end of town a great remainder warehouse flapped with banners that promised 80% off publishers prices. Inside it row upon row of long tables resembled nothing less than those awful makeshift morgues which spring up around disasters. Its tables were piled with the union dead: the mistakes and enthusiasms of editors, the miscalculations of marketing types, the brightly jacketed, orphaned victims of faddish, fickle or fifteen minute shifts of opinion and/or history. There an appliance was betrayed by another (food processor by microwave); a diet guru was overthrown by a leftist in leotards (Pritikin by Fonda); and every would-be Dickens seemed poised to tumble, if not from literary history, at least from all human memory (already gangs of Owen Meanies leer and lean against faded Handmaidens of Atwood).

     

    Upon first looking into such a warehouse–forty miles east of our spare parts, bible belt midwest town, in what we outlanders think of as wonderful Ann Arbor; we thought only a university town could sustain this. When the same outfit opened up in our town, and the tables were piled not with the leavings of Ann Arborites but with towers of the same texts, we knew this was a modern day circus. Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages! here come the books!

     

    Meanwhile, at the opposite pole in the second mausoleum, a group termed the Friends of the Library regularly sell off tables of what shelves can no longer hold. One hundred years of Marquez is too impermanent for the permanent collection of our county library, but so too– at least for the branches which feed pulp back to this trunk–so too is the Human Comedy, so too are the actual Dickens or Emily Dickinson. The book here must literally earn its keep.

     

    Both the remainder morgue and the friends of the library mortuary are examples of production/distribution gone radically wrong. Books–and films and television programs and software, etc.–have become what cigarettes are in prison, a currency, a token of value, a high voltage utility humming with options and futures. It is not necessary to have read them. Rather we are urged to imagine what they could mean to us; or, more accurately, to imagine what we would mean if we were the kind of people who had read them.

     

    This is to say that the intellectual capital economy has to some extent abandoned the idea of real, material value for one of utility. This abandonment is not unlike the kind that in a depressed real estate market leaves so-called “worthless” condos as empty towers in whose shadowy colonnades the homeless camp. Ideas of all sorts have their fifteen minute warholian half-life and then dissipate, and yet their structures remain. We have long ago stopped making real buildings in favor of virtual realities and holograms. The book has lost its privilege. For those who camped in its shadows, for the culturally homeless, this is not necessarily a bad thing. No less than the sitcom or the Nintendo cartridge, the book too is merely a fleeting, momentarily marketable, physical instantiation of the network. And the network, unlike the tower,is ours to inhabit.

     

    In the days before the remote control television channel zapper and modem port we used to think network meant the three wise men with the same middle initial: two with the same last name, NBC and ABC, and their cousin CBS. Now we increasingly know that the network is nothing less than what is put before us for use. Here in the network what makes value is, to echo the poet Charles Olson, knowing how to use yourself and on what. Networks build locally immediate value which we can plug into or not as we like. Thus the network redeems time for us. Already with remote control channel zapper in hand the most of us can track multiple narratives, headline loops, and touchdown drives simultaneously across cable transmissions and stratified time. In the network we know that what is of value is what can be used; and that we can shift values everywhere, instantly, individually, as we will.

     

    We live in what, in Writing Space, Jay Bolter calls the late age of print (Bolter 1991). Once one begins using a word processor to write fiction, it is easy to imagine that the same techne which makes it possible to remove the anguish from a minor character on page 251 of a novel manuscript and implant it within a formative meditation of the heroine on page 67 could likewise make it possible to write a novel which changes every time the reader reads it. Yet what we envision as a disk tucked into a book might easily become the opposite. The reader struggles against the electronic book. “But you can’t read it in bed,” she says, everyone’s last ditch argument. Fully a year after Sony first showed Discman, a portable, mini-CD the size of a Walkman, capable of holding 100,000 pages of text, a discussion on the Gutenberg computer network wanted to move the last ditch a little further. The smell of ink, one writer suggested; the crinkle of pages, suggests another.

     

    Meanwhile in far-off laboratories of the Military-InfotainmentComplex–to advance upon Stuart Moulthrop’s phrase (Moulthrop, 1989b)–at Warner, Disney or IBApple and MicroLotus, some scientists work on synchronous smell-o-vision with real time simulated fragrance degradation shifting from fresh ink to old mold; while others build raised-text touch screens with laterally facing windows that look and turn like pages, crinkling and sighing as they turn. “But the dog can’t eat it,” someone protests, and–smiling, silently–the scientists go back to their laboratories, bags of silicone kibbles over their shoulders.

     

    What we whiff is not the smell of ink but the smell of loss: of burning towers or men’s cigars in the drawing room. Hurry up please, it’s time. We are in the late age of print; the time of the book has passed. The book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. The book is dead, long live the book. A revolution enacts what a population already expresses: like eels to the Sargasso, 100 thousand videotapes annually return to a television show about home videos. In the land of polar mausolea, in this late age of print, swimming midst this undertow who will keep the book alive?

     

    In an age when more people buy and do not read more books than have ever been published before, often with higher advances than ever before, perhaps we will each become like the living books of Truffaut’s version of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose vestal readers walk along the meandering river of light just beyond the city of text. We face their tasks now, resisting what flattens us, re-embodying reading as movement, as an action rather than a thing, network out of book.

     

    We can re-embody reading if we see that the network is ours to inhabit. There are no technologies without humanities; tools are human structures and modalities. Artificial intelligence is a metaphor for the psyche, a contraption of cognitive psychology and philosophy; multimedia (even as virtual reality) is a metaphor for the sensorium, a perceptual gadget beholding to poetics and film studies. Nothing is quicker than the light of the word. In “Quickness,” one of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino writes:

     

    In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (Calvino 1988, 45)

     

    Following the true bent of the written language in the late age of print brings us to the topographic. “The computer,” Jay Bolter says,” changes the nature of writing simply by giving visual expression to our acts of conceiving and manipulating topics. “In the topographic city of text shape itself signifies, as in Warren Beatty’s literally brilliant rendering of the city of Dick Tracy. There the calm, commercial runes of marquee, placard, neon and shingle (DRUGS, LUNCHEONETTE, CINEMA) not only map the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, but they also shape and color the city itself and its inhabitants. Face and costume, facade and meander, river’s edge and central square, booth or counter, Trueheart or Breathless. “Electronic writing,” says Bolter

     

    is both a visual and verbal description. It is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics. Topographic writing challenges the idea that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language. The writer and reader can create and examine signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech. (Bolter 1991, 25)

     

    Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext in the 1960’s, more recently defined it as “non-sequential writing with reader controlled links.” Yet this characterization stops short of describing the resistance of this new object. For it is not merely that the reader can choose the order of what she reads but that her choices in fact become what it is.

     

    Let us say instead that hypertext is reading and writing electronically in an order you choose; whether among choices represented for you by the writer, or by your discovery of the topographic (sensual) organization of the text. Your choices, not the author’s representations or the initial topography, constitute the current state of the text. You become the reader-as-writer.

     

    We might note here that the word we want to describe the reader-as-writer already exists, although it is too latinate and bulky for contemporary use. Interlocutor has the correct sense of one conversant with the polylogue, as well as the right degrees of burlesque, badinage, and bricolage behind it. Even so, we will have to make do with–and may well benefit by extending–the comfortable term, reader.

     

    We may distinguish two kinds of hypertext according to their actions (Joyce, 1988). Exploratory hypertext, which most often occurs in read-only form, allows readers to control the transformation of a defined body of material. It is perhaps the type most familiar to you, if you have seen a Hypercard stack. (Note here that a stack is the name of the electronic texts created by this Apple product. There are other hypertext systems, such as Storyspace and Supercard for the Macintosh, or Guide for both the Macintosh and MS-DOS machines, and the newcomer ToolBook for the latter.)

     

    In the typical stack, the reader encounters a text (which may include sound and graphics, including video, animations, and what have you). She may choose what and how she sees or reads, either following an order the author has set out for her or creating her own. Very often she can retain a record of her choices in order to replay them later. More and more frequently in these documents she can compose her own notes and connect them to what she encounters, even copying parts from the hypertext itself.

     

    This kind of reading of an exploratory hypertext is what we might call empowered interaction. The transitional electronic text makes an uneasy marriage with its reader. It says: you may do these things, including some I have not anticipated.

     

    It is to an extent true that neither the author’s representations nor the initial topography but instead the reader’s choices constitute the current state of the text for her. In these exploratory hypertexts, however, the text does not transform or rearrange itself to embody this current state. The transitional electronic text is as yet a marriage without issue. Each of the reader’s additions lies outside the flow of the text, like Junior’s shack at the edge of the poster-colored city of Dick Tracy. The text may be seen as leading to what she adds to it, yet her addition is marginal, ghettoized. Stuart Moulthrop suggests that to the extent that hypertexts let a power structure “subject itself to trivial critiques in order to pre-empt any real questioning of authority . . . hypertext could end up betraying the anti-hierarchical ideals implicit in its foundation” (Moulthrop 1989a). Under such circumstances the reader’s interaction does not reorder the text, but rather conserves authority. She moves outside the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, unable to shape and color the city itself or its inhabitants.

     

    Even so, to the extent that the topographical writing of an exploratory hypertext lets readers create and examine signs and structures, it does make implicit the boundary which both marks and makes privilege or authority. In fact it has always been true that the interlocutory reader, let us say brooding alone in the reading room of the British Museum, might come to see this boundary. Attuned to organizational structures of production and reproduction, she might mark with Althusser, “the material existence of an ideological apparatus” of the state (Althusser 1971).

     

    But she might not be able to see quite as clearly or as quickly as she can see in the hypertext how the arena is organized to marginalize and diminish her. This is the trouble with hypertext, at any level: it is messy, it lets you see ghosts, it is always haunted by the possibility of other voices, other topographies, others’ governance.

     

    Print culture is as discretely defined and transparently maintained as the grounds of Disney World. There is no danger that new paths will be trod into the manicured lawns. Some would like to think this groundskeeping is a neutral decision, unladen, de-contextualized, removed from issues of empowerment, outside any reciprocal relationship. For the moment institutions of media, publishing, scholarship, and instruction depend upon the inertia of the aging technology of print, not just to withstand attack on established ideas, but to withstand the necessity to refresh and reestablish these ideas. In fact, hypermedia educators frequently advertise their stacks by featuring the fact that the primary materials are not altered by the webs of comments and connections made by students. This makes it easier to administer networks they say.

     

    Like the Irish king Cuchulain who fought the tide with his sword, they lose who would battle waves on the shores of light. The book is slow, the network is quick; the book is many of one, the network is many ones multiplied; the book is dialogic, the network polylogic.

     

    The second kind of hypertext, constructive hypertext, offers an electronic alternative to the grey ghetto alongside the river of light. Constructive hypertext requires a capability to create, change, and recover particular encounters within a developing body of knowledge. Like the network, conference, classroom or any other form of the electronic text, constructive hypertexts are “versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist” (Joyce 1988).

     

    As a true electronic text, the constructive hypertext differs from the transitional exploratory hypertext in that its interaction is reciprocal rather than empowered. The reader gives birth to the true electronic text. It says: what you do transforms what I have done, and allows you to do what you have not anticipated. “It is not just that [we] must make knowledge [our] own,” says Jerome Bruner in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, but that we must do so “in a community of those who share [our] sense of culture” (Bruner 1986).

     

    A truly constructive hypertext will present the reader opportunities to recognize and deploy the existing linking structure in all its logic and nuance. That is, the evolving rhetoric must be manifest for the reader. She should be able to extend the existing structure and to transform it, harnessing it to her own uses. She should be able to predict that her own transformations of a hypertext will cause its existing elements to conform to her additions. While not merely taking on but surrendering the forefront to the newly focused tenor and substance of the interlocutory reader, the transformed text should continue to perform reliably in much the same way that it has for previous readers.

     

    Indeed, every reading of the transformed text should in some sense rehearse the transformation made by the interlocutory reader. If a reader, let us call her Ann, has read a particular text both before and after the intervention of the interlocutory reader, Beatrice, Ann’s experience of the text should have the familiar discomfort of recognition. Ann should realize Beatrice’s reading.

     

    Not surprisingly, the first efforts at developing truly constructive hypertexts have taken place in (hyper)fictions. afternoon (Joyce 1990) attempts to subvert the topography of the text by making every word seem as if it yields other possibilities, letting the reader imagine her own confirmations. This “letting” likely signifies a partially failed attempt, a text which empowers more than it reciprocates. In situating and criticizing afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop speculated, “a writing space [which] presumes a new community of readers, writers, and designers of media . . . [whose] roles would be much less sharply differentiated than they are now “(Moulthrop, 1989a).

     

    In attempting to develop such a community it becomes clear to hyperfiction writers that unless roles of author and reader are much less sharply differentiated, the silence will have no voice. Even interactive texts will live a lie. “In all claims to the story,” writes the Canadian poet Erin Moure,

     

    There is muteness.  The writer as
              witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal
                                                      bourgeois lie.
              Because the speech is the writer's speech, and each
                                                      word of the
              writer robs the witnessed of their own voice, muting
                                                      them. (Moure 1989, 84)

     

    Increasingly hyperfiction writers consider how the topographic (sensual) organization of the text might present reciprocal choices that constitute and transform the current state of the text. How, in the landscape of the city of text, can the reader know that what she builds will move the course of the river? How might what she builds present what Bruner calls an invitation to reflection and culture creating. In her poem, “Site Glossary,: Loony Tune Music,” Moure says

     

    witness as a concept is outdated in the countries of
              privilege, witness as tactic, the image as completed
              desktop publishing & the writer as accurate, the names
                                                      are
              sonorous & bear repeating tho there is no repetition
                                                      the
              throat fails to mark the trace of the individual voice
                                                      which
              entails loony tune music in this age (Moure 1989, 115)

     

    Hyperfictions seek to mark the trace with their own loony tune music. In Chaos Stuart Moulthrop has speculated a fiction which is consciously unfinished, fragmentary, open, one of emotional orientations and transformative encounters. John McDaid’s hyperfiction Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Fun House is an electronic world of notebooks, scrap papers, dealt but unplayed Tarot cards, souvenirs, segments, drafts, and tapes, unfinished in the way that death unfinishes us all (McDaid, 1991). In Izme Pass, their hyperfictional “deconstruction of priority,” Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry seek “to weave . . . [a] new work made not of the parts but the connections . . . [in order] to unmurk it a little, to form connection in time and space, but without respect to those constraints “(Guyer 1991b).

     

    While this may seem the same urge toward a novel which changes each time it is read, what has changed in the interim between novelist-at-word-processor and hyperfiction writer is that computer tools to accomplish these sorts of multiple texts have been built. Moreover hyperfiction writers have not only imagined and rendered them, but also and more importantly have begun to set out an aesthetic for a multiple fiction which yields to its readers in a reciprocal relationship.

     

    This sort of reciprocal relationship for electronic art has a conscious history in the late 20th century. In Glenn Gould’s essay “Strauss and the Electronic Future” (1964) he envisions a “multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap.” He expands this notion in his extraordinary essay, “The Prospects of Recording” (Gould 1966): “Because so many different levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the individualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing.”

     

    What joins the concerns of many of writers working with multiple fictions is nothing less than the deconstruction of priority involved in making identity and authorship much less imposing. “The fact in the human universe,” says Charles Olson, “is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right . . . is the thing–all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks)” (Olson, 1974).

     

    These writers share a conviction that the nature of mind must not be fixed. It is not a transmission but a conversation we must keep open. “If structure is identified with the mechanisms of the mind,” says Umberto Eco, “then historical knowledge is no longer possible” (Eco, 1989). We redeem history when we put structure under question in the ways that narrative, hypertext and teaching each do in their essence. Narrative is the series of individual questions which marginalize accepted order and thus enact history. Hypertext links are no less than the trace of such questions, a conversation with structure. All three are authentically concerned with consciousness rather than information; with creating and preserving knowledge rather than with the mere ordering of the known. The value produced by the readers of hypertexts or by the students we learn with is constrained by systems which refuse them the centrality of their authorship. What is at risk is both mind and history.

     

    In Wim Wenders’ (and Peter Handke’s) film, Wings of Desire, the angels walk among the stacks and tables of a library, listening to the music within the minds of the individual readers. It is a scene of indescribable delicacy and melancholy both (one which makes you want to rush from the theatre and into the nearest library, there to read forever), into the midst of which, shuffling slowly up the carpeted stair treads, huffing at each stairwell landing, his nearly transparent hand touching on occasion against the place where his breastbone pounds beneath his suit and vest, comes an old man, his mind opening to an angel’s vision and to us in a winded, scratchy wheeze.

     

    “Tell me muse of the story-teller,” he thinks, “who was thrust to the end of the world, childlike ancient . . . .” The credits tell us later that this is Homer. “With time,” he thinks, “my listeners became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, instead they sit apart and no one knows anything about the other . . . .”

     

    Homer’s is for us increasingly an old story. When print removed knowledge from temporality, Walter Ong reminds us, it interiorized the idea of discrete authorship and hierarchy. Ong envisioned a new orality (Ong 1982). In this case it is a film which restores the circle; likewise the “multiple authorship” of hypertext offers an electronic restoration of the circle.

     

    Although hypertext is an increasingly familiar cultural term, its artistic import is only beginning to be realized. In novels whose words and structures do not stay the same from one reading to another, ones in which the reader no longer sits apart but by her interaction, shapes and transforms.

     

    Shaping ourselves, we ourselves are shaped. This is the reciprocal relationship. It is likewise the elemental insight of the fractal geometry: that each contour is itself an expression of itself in finer grain. We have been talking so long about a new age, a technological age, an information age, etc., that we are apt to forget that it is we who fashion it, we who discover and recover it, we who shape it, we who literally give it form with how we use ourselves and on what.

     

    This organic reconstitution of the text may be what makes constructive hypertext the first instance of what we will come to conceive as the natural form of multimodal, multi-sensual writing: the multiple fiction,the true electronic text, not the transitional electronic analogue of a printed text like a hypertextual encyclopedia. Fictions like afternoon, WOE, Chaos, IZME PASS, or Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse can neither be conceived nor experienced in any other way. They are imagined and composed within their own idiom and electronic environment, not cobbled together from pre-ordained texts.

     

    For these fictions there will be no print equivalent, nor even a mathematical possibility of printing their variations. Yet this is in no way to suggest that these fictions are random on the one hand or artificial intelligence on the other. Merely that they are formational.

     

    What they form are instances of the new writing of the late age of print, what Jane Yellowlees Douglas terms “the genuine post-modern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great ‘either/or’ and embracing, instead, the ‘and/and/and’” (Douglas, 1991). The issues at hand are not technological but aesthetic, not what and where we shall read but how and why. These are issues which have been a matter of the deepest artistic inquiry for some time, and which share a wide and eclectic band of progenitors and a century or more of self-similar texts in a number of media.

     

    The layering of meaning and the simultaneity of multiple visions have gradually become comfortable notions to us, though they form the essence underlying the intermingled and implicating voices of Bach which Glenn Gould heard with such clarity. We are the children of the aleatory convergence. Our longing for multiplicity and simultaneity seems upon reflection an ancient one, the sole center of the whirlwind, the one silence.

     

    It is an embodied silence which the multiple fiction can render. We find ourselves at the confluence of twentieth century narrative arts and cognitive science as they approach an age of machine-based art, virtual realities, and what Don Byrd calls “proprioceptive coherence” (Byrd, 1991). The new writing requires rather than encourages multiple readings. It not only enacts these readings, it does not exist without them. Multiple fictions accomplish what its progenitors could only aspire to, lacking a topographic medium, light speed, electronic grace, and the willing intervention of the reader.

    Works Cited

     

    • Althusser, Louis. (1971) “Ideology and the State.” In Lenin, Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
    • Bolter, Jay D. (1991) Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
    • Bruner, Jerome. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Byrd, Don. “Cyberspace and Proprioceptive Coherence.” Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, Santa Cruz, Ca, April 20, 1991.
    • Calvino, Italo. (1988) Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Gould, Glenn. (1964) “Strauss and the Electronic Future.” Saturday Review, May 30, 1964. Reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page, ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1989).
    • —. (1966) “The Prospects of Recording.” High Fidelity, April,1966. Reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page, ed.
    • Guyer, Carolyn and Martha Petry. “Izme Pass, a collaborative hyperfiction,” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2), bound-in computer disk, University of California at Davis, June 1991.
    • —. “Notes for Izma Pass Expose.” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2), University of California at Davis, June 1991.
    • Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. “The Act of Reading: the WOE Beginners’ Guide to Dissection,” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2).
    • Joyce, Michael. (1990a) afternoon, a story. Computer disk. Cambridge, MA: The Eastgate Press.
    • –. (1988) “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts.” Academic Computing 3 (4), 10-14, 37-42.
    • McDaid, John. (1991) Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse. Unpublished computer fiction.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. (1991) CHAOS. Hyperfiction computer program, Atlanta, GA, 1991.
    • —. (1989a) In the Zones: Hypertext and the Politics of Inaphy on America, Proprioception, and Other Essays. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 17 &19.
    • Moure, Erin. (1989) “Seebe” and “Site Glossary: Loony Tune Music.” In W S W (West Southwest) Montreal: Vehicule Press, 84 & 115.
    • Nelson, Ted. (1987) All for One and One for All. Hypertext ’87. Chapel Hill: ACM Proceedings.
    • Ong, Walter J. (1982) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.
    • Thurber, D. (1990) “Sony to Make Electronic Books: ‘Data Discman’ Player Will Use 3-Inch CDs.” Washington Post, (D9, D13) May 16.

     

  • The Marginalization of Poetry

    Bob Perelman

    University of Pennsylvania
    bperelme@pennsas

    If poems are eternal occasions, then 
    the pre-eternal context for the following
    
    was a panel on "The Marginalization
    of Poetry" at the American Comp.
    
    Lit. Conference in San Diego, on 
    February 8, 1991, at 2:30 P.M.:
    
    "The Marginalization of Poetry"--it almost 
    goes without saying. Jack Spicer wrote, 
    
    "No one listens to poetry," but 
    the question then becomes, who is 
    
    Jack Spicer? Poets for whom he 
    matters would know, and their poems
    
    would be written in a world
    in which that line was heard,
    
    though they'd scarcely refer to it. 
    Quoting or imitating another poet's line 
    
    is not benign, though at times 
    the practice can look like flattery. 
    
    In the regions of academic discourse,
    the patterns of production and circulation
    
    are different. There, it--again--goes 
    without saying that words, names, terms
    
    are repeatable: citation is the prime
    index of power. Strikingly original language
    
    is not the point; the degree 
    to which a phrase or sentence 
    
    fits into a multiplicity of contexts 
    determines how influential it will be. 
    
    "The Marginalization of Poetry": the words 
    themselves display the dominant lingua franca 
    
    of the academic disciplines and, conversely, 
    the abject object status of poetry: 
    
    it's hard to think of any 
    poem where the word "marginalization" occurs. 
    
    It is being used here, but 
    this may or may not be 
    
    a poem: the couplets of six 
    word lines don't establish an audible 
    
    rhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use 
    the Calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" their
    
    right to exist in their present
    form--is this a line break 
    
    or am I simply chopping up 
    ineradicable prose? But to defend this 
    
    (poem) from its own attack, I'll 
    say that both the flush left 
    
    and irregular right margins constantly loom 
    as significant events, often interrupting what 
    
    I thought I was about to 
    write and making me write something 
    
    else entirely. Even though I'm going 
    back and rewriting, the problem still 
    
    reappears every six words. So this, 
    and every poem, is a marginal 
    
    work in a quite literal sense.
    Prose poems are another matter: but 
    
    since they identify themselves as poems
    through style and publication context, they 
    
    become a marginal subset of poetry, 
    in other words, doubly marginal. Now 
    
    of course I'm slipping back into 
    the metaphorical sense of marginal which, 
    
    however, in an academic context is 
    the standard sense. The growing mass 
    
    of writing on "marginalization" is not 
    concerned with margins, left or right 
    
    --and certainly not with its own. 
    Yet doesn't the word "marginalization" assume 
    
    the existence of some master page 
    beyond whose justified (and hence invisible) 
    
    margins the panoplies of themes, authors, 
    movements, general objects of study exist 
    
    in all their colorful, handlettered marginality? 
    This master page reflects the functioning 
    
    of the profession, where the units
    of currency are variously denominated prose: 
    
    the paper, the article, the book.
    All critical prose can be seen 
    
    as elongated, smooth-edged rectangles of writing, 
    the sequences of words chopped into 
    
    arbitrary lines by typesetters (Ruth in 
    tears amid the alien corn), and 
    
    into pages by commercial bookmaking processes. 
    This violent smoothness is the visible 
    
    sign of the writer's submission to 
    norms of technological reproduction. "Submission" is 
    
    not quite the right word, though: 
    the finesse of the printing indicates 
    
    that the author has shares in 
    the power of the technocratic grid; 
    
    just as the citations and footnotes 
    in articles and university press books
    
    are emblems of professional inclusion. But 
    hasn't the picture become a bit 
    
    binary? Aren't there some distinctions to 
    be drawn? Do I really want 
    
    to invoke Lukacs's antinomies of bourgeois 
    thought where rather than a conceptually 
    
    pure science that purchases its purity 
    at the cost of an irrational 
    
    and hence foul subject matter we 
    have the analogous odd couple of 
    
    a centralized, professionalized, cross-referenced criticism
                                                             studying
    marginalized, inspired (i.e., amateur), singular poetries? 
    
    Do I really want to lump 
    The Closing of the American Mind, 
    
    Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Keats, 
    and Anti-Oedipus together and oppose them
    
    to any poem which happens to 
    be written in lines? Doesn't this 
    
    essentialize poetry in a big way?
    Certainly some poetry is thoroughly opposed 
    
    to prose and does depend on 
    the precise way it's scored onto 
    
    the page: beyond their eccentric margins, 
    both Olson's Maximus Poems and Pound's 
    
    Cantos tend, as they progress, toward 
    the pictoral and gestural: in Pound 
    
    the Chinese ideograms, musical scores, hieroglyphs, 
    heart, diamond, club, and spade emblems, 
    
    little drawings of the moon and 
    of the winnowing tray of fate; 
    
    or those pages late in Maximus 
    where the orientation of the lines 
    
    spirals more than 360 degrees--one 
    spiralling page is reproduced in holograph. 
    
    These sections are immune to standardizing 
    media: to quote them you need 
    
    a photocopier not a word processor. 
    In a similar vein, the work 
    
    of some contemporary writers associated more 
    or less closely with the language 
    
    movement avoids standardized typographical grids and 
    is as self-specific as possible: Robert 
    
    Grenier's Sentences, a box of 500 
    poems printed on 5 by 8 
    
    notecards, or his recent work in 
    holograph, often scrawled; the variable leading 
    
    and irregular margins of Larry Eigner's 
    poems; Susan Howe's writing which uses 
    
    the page like a canvas--from 
    these one could extrapolate a poetry 
    
    where publication would be a demonstration 
    of private singularity approximating a neo-Platonic
     
    
    vanishing point, anticipated by Klebnikov's handcolored, 
    single-copy books produced in the twenties. 
    
    Such an extrapolation would be inaccurate 
    as regards the writers I've mentioned, 
    
    and certainly creates a false picture 
    of the language movement, some of 
    
    whose members write very much for 
    a if not the public. But 
    
    still there's another grain of false 
    truth to my Manichean model of 
    
    a prosy command-center of criticism and 
    unique bivouacs on the poetic margins 
    
    so I'll keep this binary in 
    focus for another spate of couplets. 
    
    Parallel to such self-defined poetry, there's 
    been a tendency in some criticism 
    
    to valorize if not fetishize the 
    unrepeatable writing processes of the masters
    
    --Gabler's Ulysses where the drama of 
    Joyce's writing mind becomes the shrine 
    
    of a critical edition; the facsimile 
    of Pound's editing-creation of what became 
    
    Eliot's Waste Land; the packets into 
    which Dickinson sewed her poems, where  
    
    the sequences possibly embody a higher 
    order; the notebooks in which Stein 
    
    and Toklas conversed in pencil: having 
    seen them, works like Lifting Belly 
    
    can easily be read as interchange 
    between bodily writers or writerly bodies 
    
    in bed. The feeling that three's 
    a crowd there is called up 
    
    and cancelled by the print's intimacy 
    and tact. In all these cases, 
    
    the particularity of the author's mind, 
    body, and situation is the object 
    
    of the reading. But it's time 
    to dissolve or complicate this binary.
    
    What about a work like Glas? 
    --hardly a dully smooth critical monolith.
    
    Doesn't it use the avant-garde (ancient 
    poetic adjective!) device of collage more 
    
    extensively than most poems? Is it 
    really all that different from, 
    
    say, the Cantos? (Yes. The Cantos's 
    incoherence reflects Pound's free-fall writing situation; 
    
    Derrida's institutional address is central. Derrida's 
    cut threads, unlike Pound's, always reappear 
    
    farther along.) Nevertheless Glas easily outstrips 
    most contemporary poems in such "marginal" 
    
    qualities as undecidability and indecipherability--not 
    to mention the 4 to 10 margins 
    
    on each page. Compared to it, 
    these poems look like samplers upon 
    
    which are stitched the hoariest platitudes. 
    Not to wax polemical: there've been 
    
    plenty of attacks on the voice 
    poem, the experience poem, the numerous 
    
    mostly free verse descendants of Wordsworth's 
    spots of time: first person meditations 
    
    where the meaning of life becomes 
    visible after 30 lines. In its 
    
    own world, this poetry is far 
    from marginal: widely published and taught, 
    
    it has established substantial means of 
    reproducing itself. But with its distrust 
    
    of intellectuality (apparently indistinguishable from
                                                 overintellectuality)
    and its reliance on authenticity as 
    
    its basic category of judgment (and 
    the poems principally exist to be 
    
    judged), it has become marginal with 
    respect to the more theory-oriented sectors 
    
    of the university, the sectors which 
    have produced such concepts as "marginalization." 
    
    As a useful antidote, let me 
    quote Glas: "One has to understand 
    
    that he is not himself before 
    being Medusa to himself. . . . To be 
    
    oneself is to-be-Medusa'd . . . . Dead sure of 
    self. . . . Self's dead sure biting (death)." 
    
    Whatever this might mean, and it's
    possibly aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman,
    
    nevertheless it seems a step toward 
    a more communal and critical way 
    
    of writing and thus useful. The 
    puns and citations that lubricate Derrida's 
    
    path, making it too slippery for 
    all but experienced cake walkers are 
    
    not the point. What I want 
    to propose in this anti-generic or 
    
    over-genred writing is the possibility, not 
    of genreless writing, but rather of 
    
    a polygeneric, hermaphroditic writing. Glas, for 
    all its transgression of critical decorum 
    
    is still, in its treatment of 
    the philosophical tradition, a highly decorous 
    
    work; it is marginalia, and the 
    master page of Hegel is still 
    
    Hegel, and Genet is Hegel too. 
    But a self-critical writing, poetry, minus 
    
    the shortcircuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, 
    might dissolve the antinomies of marginality.

  • Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

    Daniel R. White

    University of Central Florida
    <fdwhite@ucf1vm>

     

    Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

     

    –Susan Sontag, On Photography (180)

     

    Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno argued in the persona of the god Momus that “the gods have given intellect and hands to man and have made him similar to them, giving him power over other animals. This consists in his being able not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but also to operate outside the laws of nature, in order that by forming or being able to form other natures, other paths, other categories, with his intelligence, by means of that liberty without which he would not have the above-mentioned similarity, he would succeed in preserving himself as god of the earth” (205). It was in the spirit of this quest to become “god of the earth” that the Father of Francis Bacon’s utopian Salomon’s house explains, “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” New Atlantis 210). The epistemology of the new human empire was to be founded on a combination of Cartesian rationality seated in the individual human reason–the cogito–and Baconian empiricism. The cogito is the unit of mind, the subject, which endeavors to understand and control the supposedly material and mechanistic realm of nature. But is this definition of mind correct and is the Modern project stemming from the Renaissance–for the technological domination of nature–taking us where we want to go? The modernist project has been challenged by two important bodies of theory, which I have elsewhere argued (White 1991) are intrinsically related: postmodernity and ecology. Here I intend to argue that there is a new, literary contender.

     

    The literary challenge to the modernist view of man and nature comes in the form of what I would like to define as a new genre: literary ecology.1 It is a species, or perhaps I should say with Deleuze and Guattari a rhizomic offshoot, of that broad critique of modernism known as postmodernity. (Postmodern-“ism” sounds hopelessly modernist.) It is a “literature” that fundamentally undermines the premises of modernity at their foundation– the subject of power–and by implication would tumble the entire domain circumscribed by the Enlightened entrepreneur of the West. It is a literature of guerilla warfare amidst the Thousand Plateaus of the ecological mind, whose textual strategies, like those of the Viet Cong, threaten at least the self-image, the simulacrum, of the great American technological utopia, the one which is reflected in Baudrillard’s sunglasses at Disney World. Thomas Pynchon probably defines the genre best by his work in Vineland, just as he exemplified postmodernity in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) after which the sensitive “reader” gleaned, if she or he were still sufficiently undecentered to navigate, with Pynchon’s imago of Dorothy: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more . . . ” (279). Now with Vineland and Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero, another originary work in the genre, we are entering a new post. WHAT IS LITERARY ECOLOGY?

     

    Literary ecological theory stands, like Pynchon’s work itself according to some critics, with one foot on traditional metaphysical ground and one in the postmodern void.2 What is traditional in literary ecology is the acceptance of a value hierarchy, namely the Great Chain of Being, stemming from the classical and medieval worlds. The most salient feature of the Chain for the human condition, Dwight Eddins argues following Eric Voegelin, is that it represents a metaxic tension between spiritual order and material chaos:

     

                                 Divine--Nous
                                Psyche--Noetic
                               Psyche--Passions
                                 Animal Nature
                               Vegetative Nature
                        Apeiron--Depth [the limitless]

     

    The Divine Nous represents the upper limit of the human quest for spiritual fulfillment, not attainable in the flesh but a necessary eschaton or goal for human striving. “The substitution of a finite, purely ‘human’ eschaton for the infinitely receding nousmeans the negation of the spiritual (noetic) quest that produces the real order of the human,” Eddins explains. “The metaxic tension collapses, and man is pulled by apeirontic vectors through lower and lower levels of his being . . . ” (22). The Gnostic quest is to appropriate the Nous to attain the all-too-human goals of power and control, on the part of an elite–THEM in Pynchon–possessed of Gnosis, over lower orders of being, the Preterite–US. The quest to become a noetic power elite sets up a paranoid cycle of oppression:

     

    For the gnostic elite . . . the alien world is a thing to be "overcome" . . . the elite experience, ironically, a preterite paranoia that drives them to seek mastery through their elite gnosis; but in so doing they define a new preterite in those who are not privy to this plexus of knowledge and power, but are pawns to be manipulated in its service. This preterity, in turn, can escape preterition only by adopting the power techniques of their masters; but in the very act they naturally tend to become--in Wordsworth's phrase--"Oppressors in their turn." (23)

     

    Eddins’ discussion is too early to have included Vineland, but what better description of the relationship between its oppressor and oppressed, Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates, and their victims?

     

    What is new in literary ecology’s appropriation of the old paradigm is that this description of the traditional hierarchy and its demise is also employed, even while it foregrounds human beings and their immediate concerns, as a paradigmatic description of an ecological crisis: of what communication theorist Anthony Wilden, commenting on the emerging Cartesian and Lockean ideas of the individual, calls “splitting the ecosystem”3:

     

    One of the truly representative characteristics of the Lockean individual, as of the Cartesian one, is that it replicates in its own organization that SPLITTING OF THE ECOSYSTEM . . . with which the Age of Discovery opened the world to colonialism and to the specifically modern domination of nature. . . . It is a splitting of the subject in this world in which the supposedly dominant part--mind--not only 'controls' the rest (it is believed)--i.e., the body--but mind actually OWNS the body. (xli)

     

    Capitalism, Wilden argues, splits the ecosystem not only by bifurcating the individual into mind and body, the one controller and the other to be controlled, but also by dividing society into bourgeoisie and proletariat, the modern social and economic form of owner and owned. Furthermore, Wilden argues, the traditional hierarchic relation between “nature” and “culture” or “nature” and “society” is as follows:

     

                             Land (Photosynthesis)
                      Labor Potential (Creative Capacity)
                                   Capital.
         Land precedes and makes possible labor potential which
         precedes and makes possible the extraction of capital.  But
         capitalism through "commoditization" inverts the hierarchy:
                                    Capital
                                Labor Potential
                                 Land. (xxxv)

     

    Capital is used to control labor potential which is used to exploit land. Underlying this system is the entrepreneurial persona, the new “god of the earth” envisioned by Bruno, and perhaps even more vividly by Francis Bacon: “I am come in very truth leading Nature to you, with all her children, to bind her to your service and to make her your slave . . . . So may I succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds . . . ” (from The Masculine Birth of Time, or the Great Instauration of the Domination of Man over the Universe [1603], cited in Wilden xxxv-xxxvi). Nature is, of course, female and her children are the proletariat, the third world, whatever can be bought. Luckily, preterite like St. Cloud in Mile Zero and Zoyd in Vineland stubbornly resist: thus the socialist ecological stance of literary ecologists, evident both in Pynchon and Sanchez.

     

    The gnostic, entrepreneurial splitting of the hierarchy of being also breaks down the metaxy, in ecological terms the dynamic equilibrium, of the Great Chain. In cybernetic language ecosystems may be viewed as hierarchies, or heterarchies, which exhibit tendencies toward both homeostasis and runaway. As Gregory Bateson explains,

     

    All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.). (447)

     

    Consider population, for example. Prey, unconstrained by traditional predators, will increase in population until limited by some other factor, perhaps disastrously by overpopulation which can decimate the population. So too, if man sprinkles his produce with DDT and kills off the bird population, the insects which were the original target of the poison will increase all the more rapidly unconstrained by their original predator and have to be “exterminated” by more toxin.

     

    This kind of degenerative cycle is what Eddins calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, “modes of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the metaphysical force fields of Pynchon’s cosmos: the instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the distinction between secular and religious constructs” (23). In other words, Brock and Frenesi and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the logic of ecological runaway, what Joseph Slade Thomas Pynchon 125) has called “excluded middles and bad shit” in reference to the plight of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49: under the Reagan-Bush version of the Entrepreneurial New World Order, you must either become a pawn of the new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into preterition. And if you want to fight back, you must also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake of power, to switch roles from Oppressed to Oppressor so that the original split in the human ecology escalates in what Bateson called the Romano-Palestinian System.4 This is the koan with which many of Pynchon’s worthy characters are presented.

     

    What is postmodern in literary ecology is that its strategy for escaping from the impossible polarities of the koan is to step out of the traditional ego of the West and into an expanded and more fluid definition of “mind.” This new definition of mind, explicit in the texts of Bateson, is what in effect gives literary ecology its deep-ecological dimension.

     

    Bateson developed mental ecology in part as a critique both of Darwin and of the premises of the Western episteme mentioned at the outset. His argument is that if we accept the cybernetic theory of “self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought,” and the information-theoretical notion that an idea is definable as a “difference,” then these criteria are not limited to the human individual. Consider a man with a computer, Bateson argues.

     

    What "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. (491)

     

    The result of this critique is a fundamental redefinition of the unit of mind:

     

    If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind. (491)

     

    If this is true, Bateson concludes, then we are faced with a number of important changes in our thinking, especially in ethics. It means, for instance, that mind–the Nous of the Great Chain–becomes immanent in the entire ecological and evolutionary structure (466)5 and that, “Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits” (491).6 It also turns out that epistemological error is ecological error:

     

    When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise "What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species," you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system--and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience. (492)

     

    In other words epistemological and ecological error are identical with the modernist paradigm and its industrial project. The literary-ecological correction of the error in Vineland is arguably an extension of what Eddins calls “Orphic Naturalism” in Gravity’s Rainbow: “a counterreligion to the worship of mechanism, power, and– ultimately–death” (5).

     

    Plumwood (1991) criticizes deep ecology from an ecofeminist perspective in terms reminiscent of those I have used to characterize the literary ecological attack on the Cartesian cogito. She argues that

     

    In inferiorizing such particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments [e.g. those emphasized by Pynchon and Sanchez], deep ecology gives us another variant on the superiority of reason and the inferiority of its contrasts, failing to grasp yet again the role of reason and incompletely critiquing its influence . . . . we must move toward the sort of ethics feminist theory has suggested, which can allow for both continuity and difference and for ties to nature which are expressive of the rich, caring relationships of kinship and friendship rather than increasing abstraction and detachment from relationship. (16)

     

    Literary ecology arguably provides exactly this rich sense of connectedness and particularity, as the texts discussed below suggest.

     

    Bateson’s language reveals the instrumental bias of Western science, as he describes nature in terms of a computer metaphor involving “circuits,” “units” and “system.” Yet he suggests what is fundamental to a more viable, ecological philosophy based on a genuine recognition and respect for the ecological other: the attribution of mind to nature. As Plumwood argues, “Humans have both biological and mental characteristics, but the mental rather than the biological have been taken to be characteristic of the human and to give what is ‘fully and authentically’ human. The term ‘human’ is, of course, not merely descriptive but very much an evaluative term setting out an ideal: it is what is essential or worthwhile in the human that excludes the natural” (17). This attribution of “mind” to “man” and materiality to “nature,” characteristic of the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans as the human cogito and res extensa as the objective world, and further expressed in the masculine subject of power dominating “mother” nature, as it is in the entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his “real estate,” is arguably one of the principal targets of the literary ecological critique. Thus literary ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but approaches them in terms of a postmodern ecological rubric which steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed, Elite and Preterite, Sacred and Secular, as deftly as Pynchon’s Ninjette DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) slips past Brock Vond’s guards.

     

    The Origins of Literary Ecology7

     

    “The Age of Ecology began on the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, with a dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gasses,” argues Donald Worster in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. The genesis of literary ecology is part of the larger history of ecological ideas, and will require a separate discussion. Here let me at least make of few suggestions about its origins. The Ecological idea stems from the 18th century, as Worster has demonstrated, but it rose into popular consciousness startled by the perception, evoked by the Bomb, that nature itself is vulnerable like the frail human beings within it. Worster continues, “As that first nuclear fission bomb went off and the color of the early morning sky changed abruptly from pale blue to blinding white, physicist and project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer felt at first a surge of elated reverence; then a somber phrase from the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds’” (339). Popular ecology, as Worster also demonstrates, has roots in Romanticism and, indeed, the intuition of the Romantic writers formed the basis upon which the clearer outlines of ecological science would be patterned. As Goethe wrote, in the character of Young Werther,

     

    When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities; when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart . . . ah, my dear friend . . . but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence. (24)

     

    This is not unlike the feeling which drew the “flower children” back to nature in the 1960’s, articulated and sustained in the writings of Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. Romantic writing was in direct response to the urbanization and mechanization of life effected by the Industrial Revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a response to what Mumford called the Megamachine of modern technology, economy, society and polity which has destroyed and displaced much of the human lifeworld, of “Earth House Hold” in the words of poet Gary Snyder. An incipient ecological sensibility is also evident in the “persistent modernist nostalgia for vanished axiological foundations in the midst of vividly experienced anomie” which Eddins finds in the work of Pynchon and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in ecological dimension, by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. Here images of a fouled, poisoned environment merge with those of human spiritual and physical demise–

     

                                 Unreal City,
                     Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
                  A Crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
                  I had not thought death had undone so many.
    
                   A rat crept softly through the vegetation
                     Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
                     While I was fishing in the dull canal
    
                               The river sweats
                               Oil and tar . . .

     

    –amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very shards inspire hope of renewal: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Additionally, the fusion of human imagination with nature’s images, as well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of Magical Realism, for example in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, is arguably an important forebear, and Carlos Fuentes’ recent Christopher Unborn I might well have included with Mile Zero and Vineland as an example of literary ecology, except for its problematic representation of gender. African literature is also a likely ancestor of the genre, for example Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart where the fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of European colonialism is explored, as it is in American literature by Peter Matthiessen, with regard to South American Indians, in another likely progenitor, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell presents a profound fusion of the human mind with nature’s, as her Golden Notebook reflects on feminist and socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which come together and are uplifted and transformed (Aufhebung) in her Canopus in Argos: Archives, especially Shikasta. Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Galapagos should not be overlooked in the search for LitEcol ancestors and, particularly where Pynchon is concerned, I would look up from these printed artifacts and seriously review the adventures of Tweety and Sylvester Vineland22).

     

    More broadly, however, I suggest that the genealogy of literary ecology includes photography, film, painting, architecture and other arts, especially video, as well as the sciences, especially information theory and cybernetics. I suggest that this is true because literary ecology is a new communicational form, a new language practice, which has evolved or leapt into being through the postmodern “trialectic” of ecology, neomarxism, and feminism in the context of what Mark Poster has defined as The Mode of Information. Going beyond Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that “the medium is the message,” which he argues is based on Locke’s “‘sensorium’ of the receiving subject,” Poster contends,

     

    What the mode of information puts in question, however, is not simply the sensory apparatus but the very shape of subjectivity: its relation to the world of objects, its perspective on that world, its location in that world. We are confronted not so much by a change from a "hot" to a "cool" communications medium, or by a reshuffling of the sensoria, as McLuhan thought, but by a generalized destabilization of the subject. (15)

     

    In this new mode the modernist Cartesian rationalist subject, as well as his empiricist Lockean conterpart, is, like Tyrone Slothrop, dispersed into more dynamic, nomadic kind of mind, the very one animating literary ecology. As Poster continues,

     

    In the mode of information the subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate its options. Instead it is multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and redefined by TV ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electronic transmission of symbols. In the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, we are being changed from "arborial" beings, rooted in time and space, to "rhizomic" nomads who daily wander at will (whose will remains a question) across the globe . . . . (15)

     

    Literary Ecology in Mile Zero & Vineland

     

    Postmodern, as Charles Jencks defines it in relation to architecture but with clear ramifications for the other arts, refers to

     

    double coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects. (14, Jencks' emphasis)

     

    Certainly Gravity’s Rainbow is at least doubly coded, employing multiple genres and styles, tragedy and comedy, narrative and song, even a character Tyrone Slothrop who does not win or lose or live or die in the end but is, like the subject of the mode of information, dispersed; a plot which is superimposed on the trajectory of a V2 rocket; chapter headings which are fitted with (pictures of) sprocket holes; and a closing apocalyptic poem over which we, suddenly transformed from solitary readers to a crowd of movie-goers, are supposed to envision a bouncing ball.

     

    Literary ecologists, as postmodernists, use traditional literary forms in new ways. Both Sanchez and Pynchon employ regional realism, for instance, through their sense of place particularizing and enriching their larger ecological sensibility. Sanchez focuses on the rich biotic and human community of Key West and the Caribbean; his book is peopled with human folkways and natural life forms which are depicted sympathetically and in careful detail. The invaders from the North are also present, the focus of Sanchez’s historical, social, cultural and ultimately ecological critique. “It is about water,” his novel begins:

     

    It was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end. The ocean mothered us all. Water and darkness awaiting light. Night gives birth. An inkling of life over distant sea swells toward brilliance. Dawn emerges from Africa, strikes light between worlds, over misting mountains of Haiti, beyond the Great Bahama Bank, touching cane fields of Cuba, across the Tropic of Cancer to the sleeping island of Key West, farther to the Gold Coast of Florida, its great wall of condominiums demarcating mainland America. (3)

     

    Characterization is also given significant human- ecological dimension. Consider Sanchez’s representation of Justo–the African-Cuban cop who is Sanchez’s best candidate for heroism–typical of the literary-ecological concern not only with nature but also with human history and genealogy. Like Pynchon in Vineland, Sanchez gives his character dimension by tracing his connections over the generations of an extended family. This family connects Justo, not only socially, but also politically, with the oppressed, and ecologically, with the environment which has meant their livelihood. As Justo makes his way down Olivia street in Key West, the sight of a vanished Cuban groceria prompts him to reminisce about his boyhood, his grandfather, Abuelo, and grandmother Pearl, and her father: “Pearl’s father was an Ibu, brought to the Bahamas as a boy in chains from West Africa and freed fifteen years later in 1838 by the British. Freed by the very ones who had enslaved him, given a dowry of no money and a new name in a white man’s world, John Coe” (69). Sanchez characterizes Coe in part by his livelihood:

     

    John Coe became a student of the sea when freed. The sea became John's new master. Turtles attracted him first, their gliding nonchalance, so few flipper strokes needed to navigate through a watery universe, an economy of effort worth emulating, which bespoke ancient liberation from the here and now. John felt kinship with his marine creature's abiding sense of ease, its deep breadth of freedom. John was as simple man who knew not the turtle's source of symbolic power, he understood only the animal's daily inspiration. John learned the ways of the thousand-pound leatherback and loggerhead turtles . . . . He studied eight- hundred-fifty-pound gentle greens . . . . He gained respect for the small fifty-pound hawksbill . . . . (69)

     

    Coe’s sense of loving “familiarity,” in the original sense of this term, with the sea and its creatures overlaps with his love and respect for his wife, Brenda Bee. John chances upon her as she is being sold at a slave auction. When “The Well-dressed gentlemen in the crowd from Charleston and Mobile didn’t see anything of value in Brenda” because she is ill and half starved, “John Coe bought himself a wife in a town where a man of dark skin was not allowed to walk the streets after the nine-thirty ringing of the night bell, unless he bore a pass from his owner or employer, or was accompanied by a white person” (74). And he plays the role of healer and nurturer for her:

     

    As John bathed Brenda's bony body with the humped softness of his favorite sheepswool sponge he vowed to treat this woman with kindness, drive the unspeakable terror from her eyes. John spoke to Brenda in a tongue she could understand, touched her only in a healing way. John brought Brenda red cotton dresses, strolled with her hand in hand on saturday eves down the rutted dirt length of Crawfish Alley, stopping to tip his cap to folks cooling themselves on the front wooden steps of their shacks. John planted a papaya tree behind his shack and a mango in front, for on sundays the preacher man swayed in the stone church before the congregation tall as an eluthera palm in a high wind, shouting his clear message that the Bible teaches to plant the fruiting tree. (74)

     

    The “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” which Plumwood (above) argues are “inferiorized” by Cartesian rationality are cultivated here and carefully interwoven with images of nature and of the sacred. Remember that all of this is, furthermore, in the memory of Justo, giving the character full human-ecological dimension.

     

    Women are not always the needy recipients of male nurture in Mile Zero. Another of Sanchez’s major characters, St. Cloud, a Vietnam veteran who begins and ends his days imbibing “Jamaica’s finest” rum, and who at one time “was still a happily married and cheating husband” (112), now must contend with being cuckolded by a woman who has clearly replaced him in his wife, Evelyn’s, affections. He also turns voyeur, watching like a latter-day Adam deserted by Eve, from her garden:

     

    He leaned against the smoothed trunk of a banyan, deep in shadow. Through the open shutters of Evelyn's bedroom a ladder of light was cast into the garden, its last bright step falling at St. Cloud's feet . . . Images of two women inside flickered insistent as a silent movie through slatted shutters. (98)

     

    The erotica in this “cinematic” display are empowered with speech, however, and the ability to shatter St. Cloud’s filmic illusions.

     

    The shutters flew open in the rainy breeze, scorpions slithered up bedroom walls. Evelyn rose from the swell of a female sea. Intruding rain mixed with sweat of exposed skin. She leaned forward to claim the banging shutters, arms outstretched from the swing of her breasts. She paused. Her words cast into rain hissing across the garden before the shutters enclosed her. "Good night, St. Cloud." (99)

     

    Sanchez repeatedly identifies women with the powers of nature, not with passive real estate to be exploited. In this regard, both Evelyn and Angelica, another prominent character, have significant tattoos:

     

    St. Cloud followed the heave of Evelyn's breathing. The green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth." (5)

     

    Angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable Aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. The octopus tattoo on her right breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath.(112)

     

    What, in addition to kinship between women and the living beings of the natural world–the rose, the octopus–do these tattooed breasts signify? Angelica is modeling for an artist who admits, in response to his homosexual son, Renoir’s, request in their discussion of women, “‘Why don’t you ask Angelica what she feels?’”:

     

    "I don't have to ask her anything. I know what women think about me. They teach me in history of Women's art. College after college they hold me up as the enemy. Because I know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails." (115)

     

    St. Cloud, also present at this transformation of the female body into art, is not so sure that the artist knows the “secret” at all, and sees something quite different in the figure:

     

    In the glittering bedroom light Angelica's breasts held the naked thrust of challenge St Cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. It was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. Watching Angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, St. Cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. Maybe it was man's desire never to let woman rise again. Keep her under heel and thumb. Never allow Pandora to release the awesome power from the box. (114)

     

    The power of femininity is combined, as the images in the foregoing passages suggest, with that of nature, and both are conjoined with the political cause of the oppressed. St. Cloud, by the way, as his feminist epiphany above suggests, is a respectable schlemiel, like Zoyd in Vineland, who finds a way out of self-pity by working as a translator for Haitian refugees.

     

    Pynchon’s regional realism is set in the Pacific Northwest, the great redwood forests of Northern California, in Vineland, and in the varied culture of the local inhabitants, most of whom are victims and refugees, ex- hippies, Thanatoids, the North American tribe who attempted to get back to the land and ended up on a kind of political reservation sandwiched between suburbs and overshadowed by government surveillance. His specific focus is on the remnants of the American radical tradition, those elements of the great European Invasion of North America who–from Thoreau to Bob Dylan–more or less sided with the Indians and wanted to call the whole thing off. Now they watch T.V. Vineland, the name given to the North American wilderness by the Vikings, is a place of very special significance, a territory upon which different stages of civilization have imposed their maps, but which holds a primitive mystery resistant to interpretation or translation into urban sprawl.8

     

    Someday this would be all part of Eureka--Crescent City--Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in Spanish and Russian Ships had seen . . . log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense that they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees--carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have know about but did not share. (317)

     

    Both novelists use traditional literary devices in new ways which constitute double coding. By far the most interesting of these is narrative. Both Sanchez and Pynchon reframe the perspective of traditional human narrators to include what Gregory Bateson would call the mind of nature. Sanchez speaks explicitly from the standpoint of a persona, almost like the deep self of Hinduism, Atman, identical with the unmanifest spiritual power underlying the manifest world, Brahman, except with a this-worldly ecological twist. (Pynchon’s character Weed Atman, mathematics professor and circumstantial radical leader, similarly adds a transcendental dimension, satirically drawn, in Vineland.) For the narrator employs a host of images and apocalyptic forebodings as if spoken directly from the person of the earth which not only condemns American civilization but also, paradoxically, turns out to be none other than you and I. Thus we are also telling the story, both reader and author, both critic and castigated, finding the natural diversity of our larger selves in the variegated patterns of human, plant, animal, amphibian, and fish life while at the same time finding the mirror of ourselves in their destruction. But is this a transcendence of self which ultimately identifies “man” and “nature” in an overarching holism, or rather, what Plumwood calls for, a feminization of the human sensibility connected empathetically with and respectful of the variegated “other” of nature? Literary ecology, clearly opting for the latter alternative, differs from deep ecology in its regional realism and heterological sense of connectedness not only with nature but also with the social and political concerns of human life.

     

    Pynchon opens Vineland with the image of shattering glass, just as he began Gravity’s Rainbow with the fall the Crystal Palace, but instead of the ominous streak of the V-2 Rocket heralding the crash, we get the human trajectory of Zoyd Wheeler, “transfenestrating” through plate-glass in order to prove his mental instability and insure his government disability check.9 In both books fragmentation spreads from image, to narrative, to character, and to a broader idea of mind.

     

    The narrative fragmentation of Vineland is precisely into paranoia in the old Greek sense, ramified by schizophrenia in a defiant new sense. It is worth noting, in this regard, that the musical tome of favorite Italian songs, used in desperation by Billy Barf and the Vomitones, an alternative rock band dressed in “glossy black short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches,” to provide entertainment for a Godfather-like celebration at the estate of one Ralph Wavony, is none other than the Italian Wedding Fake Book by Deleuze and Guattari, authors of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and A Thousand Plateaus. The image of shattering glass becomes the structural, or is it poststructural, device of the novel as a whole. As in schizophrenic discourse, image metonymically transforms the logic of the plot into a spiral nebula of fragments, a look into any one of which reveals a monadic world itself about to fracture, as if the book were a person thinking beside himself, deranged, deterritorialized, splitting into multiple selves.

     

    Thus Pynchon’s fragmented characters inhabit his fragmented narratives. A look into the world of Frenesi, for example, must be refracted through her daughter Prairie’s quest for her mother, and with her ex-husband’s Zoyd’s broken life, not to mention his transfenestrations. It also connects to the Aggro World, “‘a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers” (107) and so to Ninjettes DL and Sister Rochelle, to G-man and principal adversary Brock Vond, and thus to the interstices of what Hayles calls the “snitch system” and the “family system” (78). The former, centered around Brock, is the hand of Government repression which tries to unravel the latter, the web of kinship, and certainly the 24fps film collective, where image and reality are fractured like the collective itself. Frenesi too is fractured through the machinations of Brock to have her destroy Weed Atman by imaging him as the snitch he is not:

     

    Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed, Frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. If the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. (237)

     

    Brock’s seduction of Frenesi fractures the microcosm of her consciousness, so that she sees herself schizophrenically as in a film; but it also penetrates every level of the macrocosm, the social and ecological dimensions of Pynchon’s Great Chain, as a phallocentric rubric of aggression: “Men had it so simple,” Frenesi muses.

     

    When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world. Bleak, to be sure, but a lot more simplified, and who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise. She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to Bock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example. (241)

     

    Brock has caused Frenesi literally to think beside herself, to experience paranoesis, “as the Nixonian Reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people’s miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal became routine . . . leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. These people had known their children, after all, perfectly” (239).

     

    But just as fragmentation can be destructive shattering of human and natural worlds, so too it can be welcome “noise” that allows regenerative reorganization of a living system at a more complex and resilient level: evolution as human ecological self-correction. Brock’s neofascist attempt to impose order on America, especially on the anarchic Left, is a phallocentric attempt to “split the ecosystem,” in Wilden’s terms. But the entropy which results from the split can also be the seed of new growth:

     

    one last point on entropy, inflexibility, and disorder, it is important to recognize that the counter-adaptive inflexibility of socioeconomic systems in decline is not merely or simply the 'social disorder' which is experienced by their inhabitants at the time. At the moment of its greatest social disorder, the salient informational characteristic of the system would seem to be, not lack of organization lack of order, but OVER-ORGANIZATION and over-order. It is this very over-organization which threatens its survival, and the social disorder involved is invariably a more or less successful attempt to renormalize the system, in the interests of survival. (367)

     

    Which is why Slade argues that “Communication ordinarily helps maintain a healthy balance between order and change, so that the system remains stable but also flexible, or, in the case of a culture, tolerant of diversity” (“Communication” 129). In other words, Brock generates the very diversity, the Orphic fragments, which he seeks to suppress by attempting to routinize, in Max Weber’s terms, the counter culture. And it is this diversity out of which a successful human-ecological renewal can be shaped.

     

    The relationship between entropy and order, systemic decline and renewal, has long been a concern in Pynchon’s texts. His “Entropy,” for example, ends with Meatball Mulligan’s attempts “to keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos” by reviving and reorganizing his guests (97), on the one hand, and Aubade who, after smashing the window of their “hermetically sealed . . . enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos” (83), “turned to face the man [Callisto] on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion” (98), on the other. The movement toward entropy can signal renewal or death. As “Entropy” was mostly about the descent toward death, at the other end of a parabolic arc spanning Pynchon’s career, Vineland is about the ascent to life.

     

    Katherine Hayles has argued that the “framing narrative” of Vineland is Zoyd’s daughter, Prairie’s, search for her estranged mother, Frenesi Gates. Frenesi’s absence is partly due to the social engineering of betrayal by the novel’s chief antagonist, Brock Vond, and partly due to her own desire, mirrored later by Prairie herself; for Frenesi is “seduced” and thus “separated” by Brock from her family (the Latin root of “seduced,” seducere, can mean separate, as Hayles points out [80]), and Prairie sometimes longs to be seduced, as she calls after Brock as he is borne aloft by the post-Vietnam deus ex machina of the helicopter, “You can come back, . . . . It’s OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don’t care. Take me anyplace you want” (384). What Brock would separate them from is their family–nuclear, including Zoyd, Frenesi and Prairie, extended, including the entire Becker-Traverse clan, and ecological, including the web of human and natural lives in Vineland–a multi-dimensional reunion:

     

    The pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses and Beckers in the close neighborhood. (323)

     

    The meadow where the gathering takes place Zoyd, focusing the overall narrative on this pastoral setting, calls “Vineland the Good” (322). The quest of daughter for mother feminizes the traditionally masculine art of storytelling, reconnecting it, again in Plumwood’s phrase, to those “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” emphasized by Sanchez. The feminist dimension of literary ecology is given further depth, as Cowart argues, by Ninjette Sister Rochelle:

     

    "Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam--it was the Serpent." (166)

     

    Thus the political and social power of Women is associated both with the pristine condition of earth before “man” and with the spiritual condition of Grace, before the Fall. Recall the garden in which St. Cloud stands, displaced voyeur of women who don’t need him. Furthermore, the above text suggests, as does Foucault in The Order of Things, that “man” is more a socially constructed myth than a biological reality, interchangeable with the Serpent, the Faustian version of the Cartesian persona questing for knowledge and power, as with the Gnostic who tries to extricate himself from and gain dominion over nature.

     

    As Cowart argues, “Sister Rochelle subjects the myth of Eden to a feminist reading that complements the novel’s larger deconstruction of the apocalyptic myth” (186). The foreboding Revelatory close of Gravity’s Rainbow with rocket poised above our film-entranced heads, itself the culmination of what Edward Mendelson has called an “encyclopedic narrative,” is replaced in Vineland by a literary ecological return to earth that is less explosive but a little more optimistic.10 The return is in part constituted by what Cowart calls a “feminist genealogy”: “a genealogical plenitude that centers on women, a generational unfolding that proceeds matriarchally from Eula to Sasha to Frenesi to Prairie” and “search for the mother” which “reverses–indeed deconstructs–the conventional search for the father, for patriarchal authority, reason, and order– for the familial and communal principle itself” (187). It is this success of plenitude which draws the new Counterforce–leftist, feminist, green–into resolution at the aforementioned reunion which Cowart describes as “a fine evocation of an extended and diverse family spread out over a rich California landscape–fields of strawberry and Elysian–that is a transparent symbol of America. This, after all, is the millennium: humanity as family” (187). An even broader, ecological dimension of this renewal is suggested by Eddins in regard to narrative fragmentation and Orphic naturalism in Gravity’s Rainbow:

     

    But the fragmentation of narrative in Pynchon's Text also has a positive function. It both symbolizes a shattering that is loss and incarnates a poignant lyricism that preserves what is lost from oblivion. As the novel and its world fall to pieces more and more rapidly, the pieces continue to sing like those of the dismembered Orpheus, insisting on that larger continuity of Earth that redeems and enshrines the preterite shards. (151-152)

     

    Dwight Eddins, and David Porush in “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine,” have pointed to the paradoxical nature of Pynchon’s texts. Eddins argues that “in a coup de grace of reflexivity” Gravity’s Rainbow becomes a Real Text, like the one that can lead the Hereros back to the Holy Center, “a Torah of Orphic naturalism, revealing the nature of gnostic evil at the same time that it reveals the Way Back to communion with Earth” (150). But this reflexivity, as the logic of Pynchon’s narrative indicates, leads to paradox:

     

    The positing of Gravity's Rainbow as the Real Text involves us, of course, in the paradoxical notion of an Orphic Word. If preverbal Earth represents in some sense a transcendental unity, the mere existence of an immanentizing Word--however normative--violates that unity. The paradox is, in its most literal sense, unresolvable, and is the principal source of the stress that cracks the novel into fragments of narrative . . . . (151)

     

    Similarly, Porush argues regarding Vineland that “Pynchon often makes us feel as if we are caught in a servo- mechanical loop of interpretation with the text” (102). Consider this description of the Puncutron Machine, for example:

     

    It was clear that electricity in unknown amounts was meant to be routed from one of its glittering parts to another until it arrived at any or all of a number of decorative-looking terminals, "or actually," purred the Ninjette Puncutron Technician who would be using it on Takeshi, "as we like to call them, electrodes." And what, or rather who, was supposed to complete the circuit? "Oh, no, "Tekeshi demurred, "I think not!" (164)

     

    As Porush concludes, “the machinery of Pynchon’s plot aids the reader in crossing between worlds, just as the Puncutron aids the reader’s avatar, Takeshi, in striking a karmic balance” (102). This paradoxical reflexivity splits the ecosystem of Pynchon’s text only to reconstitute it at a more complex and resilient level: that of the Orphic god reconstituted.

     

    The art of paradoxical communication is also evident in the phenomenon of play and in the playful Zen koan. Both prompt a kind of transcendence from paradoxical alternatives. The message “This is play,” Bateson argues, in expanded form means roughly, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (180). If we take the phrase “for which they stand” as a synonym for the word “denote,” the passage may be further expanded to, “‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (180). The message “This is play” is therefore paradoxical, in terms of the Theory of Logical Types, Bateson concludes, “because the word ‘denote’ is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous” (180). Bateson argues that play marks a leap–a kind of transcendence–in the history of mammalian communication from the analog realm of kinesic and paralinguistic signals toward the denotative coding of human languages, for “Denotative communication as it occurs at the human level is only possible after the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events”(180)–as in the nip “standing for” the bite in play. But this transcendence can be Gnostic, Cartesian, entrepreneurial, and require an Orphic or ecological corrective. The play of Pynchon’s satire, I argue, provides just this.

     

    The koan, too, is a form of paradoxical communication which prompts a form of transcendence. The Zen Master, Bateson argues, may lead his student to enlightenment by logic of the koan, which is verbal and non-verbal. Holding a stick over the pupil’s head, he says vehemently, “‘If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it” (208). The Zen student, Bateson points out, might simply take the stick from the Master, thereby transcending the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Interestingly, Bateson further points out that this is precisely the logic of the Double Bind, which characterizes schizophrenic communication, except that the schizophrenic cannot transcend the terms of the paradox, indeed is systematically punished by his/her parents for communicating about the bind, and so oscillates among a medley of conflicting terms indefinitely (206-208).

     

    The related phenomena of play, the koan, and schizophrenia all suggest the function of logical typing, the formal rubric of the Great Chain, in Pynchon’s text especially, for he sustains the air of play–satire, irony, absurdity, lampoon–throughout Vineland. Safer’s article, subtitled “Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland,” argues that Zen is broadly parodied in the novel. Safer points to the New Age music played in the Log Jam bar as well as the “change of consciousness” mentioned by the bartender (6-7), where Zoyd displays his petite chain saw, to the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple where Prairie works, to the Sisterhood of Kuniochi Attentives, etc. as examples. While the parody of New Age spirituality is no doubt evident, what is more interesting from the viewpoint of literary ecology is Pynchon’s simultaneous use of Zen and of humor as forms of transcendence–not of nature but of the repressive and impossible alternatives imposed by the Gnostic order of Brock and his cohorts: transcendence of fragmentation as reconstitution of the Orphic god and his ecology.

     

    These various modes of transcendence in Vineland are explored by Porush in his “Purring into Transcendence.” The Puncutron machine, discussed above as an analog for Pynchon’s text itself, is “designed to ‘get that Chi flowing the right way’” (Porush 102, Pynchon 163). Notice that Takeshi is “all hooked up with no escape” from the Machine, just as the Zen student is caught in the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Also notice that the passage clearly has a comic tone and even, as Porush points out, parodies Kafka’s grimmer Sentence Machine in “The Penal Colony,” the Puncutron fitted with an “inkjet printer” which moves “along the meridians of his [Takeshi’s] skin” (382) instead of Kafka’s grimmer needles, prompting what Porush calls “a happier transcendence” (103). Pynchon, in an inversion of the original tendency of play, seems to prefer a descent, or better yet a landing, from the digital to the analog (cf. Porush 100). So too, the comic elements in Pynchon’s text promote a benevolent deliverance from the paradoxes of a split ecology and a recursive return to nature not only neo-primitive, as in the modernist art of Gauguin or Picasso, but also postmodern as in the ecological art of Cristo, the archologies of Paolo Soleri, the ecological designs of Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature, and the doubly coded use of artificial intelligence to interface with traditional ritual in agriculture described in a recent Omni article entitled “The Goddess and The Computer.”11

     

    Typical of Pynchon’s sense of play, the glass transfenestrated by Zoyd turns out to be candy in this instance, to Zoyd’s simultaneous disappointment and relief, and his performance appreciated by an old gun for the FBI, Hector Gonzales. Play here adds both to the postmodern question of simulation–the double coding of reality and image–and of the paranoid schizophrenia which its double bind can evoke: are images new sorts of things and, if so, which is simulation or dissimulation? Image? Reality? And who’s in control? For Plato as for the philosophical tradition he started, noesis, the contemplation of pure form by the rational subject, and dianoia, the discursive processes of mathematical and logical thinking, are ways of escaping the realm of appearances, the images in the Cave. The subject exercises “self-control” and can distinguish between appearance and reality. But paranoia, the subject’s thinking amiss or literally beside or outside itself, is a state metonymically coded in terms of images not stabilized by an underlying reality. The self loses control, cannot stand apart from the flux of images, experiences fragmentation, the “split psyche” of schizophrenia, madness. But what if the images are controlled by an unseen hand, possibly Hector’s? The paranoid collapse of the personality, or the Peace movement, becomes the occasion for imposing political control. Madmen, like hippies or ecosystems, have no apparent defense against the designs of progress, the Cartesian subject’s quest for power.

     

    The paranoiac logic of Vineland‘s plot, its rhizomically connected thousand plateaus, is simultaneously an “eco-logic,” the deconstructive architecture of a mental ecology. This is its most important intersection with the logic of Mile Zero and fundamentally what makes them both literary ecology. Sanchez uses narrative, and most significantly an ecological narrator, to tie the various strands of his feminist and leftist characters and themes together in a deep-ecological web. It is from the wider perspective of the ecological mind that Sanchez’s narrator ultimately speaks, and it is into the loops of a larger social and ecological fabric that the fragments of Vineland circulate. In both novels, moreover, the ecological and paranoetic minds ultimately converge. Sanchez’s narrator is the most immediate and striking example of this perspective and convergence, for in the “grey pages” of the novel the voice addresses the reader directly, breaking from the plot and characters yet enveloping them:

     

    My moist hand is in yours, a stillborn turtle growing virtuous. You want to leave me, don't you? You don't like my chat, are fearful of fact. . . . You don't know who I am, do you? . . . My brain is like the Gulf Stream Twelve miles offshore, a vast blue river cutting through green ocean, its current pulsing seventy-five million tons of water through it each second, a force greater that the combined sum of all your earthly rivers. I am a torrent of thought flowing within society's surrounding sea, stream of ideas surging with plankton and verbs, a circular countercurrent fury . . . . (88)

     

    The ecological mind speaks in the persona of a great power, which identities itself as Zobop–

     

                   You-bop
                   He-bop
                   She-bop
                   They-bop
                   We bop
                   To-Zobop. (259)

     

    It is an ecological discourse “surging with plankton and verbs.” Plankton are the expression and animating power of the marine ecosystem just as verbs are of human language. This convergence between natural and human rubrics is most profound when Zobop reveals your/his/her/their/our ultimate secret:

     

    You don't like it, do you? If I am everything you are not, then you are everything I am. We see Eye through I now. You knew you were me all along, didn't you?

     

    We are articulations of consciousness inscribed in the heterogeneous “conversations” of the ecological mind, whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we dare to contemplate its implications. To take this seriously is, in terms of the Western notion of self, especially as it has become externalized in what Lewis Mumford called the Megamachine of industrial technology, precisely madness: paranoesis.

     

    Pynchon’s shattered characters inhabit a latticework of worlds tied together by the panopticon of Federal surveillance. His ecology is stranger and more enigmatic than Sanchez’s, one forested not only by redwoods but by new generations of high technology–like the Puncutron Machine or the “creatures” of the Media Lab at MIT. It’s as if the implicit question in Vineland as in Gravity’s Rainbow is, “What is nature that it could have invented the computer by means of man?” Appreciative of the complexities and ironies of science, Pynchon seems less sure where to draw the line between “nature” and “technology.” As Frenesi reasons, “If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least–an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO . . . . We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune” (91). This perspective is implicit in Sanchez’s final identification of the ecological and human personae but, in Pynchon, Bateson’s assertion–that lines drawn across the system bounding man, computer, and environment are purely artificial–is a working definition of mind.

     

    “Man,” in Pynchon’s vision, is destroying the biosphere including his own ecology and biology but is simultaneously replacing himself with rarefied machinery. “‘We are approaching the famous Chipco ‘Technology City,’ home of ‘Chuck,’ the world’s most invisible robot,” a PA monitor explains to Japanese karmic adjuster Takeshi Fumimota during a helicopter flight across Japan. “‘How invisible,’the voice continued, ‘you might wonder, is ‘Chuck’? Well, he’s been walking around among you, all through this whole flight!’” (146). But the point is not some neutral positivist one about the evolution of machines to replace people; it is rather a political one: the Modern machinery that the Western and now the Eastern world have created is insidious, mean spirited, power hungry, a kind of Death Star. In this regard Sanchez’s opening images in Mile Zero are also instructive. For as a boat carrying dying Haitian refugees drifts toward Key West, it crosses paths with a speedboat race, causing an accident, while above a space shuttle hurtles upward:

     

    Seabirds fly into new day, beneath them a watery world of mystery equal to the airy one above, where a man- made bird of steel streaks atop a pillar of flame. Only moments before the steel bird shook off an umbilical maze of flight feeders, its capsule head inhabited by six humans, their combined minds infinitely less than the bird's programmed range of computerized functions. (3)

     

    The technological supersession of the natural world, here figured in the image of the “man-made bird” with computerized intelligence enveloping the astronauts, has made some dubious characters gods of the earth. It must be countered, in Pynchon, by a combination of radical green- anarchist-feminist-ninjettes, accompanied by kids and dogs, along with computer hackers, paranoids and rock-‘n-rollers– a schizo-coalition that sounds like the cultural and political analog of biodiversity. In Sanchez one finds a more “serious” but nevertheless analogous coalition of rainbow socialists, feminists and ecologists as a counterforce.

     

    The adversary in Vineland, Brock Vond, has a special talent for splitting the human and natural ecologies. “Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep–if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching–need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family” (269). Accordingly Brock, a career G-man from the Nixon through the Reagan Administrations, subverted the peace movement for the former and attempts to destroy the remnants of the counter culture, under the banner of the most defensible of campaigns, for the latter: “Brock’s Troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting ‘War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!’ strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn’t remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco” (357). But as Johnny Copeland is quoted as saying in the frontispiece to Vineland, “Every dog has his day, / and a good dog / just might have two days.”

     

    And so Pynchon’s novel culminates in the aforementioned family reunion, with ecological dimensions, of Jess Traverse and Eula Becker, great-grandparents in the American radical tradition, where a new movement falls together like the fragments of Zoyd’s window would if we watched a video of his performance in reverse. The movement is as schizophrenically diverse as Vineland‘s characters, and one of retribution in the spirit of Emerson “read by Jess from a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience“: “‘Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil’” (369). This is the self-correction of the human ecological mind.

     

    “Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished,” Bateson warns. “We may say that the biological systems–the individual, the culture, and the ecology–are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces ‘God’ if you will” (434). If there is a new religiosity implicit in literary ecology, it is not animistic or deistic; it does not naively personify or project a super mind transcending nature. The ecological mind is as immanent in nature as our own mental processes are in the brain. Therefore, in spite of the rich diversity and resilience of life forms in which mental processes are inscribed, they can like Lake Erie or Zoyd be driven “insane.” This insanity, however, is only the wisdom of the ecology correcting epistemological error. Literary ecology is an expression in human letters of the larger writing of genotypes into phenotypes in the biosphere, poesis as a creative extension of morphogenesis. Like the woge whom the Yurok people along the river in Vineland understood to be “creatures like humans but smaller” (186), and who local hippies believe have returned to the ocean as porpoises, “to wait and see how humans did with the world,” literary ecologists “would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us . . .” (187).

     

    Notes

     

    1. There are various strains of ecological philosophy in the current literature, the most important of which are deep ecology, popularly associated with the journal Earth First!, socialist ecology, probably best represented by the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and ecological feminism, the most recent scholarship in which appears in a special issue of Hypatia, 6.1, Spring 1991. Literary ecology, as it is expressed in the work of Pynchon and Sanchez, involves a cross-section of these strains.

     

    2. See, especially, David Cowart, “Continuity and Growth”; Cowart argues that “The postmodern hoops through which the animals [circus animals, Pynchon’s characteristic images and themes] jumped–the self-reflexivity of structures that mocked structure, the representation of representation, the brilliant demonstrations that ‘meaning’ is always projective–seem to have given way to a simpler, less mannered displays” (177), the central theme of which is the quest for justice (179), a solid Enlightenment master narrative supposedly undermined, as Lyotard has argued, by the postmodern condition. See also Dwight Eddins, who attempts to formulate a “‘unified field theory’ that will account for both modern and postmodern Pynchon–the Pynchon whose world-view is suffused by acute nostalgia for vanished foundations and values, an the Pynchon whose field of vision seems occupied with discontinuities and absurdities that threaten our sense of a comprehensible, mappable, even affirmable existence” The Gnostic Pynchon xi).

     

    3. While Eddins employs the writings of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin with their concept of gnosticism to explicate Pynchon’s texts, he does not claim that Pynchon has been directly influenced by them but rather that, “The crucial commonality is a sort of philosophical force field that finds its origin the Judaeo-Christian Gnostics of antiquity (with whom Pynchon is demonstrably familiar) and spreads into modern (and very Pynchonian) concerns with such issues as existentialist vacuity and the cabalistic manipulation of history” (xi). Similarly, I am not claiming that Pynchon or Sanchez has read and been directly influenced by Wilden, Bateson or other writers mentioned below, but rather that they explicitly define concerns– socialism, cybernetics, information theory, feminism, mysticism etc.–that are shared, often implicitly, by literary ecologists.

     

    4. See “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 11.Steps 432-445, citation 433.

     

    5. “You see,” Bateson explains, “we’re not talking about the dear old Supreme Mind of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on down through ages–the Supreme Mind which was incapable of error and incapable of insanity. We’re talking about immanent mind, which is only too capable of insanity . . . .” Steps 493).

     

    6. It is important to note that Bateson’s theory of difference, characteristic of cybernetics and information theory, tends to be synchronic and static, purely formal. It therefore is subject to the Derridean criticism that it invokes a metaphysics of presence to describe what, even in Bateson’s own terms, is an “evolutionary” living system. What is called for is a postmodern ecology based not on the paradoxical notion of a stable, “identical,” system preserving the idealized structure of a set of differences, or “the truth of set of descriptive propositions about the variables of the system,” as I’ve quoted Bateson as saying, above, but a neo-structuralist ecology based on Derrida’s generative notion of differance. This, of course, will make the “ground” of ecological and hence of literary- ecological theory more like quicksand.

     

    7. Parts of this section are taken, in modified form, from my essay “Postmodern Ecology”; see Works Cited.

     

    8. “The novel’s title . . . recalls the discovery of America by Leif the Lucky and his fellow Vikings. For these Norsemen exiled from their homeland, Vineland represented an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate,” Elaine B. Safer explains in “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past” (110).

     

    9. In “On the Tube,” Pynchon has a panel of experts, “including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track- and-field coach . . . discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd’s technique, pointing out the useful distinction between the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an entirely different psychic subtext . . .” (15).

     

    10. “Encyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge,” among other things, Mendelson explains in “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” (30).

     

    11. See Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96. This project in artificial intelligence nicely illustrates the virtually ecological relationships among various modes of discourse. The Goddess and the Computer project demonstrates how the religious ceremonies of traditional Balinese culture, partly supplanted by the language and practice of Western development, turned out to be a valuable commentary on and careful regulator of the local ecology. This was discovered, as usual, after the society and human ecology had been so disrupted by “development” that agriculture became counterproductive and government agronomists wanted to know why. With the help of a computer model developed by a team at the University of Southern California, they discovered that development involved over- farming, and that traditional farming had been kept at an optimum level by the restraints of the ceremonies which in turn were based on careful observation of rain in the highlands and water flow to the cultivated lowlands. When the signs from Goddess, Dewi Danu, were right, the high priest said “yea” to farming. The domain of Dewi Danu happened to be that of a volcanic lake in the Balinese highlands which feeds a complex water system branching into rice fields divided by dams in the lowlands. In each group of fields, called a subak, there is a temple dedicated to a local god and overseen by a priest. Before letting water into the subak, local farmers would consult a priest who would give permission to irrigate only if he had the word from the priest of Dewi Danu’s lake “on high.” In this way water was equitably distributed by means of a complex system of rituals and signs, which themselves served diverse purposes other than “water management.” Now farmers consult both the priest and the Macintosh computer; this is double coding in the practical arts.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis. Chicago: Benton, 1952.
    • Bateson, Gregory. Steps to An Ecology of Mind. Rpt. 1972. Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1987.
    • Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. and Ed. A.D. Imerti. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1964.
    • Cowart, David. “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland. Critique XXXII, 2 (Winter 1990): 67-76.
    • —. “Continuity and Growth.” Kenyon Review (New Series) XII, 4, 176-190.
    • Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. II. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
    • —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. I. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
    • Eddins, Dwight. The Gnostic Pynchon. Bloominington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1990.
    • Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1971.
    • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Catherine Hutter. New York: NAL, 1962.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. “‘Who was Saved?’ Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Winter 1990: 77-92.
    • Jencks, Charles. What is Post-Modernism? New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.
    • Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 29-52.
    • —. “Levity’s Rainbow.” Rev. of Vineland. New Republic 9 and 16 July 1990: 40ff.
    • Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power. New York: HBJ, 1970.
    • Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia Spring 1991: 3-27.
    • Porush, David. “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine.” Critique. Winter 1990: 93-106.
    • Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. “Entropy.” Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. 79-98.
    • —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • —. Vineland. New York: Little Brown, 1990.
    • Safer, Elaine B. “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 107-125.
    • Sanchez, Thomas. Mile Zero. New York: Knopf, 1989.
    • Slade, Joseph. “Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 126-144.
    • —. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner, 1974.
    • Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977.
    • Starr, Douglas. “The Goddess and the Computer.” Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96.
    • White, Daniel R. “Postmodern Ecology.” Proceedings of Earth Ethics Forum ’91. Earth Ethics Research Group & St. Leo College, Florida. 10-12 May 1991.
    • Wilden, Anthony. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. Second Edition. London: Tavistock, 1980.
    • Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Rpt. 1977. London: Cambridge, 1985.