Tan Lin

 

   
tall blank zebras appear

 
              A
To care. The aerogramme made a lily of necessity,
stumped box, redolence ribboned far off in the glass
cities I opened and closed to the dandy
drawers. A colt emerged on a clotted pansy. A pan
required fanning. This repose a thread files.
Inside the spitting rope sweeps
like a foppish knot or lighthouse,
a beam where the sun withers like snow
in its box of jewels. Like a towel-like now.

 

tiny broom zippers boxed

 
               Z
Light as a ruler, I knitted the whiffing train to coverlet.
Dark, I had my lips. They travel apart when I kiss.
Exonerated groove. The captioned stock box
waved to the master's bedroom.
Clacked suds. All flaking tide and shout
was music walking out a headlamp.
Engined isthmus, emerged track of levels, it could be
nice. The pubescent birdie sleeps
in a closed head. So,
it knows or it knows.
A crumb held out a mighty
citron in a beak, screwed backwards.
But no ox sniffled to an owl
or stockinged box strum through bedroom.

 

 
 

Judith Goldman and Lisa Jarnot

 

One

 

And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary?
A “generation and transition” company make the
water muddy. Transitional generation in company
of a muddy mere formality: or was it going Dutch,
in transmission to transition? A mere formality of Dutch,
a merely formal vocabulary, to be used “in company”
of Dutch transmissions. My mission was to dutch
a trans-generation, to formulate transitions.
Or was it going muddy in the company?
I threw mud at mimesis, a mere Dutch formality.
And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary?
Formerly, the Dutch kept company without vocabulary.
My former mission was a mere formality,
but I doubled my Dutch on the company’s transmission.

 

Two

 

Primitive haze or composite rejection?
Such training requires persistence–
a fateful hour, a stupid wheel, praiseworthy
annals–the main term “reaction” would be
retained, though searching for innocuous
phenomena. It was not enough to have
a patternbook, a dictatorship, or to claw walls
looking for paint. Returning to the decoding end:
you make it more cryptic. I’ll pant effectively.
Roughly, in the rough, we are roughing it.
This happens when I forget to differentiate–
a false proposition of the first order.
Or say: “When you hate maps, you hate the future.”
Our lines are at stake in the border.
 

Bill Millard

Department of English
Rutgers University
millard@zodiac.rutgers.edu

 

“There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.”

 

–Weird Beard (Russell Lee Moore, a.k.a. Russ Knight), KLIF disk jockey in Libra

 

I. Paranoias and paradigms: Who’s afraid of Don DeLillo?

 

One of the most challenging qualities that Frank Lentricchia finds in Don DeLillo is that he “offers us no myth of political virginity preserved, no ‘individuals’ who are not expressions of–and responses to–specific historical processes” (“Introducing” 241). While most mainstream fiction of the Reagan era is marked by regionalisms and privatisms that bespeak an alarming poverty of imagination, DeLillo dares to project a world in its full political complexity and to grapple with ideas that might make some sense of events observed in the public sphere. Working within a culture that was both postmodern and nostalgic, a culture that longed for the pieties of laissez- faire economics and Euro-American bourgeois individualism while its socioeconomic institutions were busily breaking down any remaining space for individuals or individuality, DeLillo recognized that the 1980s could not be understood without attention to the problem of individual behavior in a social sphere hypersaturated with the products of signifying systems. The “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (Libra 181) is a superb symbolic moment on which to focus such attention, since it is obviously much more than a symbol.

 

To publish a historical novel that posited a plausible chain of events leading to the assassination of John Kennedy was more than an act of defiant imagination or political chutzpah; it raised the stakes for the enterprise of fiction within a culture rapidly losing its allegiance to written language as a practical means of organizing experience. Libra makes the implicit claim that no matter what one might believe of the lone-gunman theory or the Warren Commission’s report–in CIA master-researcher Nicholas Branch’s view, “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred” (181)–the assembly of explanatory narratives from the available evidence surrounding the events at Dealey Plaza is as legitimate a concern for a novelist as for any journalist, historian, or member of an investigative body. Given the evidentiary problems surrounding this assassination, the unexplained (or unsatisfyingly explained) deaths of participants in these events and witnesses to them, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories of varying degrees of credibility, the novelist may in fact be on stronger ground than members of these other fields in asserting truth claims about Kennedy’s death.

 

This position depends on a precise characterization of the nature of a historical truth claim. Libra achieves its disruptive force by offering a fresh paradigm by which an event like the Kennedicide may be understood. This paradigm¹ is post-individualist, while accounting for individual actions and decisions within social signifying systems; it refuses both the easy gambit of universal skepticism toward the possibility of explaining such an event and the equally easy temptation of overreaching causal conjecture. It is immune to charges that might be lodged from opposite directions: the accusation of credulity, involving the sense of universal connectivity associated with conspiracy theory (regarded as paranoid in both the vernacular and the Pynchonian senses), and that of ahistorical nihilism, involving the disjunctivity of explanations that lodge sole culpability with Oswald (and thus reduce an incident with massive social causes and consequences to private motivation, mere inexplicable insanity). DeLillo’s text implies an interpretive paradigm that neither overplays nor underplays its hand, connecting events with participants’ intentions while eschewing any model of those intentions as deliberate, purposeful, or necessarily connected with their outcomes.

 

Libra‘s reception among the guardians of a conceptual border between fiction and the presumably nonfictional discourses of history, politics, and journalism was venomous to an astonishing but hardly inexplicable degree. Like Lentricchia, journalist Hal Crowther assesses the vituperation directed at DeLillo by George F. Will and Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post as a significant barometer of the book’s power, an indication of the authoritarian paranoia that it arouses–a deeper and truer paranoia than the accounts Oliver Stone, James Garrison, the aficionado of the Austin bookstore’s “Conspiracy” section in Slacker, or any caller to a WBAI-FM talk show might conjure. Crowther posits a credible reason why the paranoia in corporate journalism’s higher circles might mirror or exceed the paranoia in the lower: “At the Post they love to talk about Watergate, but they don’t want to talk about Dallas. Establishment journalists know in their guts that they chickened out on the biggest story of their time and left it to fringe players and exhumers of Elvis” (330).²

 

Both of the Post commentators are sniffishly dismissive of the political implications of Libra, but Will also makes an explicit case for historical disjunctivism: “It takes a steady adult nerve to stare unblinkingly at the fact that history can be jarred sideways by an act that signifies nothing but an addled individual’s inner turmoil” (qtd. in Crowther 323). Characteristically, Will takes a reasonable-sounding position in favor of willfully limiting the reach of historical reasoning. One may safely presume that any historian, journalist, congressional investigator, or novelist does desire “a steady adult nerve,” but Will’s argument fails to consider why causal inquiry must stop with the observation of individual pathology.

 

Oswald, as DeLillo represents him in Libra, is indeed addled–afflicted, apparently congenitally, with a moderately severe combination of dyslexia and dysgraphia– and in constant personal turmoil. Will’s criticism thus seems not only disproportionate but misapplied to this novel. In depicting a clueless gunman who bases his actions on romantic adolescent notions of political destiny, plays into the hands of nearly every conspirator or would-be conspirator around him, and even carries the requisite familial baggage for the privatistic banalities of Freudian interpretation (absent father, domineering mother, and largely repressed but recurrent gay desires), doesn’t DeLillo provide individual-pathology theorists with all the evidence they need? But the crucial distinction here is between a reading that incorporates individual pathology and an individualist, disjunctivist reading. DeLillo’s offense, beyond merely “exhibit[ing] the same skepticism that was almost universal at the time the Warren Report was released” (Crowther 323), is continuing the investigation into and through the pathological individual. Oswald is pathological without being particularly distinct from his surroundings.

 

Will and Yardley’s wagon-circling responses to Libra also resemble Tom Wolfe’s comments about Noam Chomsky’s theories of the structural imperatives of the news media within the corporate state, included in the documentary Manufacturing Consent (1992). Wolfe derisively dismisses Chomsky’s argument about control over the limits of permissible public debate on the grounds that it would require the manipulation of the media by a cabal of plotters, presumably gathered in a single room–a laughably cinematic image of organized malignity, mirrored from the right by Gen. Edwin Walker’s rant about the “Real Control Apparatus”:

 

The Apparatus is precisely what we can’t see or name. We can’t measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can’t get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover. This doesn’t mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives. (Libra 283)

 

Because his account of the Chomskyist critique adheres to the same individual-intentionalist paradigm, Wolfe cannot imagine a controlled discourse without conscious and practically omnipotent controllers; because they refuse to entertain possibilities beyond Warren Report orthodoxy and rational intentionalism, Will and Yardley conflate DeLillo with the “fringe players and exhumers of Elvis.” To posit mechanisms by which fringe players operate is hardly to embrace the fringe oneself. Like Chomsky elucidating the hard-wired requirements of the information industry, DeLillo outlines certain inevitable tendencies of organized sub rosa actions, aware that those tendencies go into effect no matter who does the organizing or why.

 

Cluelessness is indeed central to the actions of this novel, but it is crucial to recognize that cluelessness in this political atmosphere is by no means limited to Oswald. From Win Everett’s private mixture of motivations (only belatedly incorporating the recognition that “the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot” [221]) to David Ferrie’s sexual desires and religious mysticism, private perceptions with distinct limits shape the actions of each participant in the action of Libra. A plot against JFK arises, but without the conscious guidance of its master plotters. It is a conspiracy that Wolfe, Will, and Yardley would not recognize, an overarching “deathward logic” (221) that encompasses clever players like George de Mohrenschildt, whose loathing for Gen. Walker elicits his only expressions of strong emotion (55-56), and the CIA’s Laurence Parmenter (“part of the Groton-Yale-OSS network of so-called gentlemen spies . . . the pure line, a natural extension of schoolboy societies, secret oaths and initiations” [30]) along with willfully delusional Birchers like Guy Banister, who spends late-night hours poring masturbatorily over his “final nightmare file” purporting to document “Red Chinese troops . . . being dropped into the Baja by the fucking tens of thousands,” and who “wanted to believe it was true. He did believe it was true. But he also knew it wasn’t” (351-52). Each conspirator, seeing no further than his own interests, fears, or desires for revenge, moves in a private direction; the resultant vector of all these individual movements is something no individualist interpreter dares call conspiracy.

 

II. Insects and insubordinations: A myopic-interaction model

 

An interdisciplinary model of collective behavior that develops its own directionality, regardless of any single participant’s agenda, comes from the improbable intersection of two fields of study: entomology (as practiced on an amateur basis by a budding physicist) and computer science. Richard Feynman, recalling his home experiments with ants’ navigational behavior, finds that the insects either move randomly or follow each other’s trails, and that the repetition of small deviations when they follow each other results in a composite trail that gives the illusory appearance of order.

 

One question that I wondered about was why the anttrails look so straight and nice. The ants look as if they know what they’re doing, as if they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to demonstrate their sense of geometry didn’t work. . . . At first glance it looks like efficient, marvelous, brilliant cooperation. But if you look at it carefully, you’ll see that it’s nothing of the kind. (95-96)

 

None of Feynman’s ants moves individually in a straight line, but the collective movement nevertheless produces a straight line, simulating purposeful effort.

 

Transylvanian computer scientist Alfred Bruckstein, working with mathematical pursuit problems at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, has formalized Feynman’s conjecture, proving the theorem that an initially disorderly series of pursuit paths will converge to the straight segment connecting the initial point of departure, e.g., an anthill, and the destination of the original “pioneer ant,” e.g., a recently discovered food source (Bruckstein 60-61). His model of “global behavior that results from simple and local interaction rules” (62) has implications for robotics as well as for the behavior of animal colonies. It also has implications for the behavior of human organizations, at least metaphorically–and perhaps, if one notes its resemblance to the “political resultant” theory used in the field of geopolitical decision analysis (Allison 7-8), literally as well.³ If “globally optimal solutions for navigation problems can be obtained as a result of myopic cooperation between simple agents or processors” (Bruckstein 62), can any form of multiple myopia–perhaps the combined myopias of a disgraced, “buried,” and resentful CIA agent; a soldier of fortune with no fixed address and undiscernible loyalties; a disease-obsessed and mystically inclined pilot, sacked from an airline job because of institutional homophobia, who contemplates developing hypnotism as a weapon and claims to “believe in everything” (Libra 314-15); and a dyslexic political naif who daydreams of merging with the flow of history–also give the appearance of directed movement?

 

In the national security state as depicted by DeLillo, myopic interaction is not a human imperfection in an otherwise efficient system; it is built into the system from the outset. During the planning that resulted in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Everett and Parmenter were part of a layered and deliberately fragmented bureaucracy, described by DeLillo in parodically numbing detail:

 

The first stage, the Senior Study Effort, consisted of fourteen high officials, including presidential advisers, ranking military men, special assistants, undersecretaries, heads of intelligence. They met for an hour and a half. Then eleven men left the room, six men entered. The resulting group, called SE Augmented, met for two hours. Then seven men left, four men entered, including Everett and Parmenter. This was SE Detailed, a group that developed specific covert operations and then decided which members of SE Augmented ought to know about these plans. Those members in turn wondered whether the Senior Study Effort wanted to know what was going on in stage three.

 

Chances are they didn’t. When the meeting in stage three was over, five men left the room and three paramilitary officers entered to form Leader 4. Win Everett was the only man present at both the third and fourth stages (20).

 

The point of all this Beckettish enumeration is not simply that antlike bureaucrats come and go, talking of Guantanamo, but that the form of rationality peculiar to such organizations depends precisely on minimizing the possibility that anyone might know enough to comprehend the full narrative:

 

 Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. . . .

 

It was the President, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts. They all knew that JFK wanted Castro cooling on a slab. but they weren’t allowed to let on to him that his guilty yearning was the business they’d charged themselves to carry out. The White House was to be the summit of unknowing. (21-22)

 

Resemblances to the Reagan-Bush White House, the unpenetrating Tower hearings into the Iran-contra phase of covert national security operations, and the doctrine of “plausible deniability” are perfectly coincidental, of course. But the plot against Castro, taking grimly comic turns at first (poisoned or exploding cigars, “a poison pen in the works . . . testing a botulin toxin on monkeys . . . fungus spores in his scuba suit” [21]), then culminating in the botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs, serves as a kind of prologue-plot, prefiguring the myopically planned spectacle of Dealey Plaza. When the control of public events requires the diffusion of awareness and dispersal of control, it is unsurprising that Everett’s initial idea of a theatrically managed, well-controlled near miss–as executed, or functionally interpreted, by black-ops technician T-Jay Mackey and his team of shooters, including “Leon” Oswald–goes out of control, its multiple shades of signification simplified to the brutality of an actual hit.

 

The tendency toward myopic interactions pervades the official and unofficial national security apparatus, not only in the Bay of Pigs fiasco but in the meetings that continue after the official dispersal of groups such as Leader 4 and SE Detailed. “True believers” like the men of Leader 4 may be too “overresponsive to policy shifts, light- sensitive, unpredictable” (22) to continue in covert operations, but they carry on meeting obsessionally out of sheer momentum, a shadow-cabal without real powers (and a caricature of Tom Wolfe’s vision of conspirators). Everett, the one agent who knew enough details of the anti-Castro operations to serve as the Agency equivalent of a pioneer ant, is relegated to the emasculated existence of a planted fake professor at Texas Woman’s University, repeating pointless movements:

 

Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion, without meaning or need (16).

 

He imagines a painting commemorating the confrontation of Leader 4 with agents of the CIA’s Office of Security, titling this canvas “Light Entering the Cave of the Ungodly” (24)–implying religiosity and the Fall, not instrumental rationality, which they have tried for a time and found inoperative.

 

III. Cinema and simulacra: The fallacy of forensic romance

 

Everett and his fellow ex-“clandestines” are drawn to pointless activity as lapsing believers are drawn to ritual, no longer convinced that their actions have political content, but compelled to continue them nonetheless. They are not so much a conspiracy as the simulacrum of a conspiracy, performing according to a script whose composition is ongoing and is not under their control. They have effects on history, but hardly the “personal contribution to an informed public. . . . the major subtext and moral lesson” (53) that Everett hopes will ensue, redeeming him in the eyes of history. He fails to see that this romantic vision (the truth seeing the light of day!) is incompatible with the simulacral nature of postmodern political activity–that his plan’s complex elegance is unlikely to survive its implementation by field operatives such as Mackey and Wayne Elko, who have consumed too many images of themselves as Seven Samurai (145) to be reliable executors of subtle instructions (much as follower ants simplify the intricate paths of a pioneer ant).⁴ Once Everett has embraced the politics of the public image, hoping to manipulate the media and the Agency through the perception of a vengeful Castro–publicly raising the question of just what actions Castro is seeking to avenge–he reveals his myopia: he forgets that the politics of the public image tends to embrace you back.

 

It is practically inevitable that a consideration of Libra, with its displacements of agency and its recurrent coincidences between engineered events and happenstance (“It was no longer possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot” [178]), will lead to a Baudrillardian vision of social processes. The use of Oswald, Boy Marxist, as the instrument of the anti-Castroite conspiracy (a “negative Libran” [315] whom Ferrie believes might flip in either direction) is a clear example of Baudrillard’s “Moebius-spiralling negativity” whereby

 

[a]ll the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. . . . Is any given bombing . . . the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power . . . ? All this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. (30-31)

 

Even the Post‘s pet conspiracy Watergate was a nonscandal to Baudrillard, a show trial designed to create a “moral superstructure” (27) behind which the amoral capitalist state can function. To interpret such events as struggles of right and left over rationally expressible questions of public interest–rather than structural fictions obscuring the fact that the Watergate break-in and cover-up, or whatever plot culminated in Dealey Plaza, were closer to normative than exceptional state behavior.⁵–is to mistake vertigo for orientation.

 

Power, in Baudrillard’s vision, both uses and fears simulacra. It strives for a monopoly on simulation, punishing acts such as a theatrical “fake hold-up” (39); it fears unsanctioned simulation more than it fears violent transgression, precisely because simulation “always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation” (38, emphasis Baudrillard’s). The Everett/Parmenter/Banister/Mackey/Elko/Raymo/ Ferrie/Oswald mechanism converts the near-miss, a simulation that might have publicized sensitive covert operations, into a hit on Kennedy, a shock that the state apparatus can ultimately absorb. Sociopolitical structures could tolerate actual violence against this president, but not symbolic violence against the system of signs that functions as protective coloration for the operations of capital. “Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others . . . only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders” (37).

 

Discourses of truth come in for rough treatment in Baudrillard’s world, and the figures in Libra who try to enact discourses of truth are likewise disoriented and defeated. At the opposite end of the plot from the hapless Everett, who thought he could induce media hyperreality to do the work of the real, sits Nicholas Branch, performing historical reconstruction from the masses of evidence supplied to him by the Curator. Branch, the would-be panoptical reader who can synthesize the entire mass of materials into a credible historical truth claim, is at first driven to complete his history whether or not anyone will ever read it. It steadily becomes apparent to him, however, that he is performing a simulacrum of research. His position is both a scholar’s heaven, with apparently infinite research materials provided instantly on request, and a scholar’s hell of overabundance and nonintegration; his papery environment is hallucinatorily Borgesian, part Library of Babel and part Garden of Forking Paths. Branch is Homo documentarius, linear-thinking Gutenbergian Man, with his logical and recombinatory faculties underscored in his surname,⁶ but his attempt at a definitive reconstruction of the Kennedicide peters out as miserably as Everett’s attempt to send true information to the public.

 

For his naive belief in the possibility of a realist discourse about Dealey Plaza, Branch receives a different form of knowledge, which he comes to interpret as a form of punishment, from the sources he depends on. He is damned to an eternal investigation, drowned in information that is sensory as well as documentary, including the contradictory, the irrelevant, and the gruesome. The primary texts that the Curator continues to send him include not only the obligatory Zapruder film (that most exhaustively scrutinized of cinematic texts) but autopsy photos, “the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. . . . an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell. . . . The bloody goat heads seem to mock him. He begins to think this is the point” (299). In place of the coherence of an explainable conspiracy, he comes to see the plot as “a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like”–yet “[t]he stuff keeps coming” (441), defying comprehension at Branch’s end of the plot just as events defied control at Everett’s. Instead of attaining the closure one expects from a narrative syntagm, the successful completion of his forensic romance, Branch becomes the Sisyphus of mediated information. He is still reading signs at the close of the novel; he has still written little; he has accepted a grim role as the goatherd of historical hell, keeper of the unintelligible secrets of the state.

 

IV. Infocide

 

DeLillo’s plot is a nightmarish parable of the transmission of any type of consequential information through the public sphere under late capitalism. The sender, mediators, and receiver of the message (Everett, the other conspirators, and Branch, respectively) are all maintained in a state of myopia throughout the process; the initial message is replaced by an antithetical counter- message and never reaches its true intended receiver, the politically responsible public. This is precisely as ruling-class apologists of George Will’s ilk would have it, of course, with forensic interpretation forestalled and political accountability rendered risible. Useful communication is stultified under such conditions; the state’s literal control apparatus (from police to spies) becomes redundant, if not vestigial, when much of the citizenry is occupied with information-games that lack real referents and consequences. In Baudrillard’s glum description of daily life in the realm of infinite simulation, there is “[n]o more violence or surveillance; only ‘information,’ secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion and simulacra of spaces where the real-effect again comes into play. We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space” (54).

 

The capitalist polity, of course, has always had its own defensive mythologies to characterize its processes as positively benign. The theory of myopic interactions is by no means the only case of insect behavior offering a metaphoric explanation of human behavior. If, under this paradigm, a series of antlike actions in pursuit of private interests combine to result in public calamity, one formative myth of the early capitalist era uses another arthropod collective to extol the processes that Adam Smith would anthropomorphize and anatomize some 70 years later as capitalism’s benevolent Invisible Hand. Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, first appearing in 1705, offers a conceptual structure remarkably similar to Bruckstein’s. His beehive prospers as long as it tolerates a rich array of interlocking iniquities, but it loses both its wealth and its power relative to other hives when it gives in to the impulses of reform, economic leveling, and anti-imperalism. A critical difference between these two images of human- society-as-insect-colony is that Mandeville, while applauding the system that transmutes private vices into public benefits, also inverts the equation and identifies public-spiritedness itself, on an individual scale, with disaster on the social scale. Throughout the period of capital’s social dominance, it seems, one encounters a form of consciousness that wilfully refuses to form a lucid and integrative social vision.

 

Mandeville’s account of apian society is founded on the same sort of macro/micro disjunction by which Feynman and Bruckstein explain formic navigation: behavior that looks like error or disorder at the individual level combines with other such behavior to produce order for the collective. Like any capitalist utilitarian, pre-Marxian or post-, Mandeville rationalized the glaring class distinctions among his bees with the observation that “Industry/Had carry’d Life’s Conveniences,/It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,/To such a Height, the very Poor/Lived better than the Rich before” (ll. 198-202). This is the classical rationalization of inequities and iniquities under capitalism; it would recur in the Reaganite trope of a rising tide lifting all boats. And Mandeville’s identification of social reform as counterproductive, removing the incentives that drive the invisible hand, would recur nearly three centuries later in Margaret Thatcher’s denouncements of any public policy based on compassion or economic justice as tearfully sentimental, or “wet.”

 

The same contempt for social interaction reaches a peak of comic exaggeration in Libra when David Ferrie, joking with Mafioso Carmine Latta (who will later manipulate Jack Ruby into taking his role in the script) about the Cold War apocalypse that might ensue if the U.S. tried to bomb Cuba to retrieve it from the Communists for the mob, asserts a positive preference for postnuclear Hobbesianism:

 

. . . I like the idea of living in shelters. You go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The sewer system is a form of welfare state. It’s a government funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being independent, digging latrines in the woods, in a million backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit. (173)

 

How clearly can one distinguish this parodic hyperindividualism from the attitude expressed in the Impeach Earl Warren signs⁷ and swastika graffiti that sends Weird Beard into nervous premonitory improvisations? (381-82).

 

On a fundamental level, communication itself is at odds with the belief system shared by Mandeville, Will, Reagan (the “Great Communicator”!), Ferrie, Latta, Gen. Walker, and the looming Bircher population of 1963 Dallas. This is a community that has been immunized against community, unified in acceptance of fragmentation. Much has been written about the proliferation of signifiers from commercial culture in DeLillo’s works, and about how these intersecting messages shred the idea of an individual consciousness: “a whole network of popular mythology, allowing DeLillo to show how the possibilities of meaning and action are shaped by the contemporary ethos of simultaneity and indeterminacy . . . . Character, the transformation and realization of the novelistic subject’s depth through narrative time, is replaced by the notion of character as a function of the frequently self-canceling languages of representation in which the novelistic self is situated” (Wacker 70-71).

 

These environments are so oversaturated with disconnected messages that they pose a risk of what one might call “death by information”–a particular hazard for someone like Oswald, who lacks (probably for hereditary neurologic reasons) the integrative capacity that makes purposeful linguistic behavior possible. For all his protestations about economic injustice, Oswald’s image of Communism is a consumer item, a boy’s perverse fantasy of becoming the Other the whole culture fears; the roles of Stalin and Trotsky are natural outgrowths of teenage idol- worship, exotic alternatives to John Wayne, in whose screen- sanctified presence he also bathes while on mess duty at Corregidor (93-94). He forgets to visit Trotsky’s house in Mexico City, and “[t]he sense of regret makes him feel breathless, physically weak, but he shifts out of it quickly, saying so what” (358), like a visitor to Hollywood missing part of a Universal Studios tour. Writing his Historic Diary while in Russia, he is “[s]tateless, word- blind”:

 

Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess the rest.

 

He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world. (211)

 

Word-blindness is not the same thing as ignorance: “He knew things. It wasn’t that he didn’t know” (211). Spymaster Marion Collings gives Oswald a recruiting speech about the interpretive importance of context–“A fact is innocent until someone wants it. Then it becomes intelligence. . . . An old man eating a peach is intelligence if it’s August and the place is the Ukraine and you’re a tourist with a camera . . . . There’s still a place for human intelligence” (247)–but Oswald is unsuited for this type of cognitive work. He incorporates within his own cranium the perspectivelessness and disconnection of the whole culture; he is a living representative of a myopically interactive informational realm.

 

Death by information goes hand in hand with the death of information. In a hyperreal environment where messages are infinitely reproducible and convertible, Collings’ elision of the two meanings of “intelligence” (the raw informational material itself and the human skill at making sense of it) metastasizes throughout the culture, and the former overcomes the latter. As William Cain observes after discussing this passage, “in American culture, there are always more facts, more intelligence. . . . The irony is that the spread of information fails to lead to clearer meaning and more finely focused intelligence. People assemble knowledge, and its transmission from person to person and place to place does signify, yet the import of it all stays mysterious” (281). Such a quantity of information ensures that little or no actual informing ever occurs.

 

Is the dominance of the myopic-interaction paradigm absolute? Does Libra reinforce “what we darkly suspect about the postmodern alteration of the mind” (Cain 281)? The bathetic but intensely imagined monologue by Marguerite Oswald (448-456), patching together incoherent cliches and insights until they achieve a desperate coherence, concludes Libra in a minor key, but it is hardly the same fatalistic minor key in which Baudrillard composes. Implicitly, at least on a metafictional level, passages like this imply that it is still possible to select information from the ceaseless media Babel and combine it in ways that generate power (at least if one has Don DeLillo’s ear for the spoken American language). The question remains whether the borders between art-language and world-language are permeable.

 

For one alternative to communicative myopia, one can do worse than return to the empiricist intelligence of Richard Feynman. The ant-navigation paradigm is opposed in his text by a recurrent behavioral model that equates global awareness of purpose with problem-solving effectiveness. The most explicit description of this informed-interaction model occurs in the long chapter “Los Alamos from Below,” where he recounts his experiences working on the Bomb. Security interests have mandated the fragmentation of knowledge–with a level of control and surveillance that can properly be called paranoid, however justifiable under wartime conditions–but Feynman intuits that disseminating more knowledge about the project among technical workers will improve the quality and efficiency of their work. Experience proves him right:

 

The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. The army had selected them from all over the country for a thing called Special Engineer Detachment –clever boys from high school who had engineering ability. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks. And they would tell them nothing.

 

Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines–punching holes, numbers that they didn’t understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we’re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission . . . .

 

Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. . . . [A]ll that had to be done was to tell them what it was. (127-128)

 

The bureaucrats who set up Special Engineer Detachment counted on the efficacy of myopic interactions, under the assumption that only a small coterie (analogous to the pioneer ant that knows the location of the food) could be trusted with information about the direction of the collective endeavor, but Feynman explicitly demonstrates the superiority of informed interactions for certain types of operations. What works for ants and assassins does not necessarily improve results for engineers, and DeLillo’s account of the information-structures that produced the Kennedicide–regardless of whether the specific events he imagines to occupy that structural framework are veridical, a proposition unlikely ever to be confirmed or disproved– qualifies him as something like a conceptual engineer. This status adds weight to his works’ implicit claim to have influence in the public sphere.

 

In Mao II, DeLillo extends and deepens the intimation that the Gutenberg/Branch paradigm cannot make sense of the postmodern era’s public events. The transition from the world of Libra to that of Mao II–perhaps a paradigm shift within DeLillo’s work to mirror the one he sees occurring in the political world–becomes clear toward the conclusion of the latter book as Bill Gray approaches death, sensing that his form of information is in eclipse during the days of Moon and Khomeini (“‘What terrorists gain, novelists lose’” [157]). The literary world where he once enjoyed ferocious debate with his friend and editor Everson is in decline, eroded by the perks of capital (“‘Who owns this company?’ ‘You don’t want to know.’ ‘Give me the whole big story in one quick burst.’ ‘It’s all about limousines’” [101-02]). His belief that his actions have public consequences is also in decline; his agreeing to meet with Abu Rashid’s hostage-holders represents the beginning of a prolonged suicide for both Gray and his mode of thought. Moving eastward toward the rendezvous and the grave, Gray sustains an inner monologue that retreats from public observation into the myopic realm of personal and familial nostalgia.

 

The individual artist in language, this plot implies, is obsolete because he has always been bounded by, and bound to, his privacy–an artifact of a social order that no longer exists. Yet Gray’s language is succeeded by a different language, that of Brita Nilsson’s camera. She does not refuse to participate in history; her gesture to unmask the armed youth at the end of her meeting with Abu Rashid dramatizes her willingness to be an active participant in events, not a passive recorder (236). She, like DeLillo, is still a public citizen and an artist who can surprise the public; her visual language produces factual texts that are indeed selected–hardly the panoptical god’s-eye view of a would-be master historian like Branch, or of the illusory “objective” news media–but selected with the informed, receptive eye of a new kind of informational engineer. Myopia, after all, is easily corrected with lenses.

 

Notes

 

1. I will designate this paradigm the “theory of myopic interactions,” borrowing the term from Alfred Bruckstein. Bruckstein does not use the term “myopic interactions” in his Mathematical Intelligencer article, but the phrase is attributed to him in a brief description of this article in Science (April 23, 1993). It is broader in scope than the phrase he originally uses, “myopic cooperation,” since it allows for noncooperative or actively antagonistic interactions such as those involving governmental operatives and Oswald or Ruby.

 

2. Whether they would still love to talk about Watergate after talking about it with Baudrillard, however, is an open question.

 

3. Graham Allison offers competing explanatory models for a particularly intricate geopolitical test case, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba. According to the “Rational Actor” or “classical” model, the one most foreign policy analysts and laymen have implicitly embraced, governments make decisions monolithically as individual chess players do, referring to specific defined objectives and calculating the rational means of attaining them. However, the “Organizational Process” and “Governmental (Bureaucratic) Politics” models better explain the “intra-national mechanisms” (6) that determine international behavior: each apparent monolith or chess player is in fact a black box containing competing organizations, interests, and individuals, each of whom pursues distinct and only partially compatible objectives. Analysis of the organization, routines, and relative bargaining power of these components yields an understanding of how participants come to make irrational decisions. I am indebted to Katie Burke, MD, FACEP, for calling my attention to Allison’s work and its applications to medical and governmental decision analysis, as well as to the argument presented here.

 

4. Elko’s identification of his paramilitary role with cinematic models is made explicit, as is his own form of myopia, when he muffs his task of killing Oswald at the arranged rendezvous site, the Texas Theater, by waiting through the feature (Cry of Battle) to “let the tension build. Because that’s the way they do it in the movies” (412), allowing police to apprehend him instead. Staying for the second feature (War Is Hell) after “Leon” is removed confirms Elko’s priorities.

 

5. “In fact, the charges against Nixon were for behavior not too far out of the ordinary, though he erred in choosing his victims among the powerful, a significant deviation from established practice. He was never charged with the serious crimes of his Administration: the ‘secret bombing’ of Cambodia, for example. The issue was indeed raised, but it was the secrecy of the bombing, not the bombing itself, that was held to be the crime. . . . We might ask, incidentally, in what sense the bombing was ‘secret.’ Actually, the bombing was ‘secret’ because the press refused to expose it” (Chomsky 81-82).

 

6. Branch is among the first characters introduced in the book, appearing within six pages of another Nicholas: one of young Oswald’s taunting truant companions in the Bronx, Nicky Black, who “know[s] where to get these books where you spin the pages fast, you see people screwing” (8). Referring to himself in the third person as “the kid,” collapsing the distinction between written language and cinema with his primitive porn, bearing the Devil’s conventional given name (though “the name was always used in full, never just Nicky or Black” [8]), and vanishing from the book after a single scene, Nicky Black is the sort of background character whose very irrelevance to the narrative charges him with symbolism. When a second Nicholas B. then appears among larger, more important masses of paper, does the inference that DeLillo is setting up early subtextual linkages between an obsession with textual forms and Auld Nickie-Ben constitute interpretive overaggression?

 

7. The irony of rightists calling for the impeachment of the very man who would head the commission that performed a simulacral investigation, thus protecting the plotters (in yet another Moebius-spiral), is unlikely to be lost on many readers of Libra but is probably lost on quite a few of the rightists.

 

Works Cited

 

• Allison, Graham T. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.
• Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. 1-79.
• Bruckstein, Alfred M. “Why the Ant Trails Look So Straight and Nice.” Mathematical Intelligencer 15.2 (1993): 59-62.
• Cain, William E. “Making Meaningful World: Self and History in Libra.” Rev. of DeLillo, Don, Libra. Michigan Quarterly Review 29.2 (1990): 275-287.
• Chomsky, Noam. Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There. New York: Pantheon, 1982.
• Crowther, Hal. “Clinging to the Rock: A Novelist’s Choices in the New Mediocracy.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 321-336.
• DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
• —. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
• Feynman, Richard. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. Ed. Edward Hutchings. New York: Norton, 1985.
• “Follow-the-Leader Math.” (News report on Bruckstein’s paper, with quote from Bruckstein.) Science 260 (April 23, 1993): 495.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “The American Writer as Bad Citizen–Introducing Don DeLillo.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 239-244.
• —. “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 431-453. Originally published inRaritan 8.4 (1989): 1.
• Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., Marshall Waingrow, and Brewster Rogerson. New York: Harcourt, 1969: 267-277.
• Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Dir. Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar. 1992.
• Slacker. Dir. Richard Linklater. 1991
• Wacker, Norman. “Mass Culture/Mass Novel: The Representational Politics of Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Works and Days 8.1 (1990): 67-87.

 

Stephen Bernstein

Department of English
University of Michigan – Flint
bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu

 

Aside from their humor, Don DeLillo’s novels are noted almost as frequently for their brilliant terror, manifested as a frisson at the core of contemporary existence. Frank Lentricchia comments on DeLillo’s “yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America” (“American” 2), while Arnold Weinstein observes that “one is tempted to posit terror itself as the ground for the psyche in DeLillo, an indwelling creatural horror that underlies all the codes and systems” (294). The terror is not simply the terrorism with which DeLillo is almost obsessively concerned, but also that of a sublime dimension of experience. Again and again DeLillo’s characters are faced with the inexplicability of events and the giddy suspicion, terrifying in its eventual impact, that a darker force determines reality.

 

The sublime appears in DeLillo’s fiction in several forms. As John Frow has shown, White Noise‘s airborne toxic event and the sunsets it subsequently influences trigger a representational inadequacy on the part of their viewers. Jack Gladney wonders why he should try to describe what the sunsets have become. This is not the eighteenth-century sublime of Kant or Burke, however, but one more specifically postmodern: “the inadequacy of representation comes not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the multiplicity of prior representations” (176). The sublime of belatedness Frow formulates does not exhaust DeLillo’s excursions into the category; Michael W. Messmer reveals an “activist (Kantian) sublime” (410) in White Noise which centers on the ability of the Gladneys to respond to the terrifying sublimity of the airborne toxic event, to question the gains of science if they produce such aberrations.

 

In Libra DeLillo returns to the more familiar Kantian sublimes of magnitude and ineffability. For Kant the sublime “is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality” (90). The result for the observer is an emotion “dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination . . .a negative pleasure” (91). Kant’s “mathematical” sublime is rooted in cognition, being that “in comparison with which all else is small”(97), while his “dynamically” sublime appeals more to imagination, raising it “to a presentation of those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being, even above nature” (111-12). DeLillo’s sublime will not share the more transcendental aspects of this model, as his characters are predictably limited, from the postromantic vantage of the 1950s and 1960s, in their ability to appreciate the sublimity of the imagination’s sphere.

 

For Kant “One who is in a state of fear . . . flees from the sight of an object filling him with dread; and it is impossible to take delight in terror that is seriously entertained” (110). Containing as it does the account of terror which is largely absent from Kant’s, Burke’s model is similarly relevant to DeLillo. While DeLillo’s readers may have the appropriate distance from his novels’ terror to appreciate the sublimity of his depiction of a culture about to spin out of orbit, his characters do not. Thus they are more helpfully considered in the Burkean model, which holds that “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . .whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (39); the imaginative response to the sublime, then, “is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (57). What we will see in Libra is a hybrid combination of Kant and Burke, a sublime which is manifested through magnitude and ineffability, exhausting the powers of enumeration or speech to give any representational account of it. At the same time this sublime will arouse a powerful terror, the terror so frequently noted in DeLillo’s work which gestures frantically toward apocalypse.

 

This definition is obviously devoid of contemporary models of the sublime. Frow alludes to Lyotard, but the aesthetic program contained in the last pages of The Postmodern Condition will not be particularly relevant to this investigation of Libra. In a by now quite familiar formulation, Lyotard charges the postmodern sublime to put forward “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (81). By this account we would have to consider DeLillo resolutely modern (in Lyotard’s schema), since his sublime will be that which is more concerned “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists” (78). Probably more to the point in terms of specific periodization is Fredric Jameson’s discussion of a postmodern sublime that can only be “adequately theorized” “in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (P 38).

 

Now this “other reality” is immediately recognizable to readers of DeLillo. It is the “world inside the world” ofLibra (13), the massively structured shadow machinery which so covertly scripts the possibilities of quotidian existence. Jameson acknowledges in DeLillo “the formal dilemma” presented by “a totalized world . . . finally unavailable for perception” (Rev. 122), but in a slight departure from his model I would like to suggest that DeLillo’s most important sublime occasions in Libra go beyond configurations of “economic and social institutions” and the “totalized world” to become attempts at the comprehension of history itself. For the committed Marxist, of course, there is no difference between the terms, and I am merely performing a willful mystification of the great motor of culture. Nevertheless, DeLillo’s novel offers visions of society and economics which are at variance with another and much larger operator, and this is where levels of the text’s sublime must be discerned.

 

There is, in fact, some difficulty in stratifying the sublime in Libra since it is so consistently present. In the chiaroscuro world of covert operations men are “light-sensitive”; the interruption of a past plot by internal security is fancifully allegorized as “Light Entering the Cave of the Ungodly” (22, 24). Thus the various CIA and former-CIA agents inhabit an unrepresentable world of darkness, a gloom the magnitude of which is ungraspable by the isolated intellect. Win Everett’s plot spins out of his control almost immediately, largely because he fails to foresee its ability to expand to fill the larger magnitude of the plotters’ darkness. When Everett first unfolds his plan to T. J. Mackey and Larry Parmenter it is under a Texas sky which “towered unbearably” (25), yet another reminder of the eighteenth-century sublime and its predeliction for natural settings which “make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might” (Kant 110).

 

Parmenter’s wife Beryl appears in Libra on only a few occasions, the “domesticated version” (Cain 282) of the rarified intelligence-gathering absurdity of the career CIA operatives. She runs “a small picture-framing shop” (124) and corresponds with friends by sending them newspaper clippings, isolated vignettes “that tell us how we live” (261). Toward the end of the novel she watches replays of Oswald’s televised murder. “[T]his footage only deepened and prolonged the horror,” the narrator comments; “It was horror on horror” (446). This horror arises from the fact that Oswald’s death is “not at all like the news items she clipped,” that is, Beryl is unable to decontextualize it from the magnitude of the exterior world: “She didn’t want these people in her house” (446). Oswald’s death provides the sublime alternative–“The far reaching ‘something’ that . . . can never be named” (Cain 287)–to her earlier desire to find “Refuge only in irony” (259). In the videotape she is confronted again and again with a terror too present and unprecedented to be clipped and folded. But even this gives way: as anyone knows who sat through several days of coverage of the Challenger explosion, Tiananmen Square, or a host of other recent news stories, repetition begets numbness. As Beryl perceives, “After some hours the horror became mechanical. They kept racking film, running shadows through the machine. It was a process that drained life from the men in the picture, sealed them in the frame. They began to seem timeless to her, identically dead” (447). The sublime is finally subsumed, framed, by the numbing repetition of the image as DeLillo pinpoints the moment in which one form of the sublime gave way to the other–the moment when the terror of Kant’s mathematical sublime (Oswald and the world too vast to enumerate) recedes into the sublime Frow discusses, that which leaves its subjects edgy through their inability to develop an appropriate specificity representation.

 

In the world of the plotters and the experiences of Beryl Parmenter we see two versions of a socio-economic sublime, a sublime dependent upon the mental formulations of human actors fixed in social and historical specificity. This sublimity differs markedly, however, from the sublime as we might apply it to Oswald and to the actual mechanisms of history in the novel. DeLillo himself mentions “coincidence and dream and intuition and the possible impact of astrology” as motivating forces in the novel (DeCurtis 55); he also speaks of “a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision” in contemporary life (DeCurtis 63). “This extraordinary wonder of things,” he goes on, “is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions” (DeCurtis 63). This dread is activated in Libra as DeLillo gives it dimensions it never had in White Noise. It is certainly true, as Weinstein points out, that with the earlier novel’s airborne toxic event DeLillo sheds light “on our deep-seated need to believe in the supernatural. In so doing he gives the disaster . . . the authority of subject not object, of agent not setting” (303). But in Libra this role is transferred to history itself, with an effect far more vast than Jack Gladney’s fear of death.

 

As Daniel Aaron notes, “Subways figure in the educations of both Billy Twillig and Oswald” (79). The protagonist (in DeLillo’s novels hero seems far too strong a word) of Ratner’s Star is shown the “substratum” by his third-rail inspector father; it becomes an important metaphor for the novel’s constant dualities, its mirror worlds and the idea that “existence tends to be nourished from below” (RS 4). But this below is also “the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tract of awareness,” and the walk Billy and Babe take through the subways is made for “the sheer scary fun of it, a sort of Theban initiation” (RS 4). The sublime traits of this chthonian realm are suggested in the earlier novel; in Libra the subway metaphor is even more fully developed. The novel’s first sentence, “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track” (3), introduces the image immediately and its sublime characteristics are not far behind.

 

The subway is of course symbolic of the “world within the world” that Oswald seeks throughout the novel, the inner workings of the external real. Win Everett suggests that “when the world is no longer accessible” one might be moved to “invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail”(148). And as Thomas Carmichael puts it, assassination for Oswald becomes one way to escape “all that which would undermine the illusion of an unmediated access to the real and the sound assumption of a coherent and stable subjectivity” (214). In the sublime experience of the subway Oswald already has intimations of such an approach to the real. In the train his “body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control” (3). The sublimity of rapid movement is evoked as the novel’s primal gesture and finds its own echo when one of the metamorphosed assassination plot’s mercenaries, Wayne Elko, speculates that “They were making a crash journey over the edge” (379-80). So from the very first we understand Oswald as someone craving a literal rush, one which will have to be metaphorically converted into the rush of history as it sweeps by. Oswald thinks “the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him,” and that “The name we give this point is history”(248). The point of no separation, the point of going over the edge, these become the novel’s metaphysical analogia for the actuality of history.

 

Seen in this light, Oswald is, in Frank Lentricchia’s words, “an undecidable intention waiting to be decided” (“Libra” 201), the object of Weinstein’s formulation above waiting to be acted upon by history as subject. But what sort of subject is history? Certainly on one level history is the plot, conceived by Win Everett and modified by T. J. Mackey, against Kennedy. But on a hazier and more complicated level there is something else happening in Libra, a causality seemingly too eerie, too sublimely ineffable to be reducible to human intention. While Everett plans to “Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it” (147), this intention is not enough to explain Oswald’s status as “a fiction living prematurely in the world,” word made so fleshly that it arouses “the eeriest panic” in Everett himself (179). DeLillo reaches for a more comprehensive mode for depicting this strangeness; as the novel’s title suggests this will be astrology. Thus, to quote Lentricchia again, “astrology is the metaphor in Libra for being trapped in a system whose determinative power is grippingly registered by DeLillo’s double narrative of an amorphous existence haphazardly stumbling into the future where a plot awaits to confer upon it the identity of a role fraught with form and purpose” (“Libra“202).

 

The novel’s chief proponent of astrological explanation is David Ferrie, one of very few characters who look to an explanation for events external to the world of humans. Astrology for Ferrie is “the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the edge of human affairs” (175) and thus is linked to what Everett thinks of as “whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls” (148). But astrology’s truth is sublimely ineffable. “We don’t know what to call it, so we say coincidence,” Ferrie says at one point (172), effectually assigning a linguistic version of Kant’s mathematical sublime to the problem of causality. Kant suggests that “In the case of the logical estimation of magnitude the impossibility of ever arriving at absolute totality by the progressive measurement of things of the sensible world in time and space was cognized as an objective impossibility, i.e. one of thinking the infinite as given, and not as simply subjective, i.e. an incapacity for grasping it . . .” (108). Thus Ferrie suggests that beyond the world of plots there is a level of cause that cannot be adequately cognized. The resultant effect is that of the sublime. “[W]hat history consists of,” Ferrie claims later, is “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us” (321). In this formulation ineffability still plays the central role. The shadowy “they” who “aren’t telling” are politicians and the media in this context, but given Ferrie’s usual tenor throughout the novel, the agent is far closer to the ominous and sublime “Them” of Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

Ferrie eventually attributes all control over the assassination to the forces alluded to above. “Truth isn’t what we know or feel,” he claims, “It’s the thing that waits just beyond” (333), so that the explanation of how everything converges on Dallas is also ineffable: “We didn’t arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don’t have that kind of reach or power. There’s something else that’s generating this event” (384). Now if it were only Ferrie who felt this way in the novel we would have to attribute such a conception of causality to his extreme peculiarity as a character. But similar thoughts, not so clearly articulated, appear elsewhere. “Summer was building toward a vision, a history,” Oswald thinks several times during 1963 (322), while the crowd around the Kennedy motorcade is “a multitude, a storm force” producing “the roar of a sand column twisting” (393, 394).

 

Perhaps most striking in the novel as a sublime indicator of history’s presence, however, is the Dallas disc jockey Russ Knight, the Weird Beard. Not only does his name allude homonymically to the darkness which resists attempts at causal explanation, but what his radio persona says provides some of the strangest passages in the book. In the novel’s first transcription of his show, the Weird Beard is on the radio in Jack Ruby’s car: “Who is for real and who is sent to take notes? You’re out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you’re listening in secret is because you don’t know who to trust except me. We’re the only ones who aren’t them” (266). The passage’s relevance to Ferrie’s usual concerns are obvious, and the Weird Beard acts too to link several of the narrative’s numerous characters. His listeners include Win Everett’s daughter and wife as well as the men Mackey sends to Dallas for the assassination. Knight is also present at an abortive press conference the Dallas police try to arrange for Oswald. Even Nicholas Branch, the novel’s beleagured historian of the assassination, has a note that “The Dallas disc jockey known as Weird Beard was Russell Lee Moore, who also used the name Russ Knight” (301).

 

The Weird Beard’s genealogy in DeLillo’s fiction goes back to his first novel, Americana. In that work Warren Beasley (who even shares the Beard’s initials), fired from his job as a television weatherman after announcing that “the true weather report had been concealed from the public all these years. Storm warnings up and down the subconscious” (94), has a radio program called “Death Is Just Around the Corner” (93). Beasley’s show is pure talk – “I know you’re out there somewhere, all you prankish gunmen, pacing your scurvy rooms, making lists of likely targets with your Scriptomatic ballpoints, thinking incredibly in your wistfulness of the grandeur of state funerals” (232) – talk which gives the narrator David Bell “frightening dreams” (235), just as the Weird Beard inspires strange behavior in the Everetts’ daughter.

 

Both disc jockeys attest to Norman Wacker’s assertion that in “DeLillo’s novels, mass culture is a spectral presence haunting and disorienting every appeal to grounds outside its protean representational fields” (69). For listeners of both the Weird Beard and Beasley, this disorientation is sublime. Unlike the numbness Beryl Parmenter develops to the televised image of Oswald’s murder, the eeriness felt by the radio listeners is unabated. To the assassins traveling west to Dallas the Weird Beard is “an eerie voice rid[ing] across the long night,” a voice speaking uncanny versions of the future: “Tell you something,dear hearts, Big D is ner-vus tonight. Getting real close to the time. Notice how people saying scaaaary things. Feel night come rushing down. . . . Danger in the air. . . . Some things are true. Some are truer than true. Oh the air is swollen. Did you ever feel a tension like right now? . . . All the ancient terrors of the night. We’re looking right at it. We know it’s here. We feel it’s here. It has to happen. Something dark and strange and dreamsome. Weird Beard says, Night is rushing down over BigD” (381-82). The deadpan summation of this passage is the sentence “Raymo, Wayne and Frank had never been to Dallas and they wondered what this creep could mean” (382), but the sentence is perfectly apposite to the operation of the historical sublime in the novel. Since the three men are carnal manifestations of the larger ineffable, they are properly unaware of the greater force, the “subject not object” in Weinstein’s coinage, which directs their actions.

 

What is by now abundantly clear is that DeLillo signifies the operation of history through the sublime at nearly every step. The operations of the plotters are sublime at one level; the gradual shaping of the actual assassination sublime at another. For the former the organization of the plot on the president’s life is a project which gradually gets out of control due to what is considered an inherent fault in human protection of secrets: “The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal” (218). The plot veers away into the sublime darkness of plotting, but that darkness is to a great degree the product of human manipulation, the cloaking of cloak and dagger men. But the historical forces which gather their sublime strength in the areas of the novel I have just been reviewing operate on a far different level, on a literally awesome plane of ineffable cause.

 

A remaining question, however, is just what we can make of such a text, a historical novel with an ineffable model of historical process. The tendency toward unspeakability in DeLillo’s writing has been maligned: John Kucich, writing before Libra‘s publication, criticizes DeLillo’s “lack of clarity, “which is actually, Kucich believes, “a symptom of his own postmodern inability to reason out an alternative politics” (340-41). And Theodor Adorno, criticizing not DeLillo but the American attraction to irrational explanation, cites the “type of irrationality in which the total order of our life presents itself to most individuals: opaqueness and inscrutability. Naive persons fail to look through the complexities of a highly organized and institutionalized society, but even the sophisticated ones cannot understand it in plain terms of consistency and reason, but are faced with antagonism and absurdities . . . . Who wants to survive under present conditions is tempted to ‘accept’ such absurdities, like the verdict of the stars, rather than to penetrate them by thinking which means discomfort in many directions” (20). In the cases of both Kucich and Adorno the problem is, of course, mystification. The mysterious or ineffable can only mask a level of shrugged-off analysis and wind up as an opiate for the reading public.

 

Surprisingly even DeLillo himself, in “American Blood,” the article that was Libra‘s genesis, writes that there is “No need” to “lapse into mystical fatalism” in quest of the truth of the assassination (24). As he goes on, “Dallas remains unique in its complexity and ambiguity, in the sinister links, the doublings, the organized deceits, but we tend to see it now as simply the first of a chain of what we might call instances of higher violence–violence with its own liturgy of official grief, its own standards of newsworthiness, with its built-in set of public responses” (“AB” 24). In this view the “complexity and ambiguity,” the very things which have helped mark the event’s historical sublimity, recede before the ritual level of American violence. But there is a marked shift between “American Blood” and Libra, a shift that is again helpfully elucidated through DeLillo’s own account. “My books are open-ended,” he tells an interviewer, “I would say that mystery in general rather than the occult is something that weaves in and out of my work. I can’t tell you where it came from or where it leads to” (DeCurtis 55). Here, succinctly, we find the very ineffability which characterizes Libra‘s historical sublime. “I can’t tell you” resonates with Ferrie’s conjecture that history is “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us,” and again questions of process are left in limbo.

 

What Kucich, directly, and Adorno, indirectly, criticize is the authorial refusal to confer a predetermined ideological closure on a given narrative. Lentricchia has noted that “The telling assumption of DeLillo’s media right reviewers is that he is coming from the left” (“American” 5). In the left critique the telling assumption is that DeLillo is a bourgeois apologist, writing from the “obvious privilege of the liberal middle-class intellectual” (Kucich 334). But it is consoling to few members of the middle-class, I would guess, to be told that history is a mixture of chaos and fearsome sublimity. This is the message of Libra, a model of history beholden to theories of chaos and the lack of certainty which has haunted Western science throughout this century.

 

DeLillo is not alone in such conjecture either; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s World’s End both feature models of causality which finally rest on the random or the ineffable. For Morrison the chaotic carelessness which results in the naming of the first Macon Dead (18) has vast historical consequences absolutely relevant to the name’s literal and punning meanings, while the never explained scent of ginger haunts several of the novel’s moments of historical revelation (185, 241, 324, 339). In Boyle’s novel, indebted both to Pynchon and to Grass, the historical currents of an upstate New York town are controlled by a grotesque dwarf, the Dunderberg Imp. Though the Imp resembles a character in the novel’s present no confirmation of this link is ever made and the Imp’s meaning or purpose is never fully revealed. Yet he governs traffic on the Hudson, metaphorically the movement of time, a “capricious gnome . . . deranged and irresponsible” (170).

 

Political motivation is not lacking in this company. Morrison’s novel is part of a larger project involving the reclamation of unwritten history and the nomination of the African-American subject. Boyle uses World’s End as a satire of 1960s pop-existentialism while simultaneously hypothesizing a history of betrayal within the American labor movement. All three novelists seek some purchase on the Sixties, the decade in which all the novels are chiefly set, and all three find that a level of sublime ineffability is central to such a project. It may be that despite a widespread effort by novelists, historians, and others there is nevertheless a strong current of feeling that we are not sufficiently distant from the Sixties to be able to historicize them with any accuracy.

 

But in DeLillo’s case there is an additional impetus for the sublime: a sense on the novelist’s part of a larger and indescribable system at work. “It is just my sense that we live in a kind of circular or near-circular system,” he tells DeCurtis, “and that there are an increasing number of rings which keep intersecting at some point, whether you’re using a plastic card to draw money out of your account at an automatic teller machine or thinking about the movement of planetary bodies. I mean, these systems all seem to interact to me. . . . The secrets within systems, I suppose, are things that have informed my work. But they’re almost secrets of consciousness, or ways in which consciousness is replicated in the natural world” (61). This quasi-mystical formulation again finds its predecessors in Kant (“Sublimity . . . does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind” [114]) and Burke (“the idea of bodily pain . . . is productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it” [86, emphasis mine]). Libra‘s awesome historical sublime may simply have its roots in the related sublime of consciousness itself, and the impossibility of understanding the latter is writ large in the impossibility of encompassing the former. The resultant conceptual implosion leaves us with a better understanding of Libra as it points directly toward David Ferrie’s implicit description of the novel itself: “Think of two parallel lines . . . One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of theself. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path to his destiny” (339).

 

Any supposed evasion of politics or history by DeLillo is thus a misreading of what we might call a depth politics; history’s intention is the sublime intention of subjects, billions of them, and what novelist would want to claim certainty about what those intentions might be? Perhaps, as a line in Mao II asserts, “The future belongs to crowds” (16). Still, we should not be quick to blame DeLillo for not wanting to predict the future, to divine the intentions of these crowds. Libra finally makes the same case for history that chaos theory has clarified about weather forecasting: the impossibility of grasping the plurality of details inherent in initial conditions renders any human attempt at understanding the present or forecasting the future proportionally deficient. Like other aspects of the novel (the Nicholas Branch sections for example) and indeed the Kennedy assassination itself, Libra‘s sublimes are variations on the theme of uncertainty, variations which drive home a stunning postmodern inheritance: what Arnold Weinstein terms “a special purgatory of epistemological murk, of never again seeing clear, of permanent exile in the realm of information glut and data overload” (311). If this is an evasion of political realities and a prescription for bourgeois comfort, then many of us should feel shortchanged. Instead it appears that DeLillo has successfully transferred the infinite of the classical/romantic sublime to the postmodern conception of history itself. History is not acausal but too complex, too immense, to be reckoned by the unitary subjective mind. With the lens turned the right way, DeLillo’s conversion of an eighteenth-century aesthetic to a postmodern analytic has the terrific–in every sense– flavor of whatever might remain as truth.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 67-81.
• Adorno, Theodor W. “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column.” Telos 19.1 (1974): 13-90.
• Boyle, T. Coraghessan. World’s End. New York: Penguin, 1988.
• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enguiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James Boulton. London: Routledge, 1958.
• Cain, William E. “Making Meaningful Worlds: Self and History in Libra,” Rev. of Libra, by Don DeLillo. Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (1990): 275-87.
• Carmichael, Thomas. “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II.” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 204-18.
• DeCurtis, Anthony. “‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 43-66.
• DeLillo, Don. “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone 8 Dec. 1983: 21-2, 24, 27-8,74.
• —. Americana. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• —. Libra. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• —. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
• —. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage, 1980.
• Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 175-91.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. Rev. of The Names, by Don DeLillo and Richard A, by Sol Yurick. Minnesota Review 22.1 (1984): 116-22.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.
• Kucich, John. “Postmodern Politics: Don DeLillo and the Plight of the White Male Writer.” Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (1988): 328-41.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “The American Writer as Bad Citizen.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 1-6.
• —, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. “Libra as Postmodern Critique,” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 193-215.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Messmer, Michael W. “‘Thinking It Through Completely’: The Interpretation of Nuclear Culture.” Centennial Review 34 (1988): 397-413.
• Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: NAL, 1977.
• Wacker, Norman. “Mass Culture/Mass Novel: the Representational Politics of Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Works and Days 8 (1990): 67-88.
• Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

 

Peter Baker

Department of English
Towson State University
e7e4bak@toe.towson.edu

 

Through the issues it raises, the kind of writing style it employs, and coming as it does in a series of other novels by Don DeLillo, Mao II demands to be treated seriously in the context of postmodern work and theory. Rather than spend time developing that theory explicitly, hooking in to the arguments presented by, say, Fredric Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon, I want to develop a series of themes and meditations through a comparison of Mao II with two other texts that are roughly contemporary, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game (1992). That is, rather than attempt to define “postmodernism,” I will take as a given that all three of these works are postmodern and explore what this might mean. The comparison of DeLillo to Pynchon has become rather widespread, but Mao IIspecifically presents the character of a hyper-reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, who may interestingly be compared to the real-life figure of Pynchon, whether or not we want to argue that Gray is “based” on Pynchon.¹ The comparison with Jordan’s film rests principally on the way The Crying Game stages an encounter between a “terrorist” and a hostage that is not dissimilar from some of DeLillo’s meditations on this theme. As novelist Bill Gray travels, first to London, and finally to Lebanon, he seeks to engage the relationship he has theorized between novel-writing and “terrorism” through his own person. I want to argue that Gray (and maybe DeLillo as well) is fundamentally–and in Gray’s case, at least, fatally–mistaken in his view that equates the role of the novelist with that of the “terrorist.” As Jordan’s film carries this theme out, I think it becomes clear that the “terrorist” occupies a role more like that of the interpreter, and moreover, that this has something to do with our “postmodern condition.”

 

There is beginning to emerge a critical consensus that Thomas Pynchon “is perhaps the preeminent practitioner” of English-language postmodern fiction (McHale 1992: 83). I want to argue briefly in this context that this is at least in part due to the fact that Pynchon’s work deals with historical materials exactly defining the parameters of the rise of the United States to the status of the world’s only superpower, roughly that period from the end of World War II to the Persian Gulf War known from “our” point of view as the Cold War. Edward Said’s recent epoch-making work, Culture and Imperialism, argues for an ongoing reinterpretation of the canonical works of the modern European/American tradition based on an examination of the relationship between imperialism and culture. Twenty or thirty years from now, anyone’s first reaction to hearing the phrase “the Western tradition” will not be “Great Books” or whatever catchphrase is currently being pushed by the pundits in The New Criterion and elsewhere; it’s going to be (and for many of us already is): imperialism.² Said’s approach is not to reject the works of the western tradition, but to reexamine them in light of these geopolitical realities for how they reveal “a structure of attitude and reference” (62). Whereas Said’s primary cultural analysis concerns texts produced at the height of colonial experience, Verdi’s Aida, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kipling’s Kim, I would argue that the same kind of analysis could be used to examine works by such “preeminent” figures as Pynchon and DeLillo for what they say about U.S. imperialism and its deep and intricate relations to American culture. Such an analysis, to be adequate to Said’s complexity, would clearly have to go beyond assigning terms implying value judgments, such as “progressive” or “pessimistic.”³ I want to begin to explore some of the outlines for such a discussion with regard to the work of Pynchon, especially Vineland, before examining how some of these same issues are worked out by DeLillo in Mao II.

 

Pynchon’s “big” book, Gravity’s Rainbow, principally concerns the time frame at the end of World War II when the position of being the leading nation-state in the Western global hegemony passed from France and Great Britain–and for a brief time, Germany–to the United States. This is at least one reason for its enormously important cultural position and the intense reactions it continues to provoke. While many other works of fiction deal with the American experience of the world war, Pynchon’s novel gives a mythic embodiment to this central shift in power of the twentieth century, focusing significantly on the transfer of rocket technology from Germany to the United States, while ostensibly concerned with the resulting terror of the British population during the V-2 bombings. The earlier V. deals mainly with the underside milieu of fifties America, but significantly this underside also has its military aspect, indicating the strong links between culture and hegemony that Said outlines. Again, significantly, those segments of V. that predate the fifties mainly concern French and British efforts to maintain and extend their political influence in the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin. The Crying of Lot 49 again links paranoid systems of meaning and control of power to European antecedents, the Tristero system seemingly related to the more ancient Thurn and Taxis. Pynchon’s famous paranoia remains tremendously appealing to many of us because he, almost alone among American novelists, has attempted to describe a wide-ranging response to social life in the world’s sole superpower. Pynchon’s works outline the interpellation of subjects into the U.S. cultural system and point, usually through humorously paranoid gestures, to moments of resistance to that interpellation.

 

My officemate at the university is someone who is proud of having taught a course on everything you need to know to read Gravity’s Rainbow; but every time I mention Vineland he says he has yet to finish it, saying of Pynchon, “he’s tired, we’re all tired.” Something of this fatigue has shown up in the initial critical response to the novel, the neo-conservatives accusing Pynchon of indulging his “nostalgia” for the sixties and more progressive writers finding a lack of existential commitment to the struggle. In the Cold War context that I have begun to suggest, this fatigue is perfectly explainable as what is left at the end of an era. If Pynchon is the writer who most forthrightly takes on the issues, both global and cultural, of the Cold War era in which he came of age, then Vineland can be viewed as his “last word” on the subject (raising once again the sempiternal mystery of what he could possibly produce after this). This is not primarily a story of the relation of the U.S. to Britain, France and Germany, or even to the rest of the world where American domination is played out–it is the story of “our” government declaring war on key segments of its own population as a necessary corollary to maintaining its “preeminent” position. Pynchon’s paranoid view of the American social landscape of the Reagan eighties, though he tries hard to maintain the comic book humor and some of the same verve and excess to the writing as in the past, is less easy to take this time in part because he strikes so close to home.

 

One way Pynchon strikes at the home base is to implicate Left resistance types in the triumphant success of Reaganism (in itself nothing more than another variation on triumphant Americanism generally).⁴ While former hippies like Zoyd Wheeler are stuck in a self-induced haze of pot smoke and mental disability benefits, former committed revolutionaries like Frenesi Gates have sold out the revolution to the forces of repression represented by Brock Vond. The main plot, such as it is, of Vineland concerns Zoyd’s and Frenesi’s daughter Prairie and her efforts to locate her mother when word comes down that Frenesi may be making a move to get back in touch.⁵ The story of leftist betrayal in Vineland is enacted by Prairie viewing the films of Frenesi’s revolutionary collective, 24fps, many of these shot by Frenesi, while the narration is presented by former co-members of the collective Darryl Louise (DL) and Ditzah Pisk Feldman. Prairie is presented with both visual evidence and an oral history of her mother’s seduction by super-narc and federal hitman Brock Vond, and Frenesi’s participation in a scheme to murder protest leader Weed Atman. In terms of narrative levels, much of this material is not recounted directly to Prairie, but rather focalized through Frenesi in overlapping flashbacks, so that some of Frenesi’s inner life of the time is made clearer. This reveals the worst betrayal of all, since Frenesi’s only positive motivation in all of this seems limited to her strong sexual attraction to Vond and to uniformed men in general. Her negative motivation seems to be an existential crisis of meaning–more on that in a minute. The question remains why Pynchon chooses to tell the story of the underside of the triumph of the political Right in America as a parable of political betrayal by members of the Left. Is this simply an instance of scapegoating, or is Pynchon trying to tell a more complicated story of the co-implication, or interpellation, of various smaller narratives in the larger political narratives of our time?

 

Perhaps tellingly, I want to insist that this kind of large question is one that can have no definitive answer, but rather demands repeated acts of interpretation and reinscription into different political and cultural contexts.⁶ To make this analysis more exact, I want to concentrate briefly on the interpretive dilemma that Vineland stages with respect to “drugs.” I place “drugs” in scare quotes to indicate that any discourse on this subject can not simply take the concept as a given, but must attempt some kind of contextualization before any analysis is possible, an approach carried out in exemplary fashion by Avital Ronell in Crack Wars. As Ronell states, with her usual economy and forcefulness, “While everywhere dealt with, drugs act as a radically nomadic parasite let loose from the will of language” (52). Drugs escape the closed circle of hermeneutic inquiry because they are one name for the desire that overwhelms language. Ronell quotes Heidegger to this effect on the first page inside the cover: “Addiction and urge are possibilities rooted in the thrownness of Dasein.” What it is to be human is inextricably linked to our strongest (and strangest) desires. Frenesi’s existential torment and her politically incorrect fixation on Brock Vond’s erect penis can be seen, in some sense, as aspects of each other. But what happens when the word “drugs” is invoked to elicit and to control this generalized desire?

 

Zoyd Wheeler’s comic and slightly sad fixation on weed is nothing compared to Pynchon’s scathing contempt for how the Reagan-era Department of Justice uses “drugs” as a code for enforcing a clampdown on Americans as desiring creatures. The feds are seen moving in on the last outpost of northern California marijuana growing in a community called Holytail:

 

Sooner or later Holytail was due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie. (221-2)

 

This passage has been quoted often as revealing Pynchon’s attitudes toward a whole range of issues, from drugs to television to Reagan’s America. While I agree with Brian McHale that even the “extra-diagetic narrator” is never simply identifiable as the author Thomas Pynchon (see especially, McHale 90ff.), the elements presented in this passage are understandable as a means of talking fundamentally about the Cold War at home. The key here is that “drugs” can be used to mobilize military force–in a manner exactly parallel to that used to enforce American policy in places like Central America–to extend governmental control over the behavior of its own citizenry. And as usual in Pynchon’s work, this paranoid vision is based on and corresponds to historical realities. Why this vision of the American social polity should be threatening to neo-conservatives is clear enough. But this view of the limitations on the possibility for effective, engaged political action is likewise such that left critics like Alan Wilde complain of “Vineland‘s very different dereliction: its refusal of the existential commitment it ponders only to evade” (180). But this is just the point: the political engagement of Vineland is too close to the realities of the culture/imperialism nexus to admit the individualist revolutionary project as a satisfactory “existential” solution.⁷ Without a fully realized dialectical context, the revolutionary project itself can become, as it seems to have for Frenesi, just another in an array of interchangeable “drugs” that can be used by the forces of order to enforce a hegemonic social program.⁸

 

Don DeLillo’s Mao II presents a fundamental engagement with many of these same issues of geopolitical concern, such as the United States’s leading role in maintaining global hegemony and what that means with respect to U.S. cultural production, and their necessary interpretive scenarios. Part of its brilliant strategy is to stage some of these dilemmas through delving into the thoughts and actions of its novelist character, Bill Gray, who presents certain similarities, at least when viewed externally, to Thomas Pynchon. The irony of a blurb by Pynchon figuring prominently on the back cover of Mao II is only one of the many nestings typical of postmodern culture. Bill Gray is a hyperreclusive figure who obsessively guards his privacy with the aid of two live-in helpers, Scott Martineau and Karen Janney. Karen has been glimpsed briefly in the prologue to the novel as one of the six thousand five hundred couples married in a mass ceremony by Reverend Moon, to whom Karen refers as “Master,” in Yankee Stadium. The action of the novel begins when Scott goes to New York to transport photographer Brita Nilsson to Gray’s secret domicile for a photo session that will result in the first pictures of Bill to be published in over thirty years. Now, Bill Gray could be based on any number of prominent American writers. J. D. Salinger, for example, is at least as famous a literary recluse. The connection with the reclusive Pynchon, however, is tantalizing for several reasons: Pynchon’s famous reluctance to be interviewed or photographed, extending if one believes the stories to excising his picture from copies of the high school yearbook; his cultural centrality, or “preeminence,” despite a somewhat limited body of published work, very similar to the fictional Gray; and the insistent linkage that has taken place in the critical discourse between Pynchon and DeLillo, offering DeLillo a convenient alter-ego who is both like himself and plausibly identifiable as someone else.⁹

 

One of the concerns of Mao II most clearly identifiable as postmodern is the cultural centrality of images, and how this relates to the role of political leaders and artists in society. The photo session of author Bill Gray rhymes insistently with references to the work of Andy Warhol and to Warhol’s posthumous existence in image form. Warhol’s famous dictum concerning everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame and his use of political and culture icons insistently pose questions of simulacra and the role of cultural figures in the experience of individuals in a society. This in turn relates to an almost obsessive series of meditations on the relation between the individual–figured in Mao II insistently as the figure of the novelist/writer, but also relating to political, spiritual and terrorist leaders–and the masses. Mao Zedong is both the leader of the Chinese revolution and the enigmatic figure who appears in a photograph swimming across the Yangste River after a long period of reclusion and rumored death. Mao is the embodiment of the revolution whose writings are memorized by the faithful millions, particularly around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and he is the mass-produced silk-screen image hanging in the MOMA and reproduced on the cover of Mao II. Mao’s influence over millions of Chinese is clearly meant to rhyme with Sun Myung Moon’s influence over the 6,500 couples married together in Yankee Stadium, an event that so shocks the parents of Karen Janney, parents who metonymically represent the masses of middle Americans.¹⁰ What does the much-vaunted American concept of selfhood and individuality amount to when compared to the experience of the crowd? The prologue ends with the apothegm, “The future belongs to crowds” (Mao II 16), and Part I ends with the figure of Bill Gray leaving his publisher’s office building in New York, the beginning of his escape or disengagement from his former life, “where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd” (103.

 

Is the novelist an artist who works alone in a room with a typewriter, or is the novelist the creation of a commodity culture, packaged and marketed for consumption by the masses? Mao II‘s Bill Gray is clearly both, and the conflict that this causes “inside” him is the leading motor of the various plot machinations. Scott Martineau, Gray’s assistant, is first pictured in New York in a bookstore:

 

Bookstores made him slightly sick at times. He looked at the gleaming best-sellers. People drifted through the store, appearing caught in some unhappy dazzlement. There were books on step terraces and Lucite wall-shelves, books in pyramids and theme displays. He went downstairs to the paperbacks, where he stared at the covers of mass-market books, running his fingertips erotically over the raised lettering. Covers were lacquered and gilded. Books lay cradled in nine- unit counterpacks like experimental babies. He could hear them shrieking Buy me. There were posters for book weeks and book fairs. People made their way around shipping cartons, stepping over books scattered on the floor. He went to the section on modern classics and found Bill Gray’s two lean novels in their latest trade editions, a matched pair banded in austere umbers and rusts. He liked to check the shelves for Bill. (19-20)

 

The tonality of this passage is reminiscent of the often-praised supermarket segment of White Noise (35ff.). Just as contemporary novelists rarely pay attention to the details of food shopping and other quotidian tasks, so they rarely venture into bookstores in their prose. The self-image of the novelist as “artist” would seem to require viewing the novel as just another commodity, even a refined and highly valuable one, as demeaning to the artistic integrity of the work. DeLillo not only faces this question–one could pose it as the relation of the writer to the audience, but that would already involve certain presuppositions, including the commodity aspect addressed here–he begins to burrow inside it. There is finally something queasy-making about the ambiguity of the last sentence. Is Scott checking the shelves “for Bill” to be interpreted as: checking for Bill’s works, checking the shelves on Bill’s behalf, or checking for some kind of commodified version of Bill’s corpse? After all, it is the commodification of the author, as Foucault reminds us, that leads to the author’s disappearance.

 

Mao II could even be interpreted as a complex meditation that stages what Roland Barthes has called “the death of the author,” this being in some sense the “point” of the novel. Bill Gray dies an anonymous death on a ferry from Cyprus to Lebanon, with a crew member seen lifting Gray’s passport and identification. Although DeLillo is well known for his ambling and unresolved plot lines, Gray’s death seems particularly “unmotivated,” his internal injuries stemming from an apparently random accident in Athens.¹¹ Having gone to great lengths to create the Pynchon-like Gray, imagining his secretive retreat, his relationships with his assistants and his publisher, even sending him on an Amnesty International/PEN mission of mercy across the European continent–this denouement is reminiscent of the classic ending “and then they all got run over by a bus.” The question is whether this unmotivated death of Gray is some kind of complex joke DeLillo is playing on his audience and his critics, or whether Gray’s death has been planted (like Jack Gladney’s death in White Noise) in the circumstances of his writing, his fame, and his reclusion from the world.

 

As Walter Benjamin states, famously, in his essay “The Storyteller”: “Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell.” Any writer who tries to represent the story of a human life borrows, as Benjamin says, from the authority of death. Bill Gray would seem to wear this mantle heavily. The theme of death has been introduced, as I have been suggesting, even before Gray makes an appearance in the text, but he himself is clearly obsessed with the idea of death and how this relates to his role as a writer. During the photo session, Gray says, “I’m playing the idea of death.” He expands for Brita Nilsson:

 

“Something about the occasion makes me think I’m at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It’s their past, their history we’re inventing here. And it’s not how I look now that matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-out.” (42)

 

Gray’s theory of photography exactly parallels Benjamin’s theory of the story; the meaning of each develops from and depends upon the end of the person’s life being known. DeLillo had already given classic expression to an aspect of this idea in Libra through the speculations of Win Everett: “Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men” (Libra 221). Significantly for our understanding here, death serves as a key mediating term between the work–whether image or text–and its role in the culture. This preunderstanding is necessary, I think, to understanding Gray’s (and DeLillo’s) meditations on the link between the novelist and the terrorist.

 

Gray consents to have his photograph taken in part because the burden of his fame, specifically his reclusion from the world that is both a reaction to and source of that fame, has become too great for him to bear. He has a sense that if he releases photos of himself to the public he can delay the inevitable tightening of the noose that he represents as those fans who are desperately seeking to find his whereabouts. So if, as I have speculated, Bill Gray’s death has been “planted” long before his death on the ferry, the seeds lie both in his writings and in the effects of his reclusion, which in turn bears a complex relationship to those very writings. Arnold Weinstein has provocatively proposed a reading of Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield” as an “ur-narrative” for understanding depictions of the self in American fiction (13-26). Hawthorne’s Wakefield is a man who disappears from his life for a period of twenty years and sets himself up across the street from his former home to observe the effects of his absence, particularly on his wife. Weinstein takes this creepy parable as paradigmatic of a concern for self-shaping in American letters generally. If we want to view DeLillo’s Bill Gray as a kind of postmodern Wakefield, some of the key differences between the two may begin to emerge more clearly. For one thing, Gray disappears from the scene of his self-imposed seclusion; more importantly, he dies without a trace, whereas Wakefield eventually returns. Gray’s “self-shaping” is more emphatically oriented around his own death, although when it arrives, it seems to catch him at least partially unaware. Also, in keeping with DeLillo’s insistence on the writer being superseded by a public image, Gray’s actual death may in the end be irrelevant to his continued “existence” as a writer and public figure: Scott and Karen are seen planning to keep the household going as before, releasing the photographs, and perhaps even publishing the latest book manuscript as well (Mao II 222-4).

 

The most significant aspect of Bill Gray’s determined reclusion from public life is the variation this allows DeLillo to play on the trope of the isolated writer as outlaw or criminal, leading to the central importance in Mao II of the figure of the terrorist. As Scott is taking photographer Brita Nilsson to Gray’s secret residence, she says to him:

 

“I feel as if I’m being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat in the mountains.”

 

“Tell Bill. He’ll love that,” said Scott. (27)

 

Gray has his own extensive theories on this relationship, which he expounds on in the first part of the narrative and then tries to enact in the second part. He tells Brita:

 

“There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.” (41)

 

Clearly we need to distinguish between what Bill Gray the character says, and what Don DeLillo might be said to believe, but there is no doubt that the figure of the terrorist plays an important role in nearly every one of DeLillo’s more recent works. Further, the equation that Gray draws here is complexly enacted in the plot of Mao II, as Bill Gray leaves his private seclusion and enters into an active role in the interplay between the forces of culture and the forces of terror. My working hypothesis is that DeLillo views Gray’s statement here as at least somewhat deluded and that Gray’s eventual death is in some important sense the price he pays for that delusion. But the entire, complex treatment of the “terrorist” theme in Mao II would seem to require two related moves that were adumbrated in the discussion of Vineland. One move is to investigate the highly-charged polyvalence of the term “terrorist”; the other is to uncover, if possible, what Said calls “a structure of attitude and reference” that emerges in DeLillo’s staging of the interplay between the novelist and the terrorist, particularly as this involves an American writer’s necessary implication in the culture/imperialism nexus.

 

Terror and its derivatives, terrorism and terrorist, are highly complex conceptual markers all of whose complexity I cannot hope to outline fully. The usual pairing places terror in a conceptual binary with reason or enlightenment. Perhaps the paradigmatic historical event linking these two terms is the French “Reign of Terror,” when the enlightenment motives of the 1789 revolution were seen as overcome by the forces of the revolutionary vanguard, leading to a paradigmatically undemocratic dictatorship sustained by raw force and unrestrained cruelty. This binary serves to shape Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s strange and controversial examination of the Stalin purges, Humanisme et terreur (1947), and may serve to remind us of the stand taken by many French intellectuals at the outset of the Cold War.¹² Although Merleau-Ponty quickly abandoned even this qualified support for Stalinism, his high-level analysis that seriously attempts to contextualize Stalin’s violence by comparison to the violence present in liberal democracies shows a need to understand the argument for liberal democracy within a specifically postwar historical context. Jean-Francois Lyotard has renewed aspects of this controversy, in the context of theorizing the postmodern, by examining shifts in the meaning of terror:

 

Terror is no longer exercised in the name of freedom, but in the name of `our’ satisfaction, in the name of the satisfication of a we which is definitely restricted to singularity. And if I judge this prospect intolerable, am I still being too modern? Its name is tyranny: the law which `we’ decree is not addressed to you, to you fellow-citizens or even to you subjects; it is applied to them,to third parties, to those outside, and it is simply not concerned with being legitimized in their eyes. I recall that Nazism was one such way of mourning emancipation and of exercising, for the first time in Europe since 1789, a terror whose reason was not in theory accessible to all and whose benefits were not to be shared by all. (1981; trans. 316-317)

 

For Lyotard, as theorist of the postmodern, terror also needs to be contextualized in what he calls the “regime of phrases” and not only, or even primarily, in the totalizing discourses of emancipation or human progress. Who is addressed by the various sentences, laws, discourses that have recourse to terror? Who is excluded? How do totalizing discourses elide these questions, necessarily placing them on the outside of the discourse of rational humanism? What are the results of this marginalization?

 

This marginalized outside is what is always hidden by the ideology of liberal democracy, an ideology constituted during the Cold War by the unquestioned binary opposition between freedom and communism, and now, given the breakdown of the world communist system, transferred to an equally unquestioned opposition between democracy and terrorism. According to this logic, whatever injustices may exist in the liberal democratic system or in the relationship of liberal democracies to the rest of the world, this system represents an undeniable advance over previous and currently existing political systems based on terror, cruelty and coercion.¹³ Whether consciously or not, this logic underlies the commonly accepted usages of “terrorism” and “terrorist.” The United States is not seen as using terrorism when it wages war with Iraq, using overwhelmingly superior technology and force to inflict a large number of both military and civilian casualities (the casualty estimate itself, or more precisely the lack of an official American estimate, is only one of the scandals of this war). The bombing of the World Trade Center, by contrast, is instantly branded an act of international terrorism. American domestic lawlessness, whether it be Randall Terry and the borderline murderous “Operation Rescue” or David Koresh and his armed-to-the-teeth suicidal followers, is never referred to as terrorism in the American media.¹⁴ The end of the Cold War and establishment of the United States as the sole remaining superpower has seen all opposition by lesser nation-states to U.S. control branded as terroristic: first came “state-supported terrorism” (read: Iran); then “terrorist states” (read: Libya, Iraq). Whether one supports American foreign policy or not, and whatever one’s views may be on recent armed conflicts and other acts of violence committed in the context of these struggles, it should be clear that the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” are markers invoked to build ideological consensus for certain kinds of U.S. domination abroad. Just as the Reagan-Bush era “war on drugs” was a code for all sorts of government-sponsored paramilitary, ideological, class- and race-specific attacks on “them,” so “terrorism” functions as what Ronell terms a “parasite” on language, possessing an enormous resonance that threatens to overwhelm our interpretive structures of understanding.¹⁵

 

DeLillo obviously realizes much of this and he utilizes (or one could say, exploits) the recurrent theme of terrorism in Mao II and other works in order to tap into the tremendous force of these associations. His willingness and ability to face these central, defining geopolitical issues is a primary reason that he, much like Pynchon, is seen as one of our “preeminent” writers. But, at the same time, because he is a “preeminent” writer and one who moreover deals, as an American, with issues such as terrorism, his work may be seen to point to some of the necessarily limiting and blinding effects of the culture/imperialism nexus outlined by Said, even as it presents what critics mainly agree is a “progressive” position on most ostensibly political issues. Said’s astonishing discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example, highlights the interconnections between a novelistic discourse that presents an outward critique of the ostensible effects of the dominant ideology while in many ways remaining under the sway of that same ideology.¹⁶ DeLillo bravely sets out to imagine a complex political and cultural connection between his postmodern novelist, Bill Gray, and a “terrorist” leader, Abu Rashid. While the motivation of novelist Gray in seeking to act out his theories equating the novelist with the terrorist in terms of cultural significance is both fascinating and revealing, DeLillo’s imagined portrait of the “terrorist” half of the equation reveals some of his–perhaps necessary, maybe even inevitable–limitations as both a Westerner and an American.

 

Richard Rorty, associated with the liberal democracy argument rehearsed above, might also be said to represent the putative position of the “early” Bill Gray (“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture” [Mao II 41]). Rorty has argued for the shaping value of novels for the ethical thinking members of a culture engage in. In works such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty says that there is an unbridgeable gap between what philosophers and other intellectual and cultural workers do, and the real world in which innocent people are imprisoned, tortured, killed or left to starve to death. The value of the liberal democratic system is that by eliminating the worst kinds of government-sponsored cruelty and coercion it establishes a reason-oriented rule of peaceful discussion to attain pragmatic social goals. One of these goals is the establishment of an intellectual climate in which writers and intellectuals can discuss issues such as ethics and morality, but crucially without the responsibility for anybody’s actual well-being, which is guaranteed by the liberal-democratic state. Since the intellectual sphere is primarily engaged in imaginative exercises, novelists in Rorty’s view are much more able to engage thoughtful, well-intentioned people with questions of ethical and moral import. Novelists present imagined situations that parallel real-life ones in which people face the questions of how to resist state terror, whether or not to engage in political action, how to respect other people’s choices, and so forth, showing how individual characters are capable of the wrong as well as the right choices. Because of this imaginative license, Rorty’s novelists–his primary examples in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity are Nabokov and Orwell–are better able to engage and shape readers’ moral reactions than are, say, professional philosophers, educators, political or religious leaders.

 

Now, Rorty has been widely criticized for ignoring the cruelty, violence and coercion that exists within the liberal democratic state. He has also been accused of establishing a kind of analytical “apartheid” with his insistence on the absolute separation between the realms of intellectual endeavor and real-world situations of power and domination.¹⁷ Richard Bernstein also argues, “Rorty’s praise of novelists who educate not by didactism but by imaginative concrete description depends on a dubious presupposition which he never justifies and for which there seems to be little, if any, concrete empirical evidence”; and that “in a society such as ours where there are fewer and fewer readers of novels, it seems little more than a false nostalgia to think that novels can play the role Rorty so desperately wants them to play” (285). This would seem to be the stage of thinking that Don DeLillo’s Bill Gray has reached, one we could fairly term postmodern. Yet the consequences of this thinking are potentially devastating for Gray’s view of himself, since he is a novelist others had indeed credited with giving expression to the inner life of the culture, and he had at least until a certain point believed himself capable of sustaining such a role. If the postmodern culture is one in which novels and their creators are increasingly commodified (the heightened commodification correlating to a presumably diminishing public) rather than read and cherished, this may explain Gray’s increasingly morose view of himself and his writing. Certainly this view provides a motivation for Gray’s thinking that the only possible remaining step is to try to bridge the gap between the interiorized experience of novel-writing (and reading) and engaged action in the public sphere.¹⁸ The second half of Mao II sketches Gray’s itinerary in a distinctively postmodern and hallucinatory way; as the stages of this journey are increasingly marked by setbacks and failure, the possible interrelation between the private and public spheres is both questioned and problematized.

 

The first stage in Gray’s journey away from his former seclusion and toward a version of public action is precipitated by a request for a meeting from his old friend and publisher, Charlie Everson, communicated by Brita Nilsson. At this meeting Everson explains a situation in which Gray can be of use in his role as famous author and public figure. Everson is the “chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression” (98); and he wants Gray to appear at a media event in London on behalf of the group. This media event will be timed to correspond to the release of a hostage held by terrorists in Beirut, a hostage who is of special interest to Everson’s group because he is a Swiss poet. When Gray leaves the initial meeting with Everson, he purposely avoids his assistant Scott Martineau, and begins a process of disappearing from his life as it has been constituted up until then.¹⁹ In London, the media event never comes off, in part because the place chosen for the meeting is bombed. Gray’s itinerary is furthered, however, by his encounter and conversations with George Haddad, an intermediary figure between the literary group Everson represents and the terrorist group holding the hostage. Haddad suggests that Gray may be able to serve as an agent for freeing the hostage, if he is willing to meet directly with a leader of the terrorist group. As the bombing in London has demonstrated, however, Gray may be the object of the same “terror” that the group practices in Beirut, the fear for his personal safety placing him in a position parallel to the Swiss poet. Eventually Gray accedes to Haddad’s wish that he travel to Haddad’s base in Athens (in a significant place-echo with The Names), where according to Haddad true dialogue is easier. In Athens, though, Gray comes to understand that his only possible mediating role is to substitute himself for the hostage, a kind of literary “trading up.” Caught in this extremely uncertain position, unable to return to his previous life and apparently enmeshed in his own logic equating the novelist and the terrorist, Gray travels to Cyprus and arranges ferry passage to Beirut, during which trip he dies.

 

If the novel ended there, we might speculate that DeLillo was trying to stage the impossibility of the Western individualist-author “crossing over” to the “terrorist” Orient, trapped as Gray is by his own imaginative limitations. But in an ironic doubling that resonates with the postmodern themes of image, simulacra and personal identity examined earlier, the postscript, “In Beirut,” presents the photographer Brita Nilsson completing Bill Gray’s journey and meeting with terrorist leader Abu Rashid. Nilsson has abandoned her project of photographing authors and switched to terrorists, enacting Gray’s theorized substitution. Her experience of Beirut is hazy and surreal, dominated by the dizzying simulacra of Coke ads and the cult of the terrorist leader’s personality. As a Swede, Brita Nilsson is coded “international” from the outset and so might be seen as more able than the American Gray to move easily in this “foreign” setting. But Nilsson’s art of photography is also more capable than Gray’s written medium of communicating the surface reality of Beirut, a reality DeLillo seems to urge is all there is. (In a telling juxtaposition as the book ends, Nilsson experiences flashes followed by no sound that she realizes are not shell bursts, but someone taking photographs.) DeLillo’s Abu Rashid, seen in a single encounter with Nilsson, is a taciturn terrorist, given to mouthing phrases like “Don’t bring your problems to Beirut” (232). Much as Scott Martineau parrots statements made by Bill Gray, so Abu Rashid’s interpreter expands on, even makes up, statements for Abu Rashid. Abu Rashid also exerts an unspoken control over his hooded young followers who wear his picture on their T-shirts. But, somewhat paradoxically, Abu Rashid does seem to care what Brita Nilsson thinks of him, saying repeatedly: “You must tell me if you think I’m totally mad” (236). Where Bill Gray’s “failure” to cross over fully to the other side might be said to enact a certain reality, a division between world views and systems of thinking, Mao II‘s Abu Rashid represents, in my view, DeLillo’s imaginative “failure” even to attempt to render any kind of satisfactory counterpart to the Western novelist in the figure of the terrorist leader.

 

It may be that in order to render anything like an adequate view of what it is to be a terrorist, one must have had the actual experience. But when confronted with a situation like that presented in Mao II of someone held hostage, how is one to image the captor’s mentality? The Swiss poet has no direct contact with the leader, Abu Rashid, only with someone referred to as “the boy” who may or may not be the same “boy” with the hood that Brita Nilsson sees with Abu Rashid. The scene of captivity is imagined entirely through the consciousness of the Swiss poet. Throughout the text, “the boy” is credited with having almost no independent thought or existence; instead, his actions are random and forgetful:

 

The boy forgot to replace the hood after meals, he forgot the meals, the boy was the bearer of randomness. The last sense-making thing, the times for meals and beatings, was in danger of collapse. (110)

 

There were strip fragments of concrete still attached to the bent steel rod the boy used to beat the bottoms of the prisoner’s feet when he remembered. (203)

 

I don’t know what logic this representation of the captor’s random forgetfulness is meant to serve, but it does correspond in its way to the lassitude and taciturnity attributed to the terrorist leader Abu Rashid in the Postscript. Whatever the case may be, this semi-bored, inattentive approach to torture is most certainly not what narratives told from the “other side” present. Marguerite Duras’ brief narrative that presents an autobiographical account of torturing a French collaborator, for example, shows her and her compatriots to be tense, alert and extremely involved with the process of torturing their prisoner (La douleur 135-162). And in a note preceding this narrative, Duras “the author” tells her readers: “Therese is me. She who tortures the informer is me. I give you she who tortures along with the other texts. Learn to read: these are sacred texts” (134; my trans.). This same “sacred” quality permeates Elie Wiesel’s (one would think at least somewhat fictionalized) account in Dawn of a Jewish terrorist, as a member of a group in Palestine, holding hostage and finally shooting a British army officer.

 

The recent, surprisingly successful, film The Crying Game (dir. Neil Jordan, 1992) devotes roughly the first half of its narrative to a similar terrorist/hostage confrontation.²⁰ Both in its representation of the terrorist/hostage relationship and in the terrorist’s very different set of experiences in the second half of the film, Jordan presents material suggesting the terrorist’s role in postmodern culture is less that of the “novelist” (someone who influences the inner mind of the culture) and more that of the “interpreter” (someone who participates in smaller-scale interpretive acts). Although the second half of the film and its focus on the mysterious transvestite or transsexual Dil has provoked the most response, I find the first half of the film to be as powerful a cinematic experience as any in recent memory. Jordan has said that his depiction of the hostage/terrorist relationship in the context of Northern Ireland–though he wouldn’t tend to use the word “terrorist,” would he?–bears a relationship to two previous treatments of the theme, Frank O’Connor’s story “Guest of the Nation” and Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage (Introduction to The Neil Jordan Reader [NJR], xii). He continues:

 

O’Connor and Behan dealt with simple friendship between two men. Underlying this friendship lay an erotic possibility, a sense of mutual need and identification that could have provided salvation for their protagonists. That possibility remained subdued, and so both stories ended tragically. With The Crying Game, I brought the erotic thread to the surface. Instead of two, there were now three. A hostage, a captor, and an absent lover. The lover became the focus for the erotic subtext, loved by both men in a way they couldn’t love each other. (NJR xii)

 

Although there are many differences in all of these situations of captivity, I would propose that Jordan’s romanticizing tendency is one way to explore the “sacred” element both Duras and Wiesel insist upon, and that DeLillo’s narrative either denies or completely elides.²¹

 

The Crying Game‘s hostage Jody is a British soldier on assignment in Northern Ireland. He is also a black man, born in Antigua, and the film uses his racial identity to comment in repeated, ironic fashion on the complex interrelations inhering in Britain’s “postcolonial” experience. In the film’s opening sequence, Jody is seduced by Jude, an IRA operative, while the music from the opening credits “When a Man Loves a Woman” fades in the background. There are multiple ironies operating here, of course, as when we find out that Jude is merely playing a role in Jody’s capture, and later when we find out that the woman Jody does love is not a woman at all. The film consistently sets up these enactments of interpretive scenarios, in which the principal characters are presented with situations requiring responses to bodies of information. The film’s audience is likewise asked to participate in these interpretive actions; but, unlike the audience who are given clues and may even guess “right” (“I knew all along” “No, you didn’t” “I did too”), the film’s principal characters almost always are wrong. Jody makes a huge error when he goes with Jude, something he appears to admit when he says, “I didn’t even fancy her. . . . She’s not my type” (NJR 189). Fergus, of course, makes a big mistake in getting involved with the prisoner, a mistake that leads to a whole series of others, including letting Jody take off his hood when he is about to be executed. The film’s most notorious interpretive dilemma involves Fergus’ lack of insight into the clues presented regarding Dil’s gender. Even once his error has been exposed, Fergus continues not to recognize Dil fully, and thus both to underestimate her and to pass on faulty information to his cohorts: for example, when Maguire asks “And who is she?” and Fergus responds “Just a girl” (NJR 245). Underestimating Dil leads Fergus to botch his next assignment, when Dil ties him up, preventing him from making his rendezvous with Maguire and Jude. When Jude arrives at the apartment, Dil correctly identifies her as an agent in Jody’s abduction and shoots her. Now, we could say that all of these errors are part of the romantic plot of the film–Fergus the terrorist with a heart simply making a muddle of things–but that would likewise be a mistake of interpretation in my view.

 

Jordan’s IRA terrorists (or any other terrorists, for that matter) are by no means in control of the meanings generated by their actions, despite what they might like to think, and despite DeLillo/Gray’s equation of the terrorist with the novelist. The situations in which terrorism arises do not admit of these kind of unambivalent messages in which one person or group does the emitting and the wider culture or the masses do the receiving. Following the analysis of Lyotard in Le Differend, it is this impossibility of a universal or totalizing discourse, as paradigmatically represented by the silencing of the wronged party, e.g., the holocaust victim, that leads inevitably to the incommensurable difference or differend. The language of the Law, the language of Western imperialism, even the language of liberal democracy, does not address all subjects and does not allow all subjects to formulate utterances (most notably those who are victims of genocide). Operating out of a determinant us/them opposition, the universalizing discourse of Western humanism necessarily excludes and marginalizes certain utterances, prevents them from being heard or even from being made. The Abu Rashids of this world are not taciturn “by nature”; they are rather denied the fundamental conditions in which to formulate language in a meaningful way. Of course, this leads the Abu Rashids and the Ferguses to undertake actions that rational, moral and ethical thinking is quick to condemn. What this analysis of terrorism uncovers as an aspect of our “postmodern condition,” however, is that we all occupy roles as speakers and interpreters in various discourse communities that may or may not overlap or communicate with each other. This does not excuse any one of us (as the by-now routine misreading of Lyotard would claim) from the obligation to try to understand the ideological structures determining our own discourse communities, and the way these same structures systematically distort the meanings generated by others.

 

It is no longer a viable option, pace Rorty, to say that Western humanism is the best show we have and everybody else had better be convinced (preferably by persuasion rather than force) to get on board. The famous “conflict of interpretations,” which Lyotard continues to insist upon through linking the differend to theories of justice, means from this perspective that no one occupies the role of the “novelist” in the sense of entering into the inner mind of a culture and determining what its members should think about key moral questions. Our various social formations lack the kind of cultural consensus necessary for such a “preeminent” figure. It is a fatal error to think that the “terrorist” is any more able to occupy such a position and in this way I think DeLillo’s Mao II is exemplary in presenting Bill Gray’s doomed attempt to somehow force this connection. Where Mao II falls short, in my view, is in its imaginative representation of the figure of the terrorist. Neil Jordan’s Fergus may be a romanticized version of the terrorist, but at least Jordan’s terrorist is given a “sacred” dimension. DeLillo may wish to deny this “sacred” character to his terrorists, showing rather something like the banality of evil in “the boy”‘s random behavior and Abu Rashid’s programmatic and taciturn utterances. But it is only in attempting to understand the silenced utterances resulting from the inherent lack of justice in our society and leading to all kinds of terrorism both at home and abroad that our postmodern culture deserves to survive at all.

 

Notes

 

1. This notion is advanced by Glen Scott Allen in the fuller version of a paper presented at the 1992 Modern Language Association meeting in New York, “Spectral Authorship: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and the Postmodern Legacy,” and in his essay in this collection.

 

2. In Said’s terms, ‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; “‘colonialism,’ which is almost always a consequence of imperialism is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. . . . In our time, colonialism has largely ended; imperialism, as we shall see, lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices” (9).

 

3. This is a stage where not only the anti-Left reviewers of The Washington Post and other media outlets are stuck. For a forceful critique of these, see the articles by Hal Crowther and Frank Lentricchia in (Lentricchia, ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo. On the other side of the ideological divide are the little + – symbols that Fredric Jameson affixes on his chart next to various theorists of modernism and the postmodern, according to whether they are “progressive” or “reactionary” (61).

 

4. Something about the mirror symmetry, or pleonastic quality, of “triumphant Americanism” and “American triumphalism” ought to give pause to anyone wishing to assume the label of “Americanist.” Paul Bove has given an incisive expression to some of the problems associated with the Americanist discourse in literary studies (48-66). I am very disturbed by the suggestion voiced by some that American literature should be seen in the context of “post-colonial” literatures. Here again, I think Said’s recent work is indispensable for understanding “America”‘s role as a leading imperialist power and for providing ways of contextualizing any analysis of U.S. cultural production.

 

5. Prairie’s search is similar to that in another roughly contemporaneous work, T. Coreghessan Boyle’s World’s End (1988). In this novel, a young man’s search for identity hinges on finding out what happened during a leftist political rally that took place when he was just a child. The betrayal committed on this occasion by his father led to the death of his mother and his father’s permanent estrangement. A combination of mystery story and search for personal identity, World’s End counts for its tacit support by readers of leftist sympathy in order to invest its traditional patterns of mystery story and identity quest with political resonance. This topic has obvious resonances with Borges’ “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s film based on the Borges story, The Spider’s Strategem (1968). In the Bertolucci film, where Borges’ indeterminate setting is replaced by postwar Italy, a son returns to the town in which a statue of his father, martyred by the fascists, dominates the town square. The son intends to investigate the background of his father’s murder, but the further his investigation takes him, the more it looks like the father planned his own murder in order to make amends for betraying his cell of partisan resistance fighters. My guess is that a more thorough examination of modern European and European-influenced literatures would yield countless examples of this motif.

 

6. As should be clear by now, I am following some of the conceptual apparatus for understanding postmodernism proposed by Jean-Francois Lyotard, particularly in The Postmodern Condition and Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants.

 

7. That is, if existentialism was ever in itself a satisfactory solution on a political level. Edward Said’s discussion of Albert Camus’ work in L’Etranger and other texts shows that Camus’ vaunted existential crisis of meaning, particularly the supposedly “unmotivated” murder of the Arab by Meursault, serves as a cover for his deep intrication in the colonialist history and mindset of the French Algerians (Said 169-185).

 

8. That Marx had this metaphorical/nonmetaphorical sense of “drugs” is clear from his statement regarding religion. Lindsay Anderson’s film O Lucky Man! (1973) turns Marx’s dictum around in a prominent wall graffiti: “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”

 

9. These concerns with selfhood and authorship are central to Arnold Weinstein’s recent magisterial study of American fiction, Nobody’s Home.

 

10. In American and Western thinking generally, Asians mean numbers. In Guy Banister’s paranoid imagination, Chinese are massing in the Baja on the border with California: “There was something classic in the massing of the Chinese” (Libra 352). It is too simple merely to call this racist (though it clearly is), because we thus tend to indulge in self-righteous determinations of other people’s racism. DeLillo’s work consistently moves in to the minds of Americans–the Banisters, the Oswalds, the Bill Grays–to show how these racist and other ideological principles serve as organizing tropes for the larger social entities in which we all participate to one degree or another.

 

11. The paranoid reading of DeLillo’s fiction, as solicited for example by The Names, would raise the question of whether there can ever be an “unmotivated” killing of an American in Athens. That is to say, perhaps Gray’s ultimately fatal accident, like the near-fatal shooting of David Keller / James Axton in The Names, stages the “return of the repressed,” mirroring Meursault’s “unmotivated” murder of the Arab in Camus’s L’Etranger. But maybe America’s leading role in maintaining the “New World Order” is not as transparent as I see it as being. Arnold Weinstein, for example, says (astonishingly) about the situation presented in The Names: “American hegemony is a thing of the past” (291).

 

12. Merleau-Ponty says, for example: “It is from the conservative West that communism has received the idea of history and learned to relativize moral judgment. Communism has retained this lesson and sought at least within the given historical milieu those forces which had the best chance to realize humanity. If one does not believe in the power of the proletariat to establish itself or that it can accomplish all that Marxism believes it can, then the capitalist civilizations which have, even if imperfect in themselves, the merit of existing, represent perhaps the least terrible of what history has made; but the difference between these and other civilizations, or between these and the Soviet enterprise, is not between heaven and hell, or between good and evil: it is only a matter of the different uses of violence” (295; my translation).

 

13. This apology for Western-style pragmatic humanism under the guise of liberal democracy is usually associated with the work of Richard Rorty; see especially, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Specifically in an article entitled “Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: A response to Jean-Francois Lyotard,” Rorty rejects the idea that there is anything wrong with taking liberal democracy as the norm when dealing with other cultures: “We cannot leap outside our Western social democratic skins when we encounter another culture, and we should not try. All we should try to do is get inside the inhabitants of that culture long enough to get some idea of how we look to them, and whether they have any ideas we can use” (212-213). If that sounds like cultural imperialism, that is fine with Rorty, because liberal democracy is unquestionably the best social system yet devised. It is unfortunate that in the past force was used to colonize non-Western peoples in the name of liberal humanism, but that doesn’t diminish the ultimate validity of Western values (cf. 218-219). These very significant differences in political outlook between Rorty and Lyotard are consistently overlooked by those who want to lump the two together and accuse Lyotard of Rorty’s political shortcomings.

 

14. As DeLillo well knows, and as Mao II explores in great depth through the character of Karen Janney and her association with the Moon organization, Koresh’s Branch Davidians are known as a “cult.” Karen’s free indirect discourse formulates this as follows: “The other word is `cult.’ How they love to use it against us” (9).

 

15. In the context of the PC wars, one has only to recall George Will’s suggestion, in his Newsweek column on the debate over the Carol Iannone nomination to the NEH advisory board, that members of the MLA were the domestic equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s palace guards, comparing Dick Cheney’s role in defeating Saddam to wife Lynn Cheney’s role in fighting far more insidious enemies within the American academy. This analogy would be ludicrous if it weren’t so revealing of the links between imperialism abroad and cultural hegemony at home.

 

16. As Said says, “Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that ‘natives’ could lead lives free from European domination. As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” (30).

 

17. Richard Bernstein addresses “Rorty’s logic of apartheid–his rigid separation of the private and the public. For like all apartheid, it has violent consequences. It seems curious that Rorty, who shows us that most distinctions are fuzzy, vague, and subject to historical contingencies, should rely on such a fixed, rigid, ahistorical dichotomy. My objection is not to drawing sharp distinctions. Without doing so, no thinking would be possible. My objection is to the way Rorty uses this specific dichotomy, which leads to all sorts of violent consequences” (286). I dispute the ability of Rorty to maintain this distinction, specifically with regard to the language of gendered violence, in Chapter Six of The Ethical Turn: Postmodern Theories of the Subject (forthcoming).

 

18. One recalls that Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? argued for the superiority of the novel as an art form precisely because it alone was able to accomplish a satisfactory synthesis of these domains.

 

19. Weinstein, as we have seen, sees the Wakefield story as paradigmatic of this desire to disappear from one’s life. In the postmodern context I am working to establish here, I see parallels with two fairly recent films, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) and Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977). In each of these films the male protagonist seeks a form of disappearance: in The Passenger, Jack Nicholson’s character switches identities with a dead man who turns out to be an itinerant arms dealer; in The American Friend, the character played by Bruno Ganz is tricked into committing a mob murder by his “American friend” (Dennis Hopper), and then finds that he enjoys the thrill and isolation from his family that results. I think we could call each of these films postmodern in part because of the dissolution of previously stable identities both main characters go through, linked to paranoid systems of shady power figures, both political and criminal, similar to the terrorist network DeLillo constructs in Mao II. This postmodern connection between the individual and the larger conspiracy as a form of what he calls “totality” drives Fredric Jameson’s discussion of recent North American film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992).

 

20. My continued use of the word “terrorist” to describe the IRA character of Fergus (Stephen Rea) is deliberate. Reviews of the film also used this term, although somewhat more casually, calling Fergus, for example, “the terrorist with a heart” or “the thoughtful terrorist.” Lest it seem that I am shifting ground–from the Middle East to Ireland–without justification, I would refer to Edward Said’s discussion of W. B. Yeats in the context of the resistance to imperialism (Said 220-238). Said calls Yeats “the indisputably great national poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an offshore power” (220).

 

21. Raymond Queneau’s 1947 novel, We Always Treat Women Too Well (On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes), set during the Easter Rising of 1916, is a wickedly satirical take on the erotic possibilities of the terrorist / hostage situation, as well as being what now seems a presciently postmodern work.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Rustle of Language. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987.
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations. New York: HBJ, 1968.
• Bernstein, Richard J. The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
• Borges, Jorge Luis. “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1962.
• Bove, Paul A. In the Wake of Theory. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/New England UP, 1992.
• Boyle, T. Coreghessan. World’s End. New York: Viking, 1988.
• DeLillo, Don. The Names. New York: Vintage, 1982.
• —. White Noise. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
• —. Libra. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
• —. Mao II. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.
• Duras, Marguerite. La douleur. Paris: P.O.L., 1985; translated as War, by Barbara Bray, New York: Pantheon, 1986.
• Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Textual Strategies. Ed. Josue Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 141-160.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Wakefield.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982 (Ohio State UP, 1972, 1974).
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Captalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, and London: BFI Publishing, 1992.
• Jordan, Neil. A Neil Jordan Reader (including Night in Tunisia [stories], The Dream of a Beast [novella], and The Crying Game [screenplay]). New York: Vintage, 1993.
• Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit, 1979; translated as The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. “Histoire universelle et differences culturelles,” Critique 456 (1981): 559-568; translated by David Macey as “Universal History and Cultural Differences,” The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 314-323.
• —. Le differend. Paris: Minuit, 1983; translated by Georges Van Den Abeele, Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. Le postmoderne explique aux enfants. Paris: Galilee, 1986.
• McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le probleme communiste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947; translated by John O’Neill, as Humanism and Terror Boston: Beacon, 1969.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. New York: Little, Brown, 1990.
• Queneau, Raymond. On est toujour trop bon avec les femmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1947; translated by Barbara Wright, as We Always Treat Women Too Well. New York: New Directions, 1981.
• Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1992.
• Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
• —. “Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: A response to Jean-Francois Lyotard.” Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Qu’est-ce que la litterature? Paris: Gallimard, 1948; translated by Bernard Frechtman, as What is Literature? New York: Harper and Row, 1949.
• Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford, 1993.
• Wiesel, Elie. Dawn. Trans. Frances Frenaye. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961.
• Wilde, Alan. “Death in and around Vineland, U.S.A.” Boundary 2 18:2 (1991), 166-180.

 

Glen Scott Allen

Department of English
Towson State University
e7e4all@toe.towson.edu

 

“Terror: from the Latin terrere, to frighten; intense fear; the quality of causing dread; terribleness; alarm, consternation, apprehension, dread, fear, fright.”

 

—Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary

 

“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.”

 

–William Gray in Mao II

 

Terrorism has played an important part in nearly every novel Don DeLillo has written to date. While the terrorists of Running Dog (1978) are essentially cartoon figures in search of a hypothetical pornographic film made in Hitler’s bunker, the more realistic terrorists in Players (1977) assassinate stock brokers and attempt to convert (albeit apathetically) disillusioned upper middleclass New Yorkers. The Names’ (1982) use of terrorism is more complex, positing a terrorist group–or perhaps cult is closer to the mark–whose assassinations are either random or based on an arcane understanding of a “pre-linguistic” language, depending on what they believe that day; and White Noise (1985), with its “airborne toxic event” extends this unpredictability factor and presents terrorism as something perhaps beyond the control of human agency at all. Libra (1989) suggest that terrorism of a bureaucratic but inherently uncontrollable nature lurks at the heart of the Kennedy assassination. And finally DeLillo’s most recent novel, Mao II (1991), returns to an human terrorist, Abu Rashid, and suggests a complex and almost hypnotic symmetry between his praxis and that of a famous but disillusioned writer in the novel, William Gray. This symmetry is of course not unique to Mao II; the extended meditation about “solitary plotters” in Libra posits that both the scheming terrorist and the struggling writer are at root “men in small rooms” seeking to reconnect with a society from which they feel alienated, and so they both must “write” themselves back into the world.

 

Terrorism in DeLillo seems an integral component of the postmodern condition, its ubiquitousness aiding and abetting in the construction of a subject for whom paranoia is not so much a neurosis as a canny adaptive strategy of survival; a strategy which has “evolved” from what we might call its classical form in the works of Thomas Pynchon, especially his magnum opus Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Terrorism in GR is figured as the product of increasingly omniscient institutional surveillance over the increasingly impotent and isolated civilian. While the agents of this surveillance are obscure, still they are agents, coherent sites of surveillance and control. In DeLillo’s work, however, terrorism seems to have evolved beyond the need of human agency, to have seeped into the very texture of contemporary life. DeLillo’s response to this postmodern dynamic of terrorism and paranoia argues for an almost romantic return to the sovereign powers of the individual, an entity considered essentially extinct in postmodern fiction. This resurgent individualism is in fact not only a rejection of the paranoid strategy for postmodern survival formulated in Pynchon, but it also represents a rejection of the postmodern subject (as figured in the works of critics like Benveniste, Jameson, and Beaudrillard to name only a few) as something nearly inseparable from the semiotic “signal soup” of postmodern life.¹ For instance, Kaja Silverman singles out the writings of Benveniste as an example of the representation of this spectral postmodern subject: “[In Benveniste’s] writings, the subject has an even more provisional status . . . it has no existence outside of the specific discursive moments in which it emerges. The subject must be constantly reconstructed through discourse.” (Silverman, 199). But I will argue that DeLillo seems to feel our only hope for redemption from a self-perpetuating cycle of terrorism, repression and paranoia is in moving away from formulations of the subject which work to deny or subvert classical conceptions of the individual as the primary site of responsibility and authority.

 

Typically when we speak of terrorism we’re referring to violence committed by a minority in demonstration of its status as victim: of political repression or geographic isolation or “cultural ghettoization.” Thus terrorism is fundamentally an act meant to call attention to itself; like postmodern fiction, it is inherently self-conscious. And in order to disseminate its self-conscious image as victim, it must have recourse to the media. Clearly when DeLillo’s character William Gray suggests that terrorists have usurped the role in the public conscious that novelists once held, he is referring to the fact that terrorist acts must be circulated to attain identity, and thus such acts compete for the public’s limited attention span with other circulating “texts.” Much of the debate within the scholarship of terrorism does in fact center on whether or not mass media encourages terrorist acts or is largely irrelevant to them. Two recent articles in the journal Terrorism are good examples of this debate. Ralph Dowling suggests that TV coverage is unimportant to terrorist aims, while Russell F. Farnen argues that terrorism and TV have a fundamentally symbiotic relationship, and that in fact terrorism is “made to order” for the specific requirements of the television media: “Terrorism is different, dramatic, and potentially violent. It frequently develops over a period of time, occurs in exotic locations, offers a clear confrontation, involves bizarre characters, and is politically noteworthy. Finally, it is of concern to the public” (Farnen, 111). Farnen cites what is apparently the majority opinion in terrorism studies by paraphrasing (unfortunately) Margaret Thatcher, to the effect that TV coverage is the “oxygen” which allows terrorism to breathe.

 

Whatever one’s opinion about the relationship between TV and terrorism, a far more interesting point is to be found in Dowling’s suggestion that understanding terrorist acts is no more–and no less–difficult than understanding any human attempt at communication. For certainly “understanding” terrorist acts is the one thing the “authorities” must claim to be incapable of doing. By its very definition, terrorism, at least to modern western democracies, is “mad.” To see why this is the case we begin with a quote from a member of Al Fatah on the purpose of their use of violence: “Violence will purify the individuals from venom, it will redeem the colonized from inferiority complex, it will return courage to the countryman” (Quoted in Dowling, 52). Violence for this terrorist is not the medium, it is the message. Violence is the transcendental signifier, the one term that cannot be reduced to any positive correlative within the discourse itself; axiomatic, beyond justification or logical debate; beyond logic. Thus to the logocentric Western sensibility, the terrorists’ use of violence is the most “senseless” of all terms he/she could possibly employ. It is, in terms of cultural linguistics, essentially impossible for most “First World” Western civilians to “read” the terrorist text, to see in it any expression worth interpreting. Farnen quotes the U. S. Ambassador at Large, L. Paul Bremer, who casts terrorism in its familiar Western role of evil incarnate: “Terrorism’s most significant characteristic is that it despises and seeks to destroy the fundamentals of Western democracy–respect for individual life and the rule of law” (Farnen, 104).

 

Though these two authors disagree about the relationship between terrorism and the media, they both agree that terrorism does in fact serve a fundamental rhetorical purpose, like any other form of human communication consisting of the manipulation of symbols. The communicative act is, Dowling argues, the way humans “find a place in the world,” the process of identifying oneself and one’s group as distinct from other selves and other groups. Terrorist acts signal to the terrorists themselves who they are. In Dowling’s view, the cultural effect of mass media-broadcasted terrorist violence is quite secondary to the more fundamentally human need of terrorists to “speak” themselves: “The seemingly senseless killings by terrorists serve the same function for terrorist society that wars and punishment of criminals and dissidents perform for mainstream society” (Dowling, 51). Farnen also believes that terrorism is a form of expression, a text which all the parties involved seek to control.² He uses the example of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Brigate Rosse, which Farnen says was “played out” as a classic narrative of sacrifice and tragedy by all the parties involved: government, media, and the terrorists themselves: “The saga was complete with ‘Christians’ (Moro and his martyred bodyguards), BR ‘lions,’ state ‘Caesars,’ media ‘tribunes,’ and the anxious Italian public” (Farnen, 116). In fact, Farnen argues that the terrorists intentionally and specifically “wrote” various symbolism into the entire kidnapping drama, in such forms as the “placement of [Moro’s] dead body in the center of Rome, on a street linking the two major party headquarters” (118). Even more interesting is Farnen’s observation that, though the event was discussed at obsessive length in the media for months, very little was ever said about the terrorists’ possible motivations or rationale. In fact, he concludes that, like many such terrorist acts, the entire event was treated as though it occurred somewhere outside the normal course of human events: “The Moro affair was treated much like an inexplicable natural disaster or an act of God” (118). Finally, Farnen points out terrorism’s usefulness as a dramatic trope, which has made it a mainstay of TV shows and popular spy novels: “With the sudden demise of post-Gorbachev communism as the main enemy, terrorism has become ‘public enemy number one’ in American public discourse” (103). (Certainly this move is evident in the work of Tom Clancy, who began by casting Soviets in the role of arch villain, but has easily substituted terrorists–both narco- and political–in that role in his more recent novels.)

 

While much of Dowling’s argument seems finally rather simplistic–at times he appears to cast terrorists in the role of the misunderstood teens from “West Side Story”–at the very least he works to move the discourse about terrorist acts from reductive tactical debates to a recognition that terrorism is a means of expression. However, by downplaying and eventually denying the role the mass media audience plays in the formation of the “terrorist identity,” he skims over what is clearly for many postmodern writers, especially DeLillo, the most interesting, perhaps the most terrifying aspect of modern terrorism. For if terrorists have become nearly ubiquitous players in the contemporary social narrative, then, whatever the intent of their “expressive” acts, they contribute as much to the formation of our identity as to their own, and their acts of seemingly random and “meaningless” violence have become an integral component of what being a modern individual means. Given that it has become something of a commonplace to say that part of what being a postmodern subject means is a pervasive sense of anxiety and vulnerability, then terrorism’s chief aim would seem to be perfectly consistent with that “meaning.” According to an authority on terrorism, its chief “objective . . . is to convey a pervasive sense of vulnerability”; vulnerability which produces consequent paranoia and guilt in the civilian; guilt which arises “when terrorism proves that societal institutions cannot provide the peace and security they promise” (qtd. in Dowling, 52). Thus in a broad cultural context, terrorism is an all-too material demonstration of the uncertainty principle, i.e., that we cannot absolutely control our environments and destinies, and that our ability to dictate the narrative of our own lives is limited and circumstantial.

 

In order to describe DeLillo’s presentation of this dynamic of terrorism and paranoia, we first need to discuss terrain so often considered Pynchon’s preeminent stomping ground. Pynchon’s chief contribution to literature may well be considered a body of fiction where the legacy of a paranoid style–out of Orwell via Burroughs, Kerouac and Mailer–comes to full fruition in what a character in Running Dog calls the “age of conspiracies.” According to John McClure, the appeal of conspiracy theories in the late 20th century stems from their essentially indisputable, self-justifying, self-referencing hermeneutics: “For conspiracy theory explains the world, as religion does, without elucidating it, by positing the existence of hidden forces which permeate and transcend the realm of ordinary life” (McClure, 103). Though McClure is writing here of the work of Don DeLillo, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow would undoubtedly serve equally well as an example of this conspiracy fiction, with its nearly infinite schemes crossing and crisscrossing nations, continents, and decades, while in the center of these intersecting plot-lines sits forlorn Tyrone Slothrop, like a target in a crosshairs.

 

But a target of what? Certainly the V-2 rocket is one possibility; by the end of the novel we have reason to believe that the rocket is in fact “pursuing” Slothrop, or that he is pursuing it. In any case, they seem bound, through the early experiments of Dr. Jamf with Imoplex-G, in some complicated dance of death. But this “chemical bond” is only conjectural, and certainly not the only candidate for some They out to get Slothrop. In fact, by the time Slothrop wanders the Zone, They has become nearly every postwar institution, regardless its national or ideological boundaries. Finally what pursues Slothrop is the World; but what pursues the reader is the lasting image of a rocket, poised an infinitesimal inch above our heads, completing an arc which began with its vapor trail first witnessed by Pirate Prentice 800 pages earlier. And in a purely physical sense, the greatest terror of the novel is the V-2, the German “terror weapon” that was intended to demoralize the British civilian population. By using the V-2 as a trope of paranoia, Pynchon categorically identified the primary legacy of our victory in WWII as anxiety; anxiety fueled by a world armed with weapons which had transcended all classical theories and strategies of warfare. This fundamentally “material” terrorism is one easily recognized by anyone who lived through either WWII or the 25 years of intense Cold War which followed. As critic John Johnston has argued, the “They-system” of Gravity’s Rainbow “is depicted as arising out of the new bureaucratic needs and technologies of World War Two” (“Post-Cinematic Fiction,” 91); bureaucratic needs and technologies which would come to identify Slothrop’s “time” as the progenitor of this age of conspiracies:

 

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly–perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time’s assembly–and there ought to be a punchline to it. But there isn’t. The plan went wrong. (GR, 680)

 

Though Pynchon’s Theys are depicted as beyond traditional national ideologies, Their politics are clearly identifiable as essentially those of isolation, repression and control. In the post-WWII world of Pynchon’s fiction, the development of modern and efficient state surveillance is a form of terrorism which motivates the civilian to seek out patterns of information which may (or may not) reveal hidden agencies and concealed plots. Thus paranoia is an adaptive reaction formation to omniscient institutional surveillance. And the mass media in Pynchon–radio, TV and print journalism, even the US. postal system–has been largely co-opted by these forces of surveillance and control until they have become little more than state-dominated networks for distributing dis-information. Pynchon correctly predicted that the surviving nation-states, unable to take to the battlefield against foreign enemies, would turn all their powers of surveillance on their own citizens, project their institutionalized paranoia onto these civilians, and thus construct an international and domestic tension where peace in the world was purchased with the disappearance of this very civilian as an independent subject. What Pynchon represents in GR is, for want of a better term, the ascendancy of State Terrorism; not the state terrorism claimed by the PLO as a underlying reality in the foreign policy of the United States and other world powers, but rather an intra state terrorism, i.e., the development of complex and interconnected domestic and international networks of surveillance which depend on the acquisition and circulation of vast quantities of new information.

 

And these new information technologies also become central to the thematics of DeLillo’s novels, but in quite different ways. For instance, the information in DeLillo’s work often seems utterly ahistorical. The characters of DeLillo’s novels often “inhabit” identities whose connection to history–either personal or cultural–is merely theoretical. DeLillo’s fictions seem set in a time when World War II has become a distant influence. In Running Dog, for instance, there is the pornographic film from Hitler’s Bunker, yet nothing else about World War II seeps through into the novel; even Vietnam seems to belong to an entirely other world. Of course, the paranoiac “fallout” from World War II and the stalemate of the Cold War is only one of the trademarks of Pynchon’s fiction. Others include conspiracies whose agencies are dispersed or uncertain, characters who disappear in ways which mirror the dispersal of those agencies, and endings which suggest imminent and perhaps apocalyptic revelation. Yet, while all of these components are evident in DeLillo’s novels as well, they are all warped by this increasing mass of information which shapes, or perhaps is the postmodern subject.

 

In other words, many of DeLillo’s characters seem to be in danger of becoming exactly the sort of postmodern specter to which I referred earlier. In fact, critic Daniel Aaron has suggested that, in all of DeLillo’s novels, his characters are less Cartesian individuals than “integers in a vast information network” (70). And LeClair sees information and its various incarnations as the very essence of DeLillo’s works: “The novels are all about communication exchanges, the relations between information and energy and forces, the methods of storing, retrieving, and using new kinds of information” (“Postmodern Mastery,” 101). How, then, is DeLillo arguing against the acceptance of the dissipated postmodern subject? This is a point I will return to in a moment. But first I want to pursue the ways in which DeLillo re-structures Pynchon’s legacy of paranoia, and the relationship in Ratner’s Star between paranoia and what DeLillo presents as the “new, improved” version of postmodern terrorism.

 

DeLillo remaps Pynchon’s legacy of paranoia onto a distinctly American, largely urban post-historical landscape. In novels of middle class ennui like Players, White Noise, and even to a certain extent Mao II, the America of DeLillo is not only a land existing completely within this “age of conspiracies,” its inhabitants seem capable of defining themselves only as victims of these conspiracies. Frank Lentricchia believes that DeLillo’s works serve as cautionary tales about such conspiracy and media-bound identity, illustrating “how the expressive forces of blood and earth are in the process of being overtaken and largely replaced by the forces of contemporary textuality. Lives lived so wholly inside the media are lives expressed (in the passive mood) through voices dominated by the jargons of the media” (“Postmodern Critique,” 211). And while the terrorism in DeLillo’s novels often begins as something familiar to us as terrorism–small bands of individuals plotting acts of violence against “innocent” civilians–this “prosaic” terrorism typically metamorphoses into something else: an independent, uncontrolled, mysterious and perhaps even unfathomable force which disrupts the best laid plans of terrorist and civilian alike. Again, the airborne toxic event in White Noise is one example. But the best sustained representation of this “agentless” terrorism is to be found, oddly enough, in one of DeLillo’s earliest novels, Ratner’s Star (1976); a novel unique among his works if only because there is no representative terrorist among its characters; at least no recognizably human terrorist. But we do recognize in Ratner’s Star a “Pynchonian” mise en scene, complete with proliferating plots, daunting intertextual connections, hidden and potentially non-existent agencies, dispersing narrative voices, and, at the center of the plots and counter-plots, a lone and relatively naive protagonist, Billy Twillig, whose task it is to determine whether he is a perceptive victim or a delusional paranoid. In Ratner’s Star, DeLillo rewrites the global plots of Gravity’s Rainbow onto the larger stage of the Universe, which itself becomes both scheme and schemer, as well as the chief “terrorist.”

 

The premise of Ratner’s Star is that we have received a signal from outer space. Fourteen-year-old Billy Twillig, a mathematical prodigy, is summoned to a distant research complex, Field Experiment Number One (FENO), to help decode the message. From the beginning of the novel the uncertainty of Billy’s task and the instability of the fictional world which surrounds him are emphasized: “Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain. . . . But ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one’s perspective” (RS, 3). From the moment Billy arrives at FENO, he is besieged by what any reader of Pynchon would recognize as an overabundance of signal which threatens to degenerate into noise; and the only scientist other than Billy capable of deciphering the alien message–the aged and venerable Henrik Endor–has run away from the complex and is out in the desert, digging a hole.

 

Billy’s dilemma is not unlike that of Benny Profane or Oedipa Maas or Tyrone Slothrop: to “sort noise from signal,” and determine whether or not there is an intelligent “agency” at the origin of the message; but to determine first of all if there is a message. And like Benny and Oedipa and Tyrone before him, Billy encounters a dizzying array of characters in his search, all with their own interpretation of the message, all with their entirely idiosyncratic agenda of signals and counter-signals. But whereas in Pynchon the “terror” generated by mysterious plots is largely a result of the revealed size and complexity of those plots, in Ratner’s Star the terror arises from the randomness and potential irrelevance of the information with which Billy is bombarded; which is to say, in Pynchon what is learned contributes to the background of terror, while in DeLillo the acquisition of knowledge is problematized to the point where “learning” itself is an experience of random and meaningless violence; the very process of searching is, in and of itself, terrifying.

 

This terrible process of learning is figured as inescapably arising from the dynamics and limits of language. While the later half of the novel is devoted to the revelation of many things Billy doesn’t really want to know (about adulthood and sex, trust and betrayal), the first half concentrates on reducing language, and particularly conversation to something more like hand-to-hand combat than communication. For instance, dialogue between characters is less the revelation of information than an exchange of cliches, a sort of preliminary sizing up of one another for soft spots. A dialogue between Billy and a vaguely sinister man he meets on a plane (an entrepreneur who will turn out later to be the closest thing the novel has to an actual terrorist) goes like this:

 

"How was the bathroom."
"I liked it."
"Mine was first-rate."
"Pretty nice."
"Some plane."
"The size."
"Exactly."

 

Throughout the novel most of the characters play their conversational cards very close to the vest, but Billy’s responses to questions particularly are more like stage directions for speech than speech itself: “My mouth says hello”; “I do not comment.”; “I make no reply” (RS, 11). And when Billy eventually reaches the secret complex FENO, he is almost literally assaulted by a blizzard of scientific jargon from a dozen different fields–biology, child “sexology,” astrophysics, architecture–as well as the apparently secret agendas of everyone he meets. All of this secretive and gestural communication occurs in an atmosphere of instantaneous computer networks, portable communicators, super intelligent computers and hyperbolic referentiality, which makes language something violent, unrelenting, and unpredictable. No communication is simply referential, pointing to any unambiguous signified. In fact, signification in the world of FENO is (in Barthes’ terms) all connotation, no denotation–rhetorical “slippages” alone accounting for what little coherent meaning can be derived. Language here is often so rote as to be almost all ritual, its meaning residing entirely in its context. For instance, when Billy reaches his room in FENO, certain “safety precautions” are read to him by his escort:

 

“The exit to which your attention has been directed is the sole emergency exit point for this sector and is not to be used for any purpose except that contingent upon fire, man-made flooding, natural trauma or catastrophe, and international crisis situations of the type characterized by nuclear spasms or terminal-class subnuclear events. If you have understood this prepared statement, indicate by word or gesture.”

 

“I have understood.”

 

“Most people just nod,” Ottum said. “It’s more universal.” (17)

 

And often language “attacks” occur without any context. In fact, individual words often take on a paranoiac aura which is completely independent of either their denotation or connotation. For instance, Billy feels certain words are threatening all by themselves–words like gout, ohm, ergot, pulp; “organic” words which he refers to as “alien linguistic units.” And his paranoid reaction makes perfect sense: in a world where all quotes are taken out of context, each utterance would indeed seem an “alien linguistic unit,” something whose purpose is suspect and presumptively threatening. Thus the material violence which is the transcendental signifier for terrorists like the member of Al Fatah becomes in Ratner’s Star the abstracted violence of decontextualized and seemingly nonsensical language; language without a logical referent, pointing either to itself or nowhere, or both.

 

Of course much postmodern fiction depends on this technique of decontextualization for its disorienting effect. But typically accompanying this technique is the employment of intertextual references which signal to the reader exactly what sort of larger context–often ironic–is to be used to “ground” signification. Throughout Ratner’s Star, however, what we would typically refer to as the intertextual references are made not to individual texts at all, but rather to vague “sites” of cultural signification. These sites are in turn reduced to single tropes, what we might call “signature” tropes, the decoding of which depends on the reader’s possession of a repertoire of contemporary cultural trivia: cliches from classic films, one-liners from TV shows, characters and quotes from comic books, popular novels, newspaper headlines, tabloids, the jargon of Scientific American, the newspeak of federal bureaucrats, the glib argot of tabloid journalists . . . all of these idiolects existing side-by-side as equally valid discourses. Thus “texts” are less discrete and more continuous, terms which Ratner’s Star uses with considerable frequency; something like subatomic particles, which aren’t really “particular” at all but rather fields whose density fades vaguely off into other fields. And very often these “fields” of reference merely deflect the reader to still other “tropic fields” (to coin a perfectly awful phrase) until the paths of reference become so intricate that any map of this referentiality would look like the tracings of subatomic collisions produced in particle accelerators.³

 

In such a miasmic communicative environment, traditional boundaries between “texts” are dissolved. The result is more chaotic tropic plasma than orderly intertextual network. In this new form of intertextuality, the process whereby texts make contributions to the intertextual langue are best thought of as something like a field of signification, something one measures with probabilities and approximations rather than certainties and units. The characters of Ratner’s Star move through clouds of such tropes, charged with the reflexive urge to find some sort of order, to arrange these signals into “spectra” based not on the content of the original text from which the signature trope is derived, but rather on the degree to which each trope serves as a vector pointing toward a potential agency at the message’s point of origin. For instance, even when Billy believes he has finally decoded the message from space, he is admonished for working toward the wrong goal: “Content is not the issue. So don’t go around telling people you broke the code. There is no code worth breaking” (416). Robert Softly, the character who has conceived of the perfectly logical, perfectly useless language called Logicon (a language for which one of the key rules is “i. All language was innuendo.”) often speaks with every word–even articles and prepositions–in quotes: “‘It’ ‘is’ ‘time’ ‘for’ ‘me’ ‘to’ ‘get’ ‘out’.” Each word is thus partitioned by an ironic valence even from its immediate, syntagmatic context. Thus severed from all context global and local, much of the language in the book does indeed seem like the “alien linguistic units” which so terrorize Billy. To what do such “alien linguistic units” refer? For Billy at least, that common direction, the principle which he uses in an attempt to bring shape to the tropic plasma, is the discourse of mathematics–the only discourse which he does not find threatening. Language which is not simply “alien” is “comforting” to the extent that it can be translated into mathematical equivalents. And what Billy finds comforting in mathematics is the distinct quality of its constituent components–at least its integer components: “Words and numbers, writing and calculating. . . . Ever one more number, individual and distinct, fixed in place, absolutely whole” (7). Fractions, we are told, have always made Billy feel “slightly queasy.”

 

The typical Pynchonian reaction to such a state of paranoia would be a dispersal of agency. By dispersal of agency, I mean both the figurative way in which the plots in Pynchon’s novels are always potentially agentless and self-perpetuating, and the literal manner in which Pynchon’s protagonists have a tendency to disappear: we recall Benny in V. disappearing into the sunset of Malta, Oedipa in Lot 49 disappearing into the auction room, and, most significantly, Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, who disperses into the plot itself, becoming a “pretext” and a concept which is “just too remote” to hold together. We might also remember the way in which Slothrop merges with the symbol of what’s been pursuing him–the V-2 rocket–by becoming Rocketmensch just before he merges with the plot ever further and becomes vaguely visible (at least to Pig Bodine) but insubstantial; before he becomes, that is, a specter. And such a move is, again, perfectly in keeping with the paranoid logos of the novel, as the other trademark of Pynchon’s plots is their undecidability, their sense of imminent but unrealized revelation. In one sense, revelation ought to be the ultimate moment for the paranoid, as it is the moment when the “truth” of his world view is substantiated, made incarnate; but of course this ultimate moment is also the final moment–for if paranoia is more the state of seeking agency than the moment of finding it, then revelation threatens the paranoid’s very raison d’etre. Thus the most dedicated paranoid would be the one able to forever defer this moment of revelation.

 

At this point I need to briefly discuss the idea of tropes. The root of the word trope is the Greek tropaion, which was a marker left to indicate where an enemy had been turned back. We might ask, then, what “enemy” is it that tropes turn back? As tropic or figural language is, at least in a basic sense, considered the opposite of literal language, a first order answer might be that tropes mark the place in language where literality is “turned back.” What is literal is “made up” of letters; and literal reading is after all an effort to reduce the ambiguity of a term to a single meaning; to transform signifiers into signals whose meaning is constant across all possible contexts. Tropes, on the other hand, tug language in the opposite direction, toward a multiplicity of meaning and thus toward an uncertainty of interpretation. With this understanding of the tension between literal and tropic reading in mind, I would suggest then that the paranoid reader is in fact a very literal reader, one who works to reduce the ambiguity of the signifiers about him to mere signals which can all be traced back to the same and central agent–the agency at the center of the “plot.”

 

Who or what is this agent? To quote first from Gravity’s Rainbow:

 

“There never was a Dr. Jamf,” opines world-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry–“Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what [Slothrop] felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he was in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death.” (861)

 

By the end of Ratner’s Star, Billy Twillig feels “there was something between himself and the idea of himself . . . and what he knew about this thing was that it had the effect of imposing a silence” (RS, 361). Is Death, then, the elusive agency at the heart of both Pynchon and DeLillo’s paranoid plots? After all, a paranoid’s literal reading of Revelation–as in the revelation of agency–would necessarily dictate that it be followed inevitably by the completion of apocalypse, i.e., annihilation. And here we might remember the ending of Gravity’s Rainbow, with the tip of the rocket suspended above our heads and the words, “All together now” uniting us in the paranoid’s penultimate embrace. But in Ratner’s Star, DeLillo again raises the stakes of this near moment of revelation: for, while the imminent apocalypse in Gravity’s Rainbow is global, the imminent apocalypse of Ratner’s Star is “literally” universal.

 

Ratner’s Star posits something in space called a “mohole,” where all the recognized laws of physics cease to apply. “‘If I had to put what a mohole is into words’ (asks the reporter, Jean, who is chronicling the development of Logicon)’what would I say?’ ‘You’d have a problem,’ Mainwaring said” (365). By the end of the novel, the earth seems to be in just such a place, to be “mohole intense,” as it is cast into darkness by an “unscheduled” solar eclipse. Though the gathered scientists predict that life in a mohole will be radically different, they have no idea how to explain or describe the difference: “I don’t feel any different,” Softly said. “Rob, we don’t know. That’s it. We don’t know what it means. This is space-time sylphed. We’re dealing with Moholean relativity here. Possibly dimensions more numerous than we’ve ever before imagined” (410). Thus DeLillo gives Pynchon’s formula of dispersed and uncertain agency a boost by moving his imminent apocalypse into an area of potentially absolute dispersal and infinite uncertainty. Perhaps at the conclusion of Ratner’s Star we are on the verge of a literal apocalypse; that is, an apocalypse of literality; and, potentially, the genesis of an entirely “figural” universe where there is absolutely no consistent, predictable relationship between one experience and the next, between any word and any thing, between cause and effect. At the very least, such a universe would mean, in Ambassador at Large Bremer’s words, the end of “respect for individual life and the rule of law”; i.e., the final and complete triumph of terrorism.

 

So perhaps Slothrop’s disappearing act could well be considered a maneuver intended to outflank this revelation of universal uncertainty and thus omnipresent terrorism: a countering of the “reign of terror” engendered by the dispersal of agency by mirroring it and becoming the dispersed subject. And this dispersal of the subject is also found in Ratner’s Star–but again, with a twist. While Slothrop disperses into the narrative, still the narrating voice of Gravity’s Rainbow remains relatively coherent. However, in Ratner’s Star, while Billy Twillig retains his coherence as a character, what had been the third person omniscient narrating voice of the novel essentially disperses into the characters, moving in the same sentence between locales, even between thoughts:

 

Softly stopped reading here, thinking I am old, I will die, no one cares, her upper body slumped forward on the desk and what an implausible object it is, she thought . . . the photoelectric command at the end of Bolin’s hand, thinking I am old . . . Wu’s middle ear conveying vibrations inward . . . the implausibility of my parts, she thought. . . . (425)

 

In this final section of the novel, sentences intrude on one another like filaments of conversations overheard on car phones, as if the very atmosphere of the novel were filled with detached segments of dialogue drifting about, looking for a conversation to link up with. Thus it is the “voice” of Ratner’s Star which disperses, and which anticipates and evades the imminent revelation that its own end implies but does not quite reach.

 

DeLillo particularly seems interested in the link between death as the final paranoid revelation and the act of authoring itself. One of the entries quoted from Oswald’s diary in Libra expresses Oswald’s greatest longing, which is to cease being Oswald the individual and to merge into a spectral identity called “the struggle”: “Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general” (quoted in Lentricchia, “Postmodern Critique,” 197). Lentricchia sees in Oswald’s banal desire something other than merely one soldier of the revolution wishing to become one with the army of the revolution. Rather, he suggests that Oswald wishes to exchange places with Win Everett (the former CIA agent who is “plotting” Kennedy’s fake assassination), to become the author of the plot in which he is only a character–or perhaps to become an author, period: “Oswald, in his desire for a perfectly distilled, scripted self–propelled by itself as its own novelist/prime mover–is a figure of the assassin as writer, a man isolated by his passion, room-bound, a plot schemer” (“Postmodern Critique,” 209). Lentricchia suggests that in his feelings of impotence, victimhood, and insubstantiality Oswald is the perfect representation of the spectral and manipulated postmodern subject: “Self-constructed, constantly revised, Oswald’s narrative is a search for the very thing–a well-motivate, shapely existence–whose absence is a mark of the negative libran . . . Oswald’s patched voice produces the presiding tone of the postmodern absence of substantial and autonomous self-hood” (Lentricchia, “Postmodern Critique,” 209).

 

And DeLillo’s most recent novel Mao II centers on another “room-bound” plot schemer, a writer whose infrequent books are considered vastly intricate and dauntingly knowledgeable (which is of course also reminiscent of Pynchon). The writer’s name is William Gray–a fine name for blending into the background. ⁴ Gray is a recluse, in the style of J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. In the novel, Gray has become something of a cultural “trope,” whose usefulness to his culture resides in the very insubstantiality of his celebrity. However, Gray feels his best work is behind him; or rather, that the best role of the author in society is behind him, and that authors as enactors of literature no longer have any effect on society. “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness” (Mao II, 87). Yet the “plot” Gray eventually becomes involved with is one authored by terrorists, not novelists; a plot which leads him to the realization of what seems to be his ultimate desire, which is not so much a merging into the struggle, as Oswald wanted, but a disappearing altogether into an anonymous death. There is the suggestion that Gray trumps the terrorist Abu Rashid’s plans for him by dying before he can be victimized, by making his sacrifice his own statement rather than allowing it to be shaped to Rashid’s purposes. But of course this is a statement no one reads, which we can think of either as an act of supreme idealization.

 

Or supreme futility. Mao II hardly endorses Gray’s self-willed abdication of self, his “devout” wish “to be forgotten,” as any sort of positive solution to the problem of postmodern terrorism and paranoia. For one thing, Gray’s anonymous death does not end the novel; we see the various characters adjusting to Gray’s disappearance, using it, shaping his absence to their own ends: his friend Scott settles into Gray’s house, becoming a simulacrum of the absent author; the photographer Brita who sought to “reproduce” Gray shifts her aim easily to the terrorist instead, in a move both opportunistic and smoothly adaptive (and one which models the very sort of symbiotic interdependence Farnen suggests between those who “write” violence into the text of everyday life and those who disseminate it). Gray’s dispersal leaves only a vacuum which others rush in to fill, without giving a second thought to the “message” intended by his disappearance. Thus the novel poses a subtle, even tragic question: what are the limits of dispersed subjecthood? If one seeks to evade the terror of random violence by blending into the background and denying the terrorist–whether individual or Universe–a coherent, identifiable site of violence, what is sacrificed? To what extent is Gray’s preemptive vanishing a death not only of potential victimhood, but also of personal identity, of responsibility, and thus of legacy? How thoroughly can the author disown author-ity before also surrendering integrity; the ability, in the words of Gravity’s Rainbow, to appear as any sort of “integral creature”?

 

Lentricchia suggests that, in the traditional American novel, the author provides a stable point of reference from which the reader can take society’s “critical measure,” that the reader can find relative detachment “within the value of the ‘omniscient’ author who displays the workings of the dynamic but is not himself subject to them. The author, then, is a transcendent figure, someone the reader is implicitly asked to identify with . . . that constantly throws us forward into some other, some imagined, existence” (“Postmodern Critique,” 210). Lentricchia goes on to say that this “exit” is “sealed off” in Libra. Johnston makes essentially the same observation about Ratner’s Star, which he sees as refusing to grant authority to any univocal narrator or point of view: “[Ratner’s Star] refuses to privilege any single ‘authoritative’ version or to subordinate its varied stories and discourses to a higher or more englobing authorial narrative discourse, which would amount to yielding to precisely those powers and functions that it wants to lay bare. Instead, it inscribes an uncertainty and indeterminacy in its own narrative structure, and plays with how we might know certain connections between events” (“Post-cinematic Fiction,” 91). I would point again to the novel’s last section, when what has previously been a coherent and recognizable narrating voice disperses into the “text.” Thus Ratner’s Star robs the reader of the comfort of any transcendental authorial figure who might otherwise serve to “make sense” of the random violence of decontextualized language; who might, that is, provide relief from the terrorism of meaninglessness. And this absence further denies the reader any detached platform from which he/she might, with impunity, take his/her society’s “critical measure.” Thus, in the absence of the narrator and author, the reader is forced to construct some central embodying principle to grant overall context to the otherwise terrifying uncertainty of the novel; to build upon an interpretive principle which is secretive, elusive, coded, with a potentially totalizing or “universal” agenda and capable of explaining vast and obscure connections. . . . In other words, the reader must write a plot. He/she must actively engage the terrorism of meaninglessness which seeks to overwhelm the novel; to assert, that is, his/her individual strategies of sense-making.

 

However ambiguous the endings of DeLillo’s novels, there is almost always at least one character who “models” this sort of adaptive strategy for the reader: one thinks of Pammy in Players, moving away from the violent ennui of her husband-become-terrorist toward an alternative she can’t quite articulate; or the final image in Ratner’s Star, which is not the ascendancy of the dispersed voice of the narrator (as in Gravity’s Rainbow), but rather the frail and oddly exuberant image of Billy Twillig–who has spent the last half of the novel almost paralyzed with terror–exuberantly pedaling a tricycle into the “reproductive dust of existence” (120). While DeLillo’s representation of terrorism in novels like Ratner’s Star and Mao II seems even more universal, insidious and hegemonic than Pynchon’s in Gravity’s Rainbow, his work finally does not seem to completely accept Pynchon’s solution, i.e., that we abandon the field to the ablest postmodern paranoids. In fact, I would argue that DeLillo’s characters often embrace the plots which surround them, which perhaps construct them, and work–against all reasonable odds–to adapt to such a statement of existence so that they might in turn alter the statements of that existence. They seek some alternate way of existing within a world admittedly filled with random violence and meaningless communication, to resist both the role of surveilled and terrorized subject and paranoid, dispersed specter. Though there is certainly an overlay of despair and futility in DeLillo’s work, there often seems too an indefatigable energy, a belief just as strong that the production of plots we call novels might not be completely futile or always already culpable. DeLillo himself has expressed a willingness to embrace rather than resist what other writers see as the terrorism of technology and technological modes of existence in postmodern society: “Science in general has given us a new language to draw from. Some writers shrink from this. . . . To me, science is a source of new names. . . . Rilke said we had to rename the world. Renaming suggests an innocence and a rebirth” (LeClair, “Interview” 84).

 

Much of DeLillo’s work, especially Ratner’s Star, points toward a strategy of adaptation and rebirth particularly of our sense of individual identity and responsibility as, perhaps, the only counter to becoming the dispersed and irresponsible postmodern specters. But his work also recognizes that such a rebirth of our sense of self and community involves a considerable struggle; a struggle Jacques Derrida seems to have had in mind when, writing about the importance of a new formation of European cultural identity in response to terrorism–whether it be religious, political, or ethnic–he calls for a postmodern subject which is informed by rather than frightened of our increasing and inescapable connectedness; a cultural identity “constituted in responsibility” shaped by, in a quite traditional way, the anticipation of one’s cultural legacy. “For perhaps responsibility consists in making of the name recalled, of the memory of the name, of the idiomatic limit, a chance, that is, an opening of identity to its very future” (Derrida, 35). Perhaps such an interpretation reads DeLillo (and Derrida) as more neo-existentialists than postmodernists; perhaps it even suggests that DeLillo’s work needs to be re-examined for its links to modernism, even romanticism, in its representation of the theoretically obsolete individual as the only viable site of resistance to the ubiquitous terror of postmodern life.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for instance, Emile Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics (1971); Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992); and Jean Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the Social (1983).

 

2. Farnen also has a second and more interesting point to make, which is that the portrayal of terrorism in the media has created a false trope. He quotes at length statistics which show that, especially in the last five years, terrorists acts have become so rare that “[I]n the United States, a person is more likely to die as a victim of an asthma attack than as a victim of a terrorist attack” (101).

 

3. See John Johnston’s discussion of the heavy use of cinema in the works of both Pynchon and DeLillo in “Post- Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy, and DeLillo,” where he suggests that “the interest in cinema revealed in these novels seems to respond to a sense of the cinema as an apparatus for producing and disseminating images which both construct and control a new kind of subject.” A subject, I would add, which is a product not of the accumulated content of interrelated texts, but rather the transient acontextual moment of intersecting tropes.

 

4. In fact, it is rumored that Bill Gray is the name Don DeLillo often used when traveling incognito.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 67-81.
• DeLillo, Don. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage Books, 1980 (1976).
• —. Players. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
• —. Running Dog. New York : Vintage Books, 1978.
• —. The Names. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
• —. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
• —. Libra. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
• —. Mao II. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
• Dowling, Ralph E. “Victimage and Mortification: Terrorism and Its Coverage in the Media.” Terrorism 12-1, (1989): 47-59.
• Farnen, Russell F. “Terrorism and the Mass Media: A Systemic Analysis of a Symbiotic Process.” Terrorism 13-2, (1990): 99-123.
• Harris, Robert R. “A Talk with Don DeLillo.” New York Times Book Review, 10 Oct. 1982: F26.
• Johnston, John. “Generic Difficulties in the Novels of Don DeLillo.” Critique 30-4, (1989): 261-275.
• —. “Post-Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy, and DeLillo.” New Orleans Review 17-2, (1990): 90-97.
• LeClair, Tom. In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Chicago: U. of Illinois Press, 1987.
• LeClair, Tom. “Interview with Don DeLillo.” Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983. 79-90.
• LeClair, Tom. “Post-Modern Mastery.” Representation and Performance in Postmodern Fiction. Ed. Maurice Couturier. Nice: Delta Press, 1983. 99-111.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “Libra as Postmodern Critque.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 193-215.
• McClure, John A. “Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 99-115.
• Price, Andrew Jude. “The Entropic Imagination in 20th Century American Fiction: A Case for Don DeLillo.” Dissertation abstracts, ’88 nov 49-5, 1143A.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1976.
• Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

 

John Unsworth

Department of English
University of Virginia
jmu2m@virginia.edu

 

This journal does not usually run editor’s introductions, but with this issue it enters a new phase of its existence, and that new phase deserves some comment. For more than three years, Postmodern Culture has been publishing peer-reviewed critical and creative work in a text-only format that accommodates electronic mail: we will continue to publish in that format, but beginning with this January, 1994 issue, we will also publish each new issue (and provide all back issues) through the World-Wide Web. Regular subscribers of the journal will also note that this is the first issue ever to be published late: unfortunately, producing two versions of each file and setting up templates for article and issue design proved more time-consuming than anticipated. That it came out at all is due in large part to the efforts of the guest editors, Scott Allen and Stephen Bernstein for the DeLillo cluster and Tan Lin for the poetry cluster–and no less to Jim English, the review editor, and the editorial staff, Jonathan Beasley, Chris Barrett, Amy Sexton, and Jason Haynes.

 

What’s the Web?

 

The World-Wide Web may already be familiar to some of our readers, since its use is growing faster even than the internet itself, but many others will not yet have discovered it and may welcome some background information. The World-Wide Web is a client-server system for providing integrated text, graphics, sound, and video over the internet. The most important feature of the Web, though, is its ability to link files to one another in a hypertextual structure: in fact, it has the capability of turning the entire internet into one hypertextual web.

 

The Web has been around for a couple of years, making it older than gopher, the more well-known client-server program that currently underlies (for example) many campus- wide information systems. At the moment, Web traffic is growing much faster than gopher traffic–341,634% per year vs. a mere 997% per year, according to one estimate¹ –but its relatively slow start was due in part to the lack of an adequate client program. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Champaign- Urbana, has filled that void with Mosaic, an excellent, free, mouse-oriented client for the Web. Mosaic clients are available for Macintosh, Windows, RS6000, DEC, and Sun computers (by anonymous ftp from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu). The entry-level equipment for using these clients might be, for example, a 386 with a VGA monitor and an ethernet card– equipment that costs under $1000 at this point. In fact, the nature of one’s connection to the internet is more likely to be an obstacle than is the nature of one’s equipment: since using the Web involves transmitting sizable files (graphics, sound, etc.), the transmission speeds of an ethernet connection are required for satisfactory performance. It’s possible to cruise the Web over your modem, with an additional layer of SLIP software, but this is agonizingly slow and can be absurdly difficult to set up.

 

Since June of 1993, the World-Wide Web has been growing at a rate faster than one new server a day. In June, there were 100 sites; in November, there were 270 sites; in December, there were 623 sites (according to Matthew Gray of MIT, author of the WWW Wanderer, a program that follows links from one server to another, to determine the extent of the web). These estimates are certain to be low, but they give an idea of the curve. At present, something on the order of a quarter of a million documents are provided over the Web; the increase in use of Web clients is on the order of 2000% a month. In other words, while it is not clear how well all this will scale up, it is clear that we’ll find out the answer to that question very soon. The Web has its shortcomings (for example, its hypertext pointers refer to literal file- and path-names, making it easy for someone on one system to set up a pointer to a file on another system that gets moved or renamed, resulting in a non-functioning link), but these shortcomings are minor in comparison to the great advance it provides in the general usability and perusability of the net. And since Mosaic can also open ftp, telnet, WAIS, and gopher sessions, all with a mouse- and icon-oriented graphical user interface, it functions as a kind of meta-menu for a panoply of networked information services.

 

What Does It Mean for PMC?

 

Explanations of the Web tend to make the eyes glaze over; demonstrations tend to make the eyes light up. The first outing induces a kind of informational vertigo, especially when one considers the implications of this medium for networked scholarship and publishing. The network-as-hypermedia implies that the connections now gesturally performed in notes and citations can–will– become explicit and navigable links from document to document. It means that in the very near future, authors will propose and editors will review such links, and it means that readers can keep private marginalia on networked documents, as well. For Postmodern Culture, it means that we can begin publishing film clips, readings of poetry or fiction, musical performances, and hypertexts of all kinds. It also means that, as more and more of the material published in PMC incorporates non-text elements, the e-mail version of the journal will inevitably become less authoritative or complete.

 

We welcome comments on this new phase in the journal’s existence, suggestions on the journal’s hypermedia format and design, and submission of hypermedia texts. Excellent information and extensive tutorials on the various techniques and requirements of the Web are available under the Help button on the Mosaic clients (though you may find it impossible to get through to the beseiged hosts at uiuc.edu at certain times of day); information specific to PMC’s implementation of the Web’s standards is available from the Table of Contents page for the January, 1994 issue. Moreover, since Mosaic allows you to view the underlying markup for any Web page, it is easy to learn by example.

 

In closing, I should note that older offshoots and avatars of PMC have not been amputated in this new phase of our existence. PMC-Talk continues its fitfully productive existence, and a thread from that discussion group is included in this issue. PMC-MOO has moved from North Carolina to Virginia (hero.village.virginia.edu 7777) and has adopted email registration in the interest of discouraging irresponsible and unpleasant behavior (there was the mention of PMC-MOO in Wired, followed by a wave of rather juvenile net-tourists who came tramping through with little interest in postmodernism and many personality problems to work out…but they’ve moved on now, for the most part, to new encampments). We have a new gopher site (jefferson.village.virginia.edu), but the old ftp site remains (ftp.ncsu.edu), and the listserv archives continue as before. Appropriately enough, the Web version of the journal provides an integrated menu of all of these services and versions.

 

Notes

 

1. The Internet Index, revised 1/7/94, compiled by Win Treese (treese@crl.dec.com).

 

 

 

 

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

 

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Journal and Book Announcements:

1) Essays in Postmodern Culture

2) Black Ice Book

3) Black Sacred Music

4) The Centennial Review

5) Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science

6) College Literature

7) Contention

8) Difference

9) Discourse

10) Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture

11) Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology

12) GENDER

13) Hot Off the Tree

14) Information Technology and Disabilitie

15) M/E/A/N/I/N/G

16) Modern Fiction Studie

17) Minnesota Review

18) Nomad

19) October

20) RIF/T

21) CORE

22) tudies in Popular Culture

23) Virus 23

24) ViViD Magazine

25) Zines-L

 

Calls for Papers, Panels, and Participants:

26) PMC-MOO

27) Association for History and Computing Conference (UK Branch)

28) 4CYBERCONF: 4th International Conference on Cyberspace

29) Art and Virtual Environment Symposium

30) Chaos and Society Conference

31) Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture

32) Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture

33) Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist

34) The Linguistics of Humor

35) Literary Texts in an Electronic Age

36) National Symposium on Proposed Arts and Humanities Policies for the National Information Infrastructure

37) Postmodern Culture

38) PSYCHE

39) Research on Virtual Relationship

40) creensites 94

 

Networked Discussion Groups:

41) FEMISA: Feminism, Gender, International Relation

42) HOLOCAUS: Holocaust List

43) NewJour-L

44) Popcult List

 

Job Openings:

45) Princeton University: Humanities Consultant

 

Research Programs:

46) Deadlines for NEH Programs, Seminars, and Fellowships

 

Resources:

47) Gopheur Litterature

 

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•      ESSAYS IN POSTMODERN CULTURE:

. . . Now Cordless

 

 

An anthology of essays from Postmodern Culture is available in print from Oxford University Press. The works collected here constitute practical engagements with the postmodern–from AIDS and the body to postmodern politics. Writing by George Yudice, Allison Fraiberg, David Porush, Stuart Moulthrop, Paul McCarthy, Roberto Dainotto, Audrey Ecstavasia, Elizabeth Wheeler, Bob Perelman, Steven Helmling, Neil Larsen, David Mikics, Barrett Watten. Book design by Richard Eckersley.

 

 

ISBN: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound)
0-19-508753-4 (paper)

.

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•      BLACK ICE BOOKS

 

Black Ice Books is a new alternative trade paperback series that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident American writers. Breaking out of the bonds of mainstream writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging and provocative. The first four books include:

 

Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation

 

Edited by Larry McCaffery, this book is an assemblage of innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics and various other unclassifiable texts by writers like Samuel Delany, Mark Leyner, William Vollmann, Kathy Acker, Eurdice, Stephen Wright, Derek Pell, Harold Jaffe, Tim Ferret, Ricardo Cortez Cruz and many others.

 

 

“One of the least cautious, nerviest editors going, Larry McCaffery is the No-Care Bear of American Letters.”

— William Gibson.

 

“A clusterbomb of crazy fiction, from a generation too sane to repeat yesterday’s lies.”

— Tom Robbins

 

New Noir
Stories by John Shirley

 

John Shirley bases his stories on his personal experience of extreme people and extreme mental states, and on his struggle with the seduction of drugs, crime, prostitution and violence.

 

“John Shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled regions with visionary tales to tell.”

— Clive Barker

 

The Kafka Chronicles
a novel by Mark Amerika

 

The Kafka Chronicles is an adventure into the psyche of an ultracontemporary twentysomething guerilla artist who is lost in an underworld of drugs and mental terrorism, where he encounters an unusual cast of angry yet sensual characters

 

“Mr Amerika–if indeed that is his name–has achieved a unique beauty in his artful marriage of Blake’s lyricism and the iron- in-the-soul of Celine. Are we taking a new and hard-hitting Antonin Artaud? Absolutely. And much more.”

–Terry Southern

 

Revelation Countdown
by Cris Mazza

 

Stories that project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more resembling loss of control.

 

“Talent jumps off her like an overcharge of electricity.”

–LA Times

 

Discount Mail-Order Information:

 
You can buy these books directly from the publisher at a discount. Buy one for $7, two for $13, three for $19 or all four for $25. We pay US postage! (Foreign orders add $2.50 per book.)

___ Avant-Pop

___ New Noir

___ The Kafka Chronicles

___ Revelation Countdown

 

Please make all checks or money orders payable to:

 

Fiction Collective Two
Publications Unit
Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61761

 

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•      Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology

 

Presenting the proceedings of an important conference held in Blantyre, Malawi in November of 1992, this volume represents a significant step for the African Christian church toward incorporating indigenous African arts and culture into it liturgy. Recognizing that the African Christian church continues to define itself in distinctly Western terms, forty-nine participants from various denominations and all parts of Africa– Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon–and the United States met to share ideas and experiences and to establish strategies for the indigenization of Christianity in African churches.

 

Other special issues by single copy:

 

The William Grant Still Reader presents the collected writings of this respected American composer. Still offered a perspective on American music and society informed by a diversity of experience and associations that few others have enjoyed. His distinguished career spanned jazz, traditional African-American idioms, and the European avant-garde, and his compositions ranged from chamber music to opera.

 

Sacred Music of the Secular City delves into the American religious imagination by examining the religious roots and historical circumstances of popular music. Includes essays on musicians Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Madonna, and 2 Live Crew.

 

Subscription prices: $30 institutions, $15 individuals. Single issues: $15. Please add $4 for subscription outside the U.S. Canadian residents, add 7% GST.

 

Duke University Press/Box 90660/Durham NC 27708

 

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•      The Centennial Review
  Edited by R.K. Meiners

 

The Centennial Review is committed to reflection on intellectual work, particularly as set in the University and its environment. We are interested in work that examines models of theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures; that questions the cultural and social implications of research in a variety of disciplines.

 

Please begin my CR subscription:

 

___ $12/year (3 issues)

___ $18/two years (6 issues)

(Add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the US)

 

Please send me the special issue:

 

___ Poland: From Real Socialism to Democracy

 

Please make your check payable to The Centennial Review. Mail to:

 

The Centennial Review
312 Linton Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1044

 

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•      Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science

Editors: Stuart Kurtz, Michael O’Donnell, and Janos Simon, University of Chicago

 

“I want to commend both The MIT Press and the MIT Libraries for their vision in publishing the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science… the North Carolina State University Libraries will be subscribing to this ground-breaking electronic journal. I can assure you that we will do all that we can to make our faculty and students aware of this exciting new publication” –Susan K. Nutter, Director of Libraries, North Carolina State University

 

Please Join in Our Vision of a New Relationship between Publishers and Libraries

 

We have a vision that university presses and university libraries, working together, can publish and maintain electronic scholarly journals which provide:

 

•      Peer-reviewed and high-quality papers
•      Continuity and name-recognition
•      Quicker and wider dissemination of information
•      Enhanced search and retrieval mechanisms
•      Lower costs than print journals
•      Guaranteed future access to the contents

 

Our Vision Begins with . . .

 

Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science

 

The MIT Press and the MIT Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of a ground-breaking electronic journal to begin publication in spring of 1994. Edited by Stuart Kurtz, Michael O’Donnell, and Janos Simon at the University of Chicago, the journal will publish high-quality, peer-reviewed articles in theoretical computer science and is designed to meet the following needs:

 

•      The scholar’s desire for quicker peer review and dissemination of research results;
•      The library’s need to develop systems and structures to deal with electronic journals and know to what degree electronic journals might relieve budget pressures;
•      The publisher’s need to develop an economic and a user model for electronic dissemination of scholarly journals.

 

Ground-Breaking:

 

•      Published by an established journals publisher, the MIT Press, working with the MIT Libraries to guarantee library concerns are addressed;
•      Committed to publishing a level of quality equivalent to standard print journals with the goal of increasing acceptance of electronic publication in the tenure review process;
•      Committed to fast turnaround in the peer review process in order to attract high-quality manuscripts and communicate research results more quickly to the scholarly community;
•      Sold on a subscription basis for fees comparable to standard print journals to both libraries and individuals in an effort to develop an economic model that will encourage publishers to develop electronic journals (initial subscription prices of $125/year for institutions and $30/year for individuals);
•      Published on the basis of trust in libraries and scholars to pay for what they use and to follow established copyright and fair use guidelines;
•      Archived at MIT Libraries and University of Chicago with commitment to keep text compatible with latest standards, and assurance of authoritative version of text.

 

What a Subscriber Gets:

 

•      Article-by-article publication, beginning with approximately 15 articles in 1994 (equivalent to a triannual standard paper journal) and including possible paper delivery if demanded by customers;
•      Notification by e-mail of article title, author, and abstract when articles are ready, and the ability to retrieve them from the Press’s WAIS server via FTP or gopher, in either LaTex source file or Postscript form;
•      Articles published with an associated file of forward pointers for referral to subsequent papers, results, and improvements that are relevant to the published article;
•      Advertisements and notices available upon request from file server at MIT;
•      Access to continually updated archive located at MIT.

 

As a Library Subscriber you have permission to:

 

•      Store the Journal on any file server under your control, and make it available online to the local community to print or download copies;
•      Print out individual articles and other items for inclusion in your periodical collection;
•      Place the Journal on the campus network for access by local users or post article listings and notices on the network to inform your users of what is available;
•      Print out individual articles and other items from the Journal for the personal scholarly use of readers;
•      Print out articles and other items for storage on reserve if requested by professor, student, or university staff;
•      Share print or electronic copy of the Journal with other libraries under standard inter-library loan procedures;
•      Convert material from the Journal to another medium (i.e. microfilm/fiche/CD) for storage.

 

For subscription information please contact:

journals-orders@mit.edu

 

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•      College Literature: A Triannual Literary Journal for the Classroom
  Edited by Kostas Myrsiades

 

A triannual journal of scholarly criticism dedicated to serving the needs of College/University teachers by providing them with access to innovative ways of studying and teaching new bodies of literature and experiencing old literature in new ways.

 

“College Literature has made itself in a short time one of the leading journals in the field, important reading for anyone teaching literature to college students.”

 

J. Hillis Miller
University of CA, Irvine

 

“Congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant.”

 

Terry Eagleton
Oxford University

 

“In one bold stroke you seem to have turned College Literature into one of the things everyone will want to read.”

 

Cary Nelson

 

“My sense is that College Literature will have substantial influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies.”

 

Henry A. Giroux

 

“A journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy.”

 

Robert Con Davis

 

Forthcoming issues:

 

Third World Women’s Literature African American Writing Cross-Cultural Poetics

 

Subscription Rates:      US                  Foreign
         Individual      $24.00/year         $29.00/year
         Institutional:  $48.00/year         $53.00/year

 

Send prepaid orders to:

 

College Literature>
Main 544
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383
(215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150

 

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•      CONTENTION
  Debates in Society, Culture, and Science

 

Contention is:

 

“…simply a triumph from cover to cover.”

 

Fredrick Crews

 

“…extremely important.”

 

Alberta Arthurs

 

“…the most exciting new journal that I have ever read.”

 

Lynn Hunt

 

“…superb.”

 

Janet Abu-Lughod

 

“…an important, exciting, and very timely project.”

 

Theda Skocpol

 

“…an idea whose time has come.”

 

Robert Brenner

 

“…serious and accessible.”

 

Louise Tilly

 

Subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00 and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface postage) from:

 

Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 N. Morton
Bloomington IN 47104
ph: (812) 855-9449
fax: (812) 855-7931

 

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•      Differences
  A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

 

QUEER THEORY: LESBIAN AND GAY SEXUALITIES
(Volume 3, Number 2)
Edited by Teresa de Lauretis

 

Teresa de Lauretis: Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities An Introduction
Sue Ellen Case: Tracking the Vampire
Samuel R. Delany: Street Talk/Straight Talk
Elizabeth A. Grosz: Lesbian Fetishism?
Jeniffer Terry: Theorizing Deviant Historiography
Thomas Almaguer: Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior
Ekua Omosupe: Black/Lesbian/Bulldagger
Earl Jackson, Jr.: Scandalous Subjects: Robert Gluck’s Embodied Narratives
Julia Creet: Daughter of the Movement: The Psychodynamics of Lesbian S/M Fantasy

 

THE PHALLUS ISSUE
(Volume 4, Number 1)
Edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed

 

Maria Torok: The Meaning of “Penis Envy” in Women (1963)
Jean-Joseph Goux: The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the “Exchange of Women”
Parveen Adams: Waiving the Phallus
Kaja Silverman: The Lacanian Phallus
Charles Bernheimer: Penile Reference in Phallic Theory
Judith Butler: The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary
Jonathan Goldberg: Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger
Emily Apter: Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem

 

Single Issues: $12.95 individuals
               $25.00 institutions
               ($1.75 each postage)

 

Subscriptions (3 issues): $28.00 individuals $48.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage)

 

Send orders to:

 

Journals Division Indiana University Press 601 N Morton Bloomington IN 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931

 

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•      DISCOURSE
  Volume 15, Number 1

 

SPECIAL ISSUE

FLAUNTING IT: LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

 

Kathryn Baker: Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in Reform Schools for Girls

Terralee Bensinger: Lesbian Pornography: The Re-Making of (a) Community

Scott Bravmann: Investigating Queer Fictions of the Past: Identities, Differences, and Lesbian and Gay Historical Self-Representations

Sarah Chinn and Kris Franklin: “I am What I Am” (Or Am I?): Making and Unmaking of Lesbian and Gay Identity in High Tech Boys

Greg Mullins: Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in Physical Culture Magazine

JoAnn Pavletich: Muscling the Mainstream: Lesbian Murder Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice

David Pendelton: Obscene Allegories: Narrative Structures in Gay Male Porn

Thomas Piontek: Applied Metaphors: AIDS and Literature

June L. Reich: The Traffic in Dildoes: The Phallus as Camp and the Revenge of the Genderfuck

 

 

Single Issues: $12.95 individuals $25.00 institutions ($1.75 each postage)

 

Subscriptions (3 issues): $25.00 individuals $50.00 institutions ($10.00 foreign surface postage)

 

 

Send orders to:

 

Journals Division Indiana University Press 601 N Morton Bloomington IN 47404 ph: (812) 855-9449 fax: (812) 855-7931

 

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•      The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture

 

We are very pleased by the great interest in the Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture. There are already more than 1,280 people subscribed.

 

Our first issue was distributed in March 1993. The future looks very interesting. Editors are working on Special Issues on education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual culture.

 

The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture (EJVC) is a refereed scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture. Virtual culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action, interaction and thought, including electronic conferences, electronic journals, networked information systems, the construction and visualization of models of reality, and global connectivity.

 

EJVC is published monthly. Some parts may be distributed at different times during the month or published only occasionally (e.g. CyberSpace Monitor). If you would be interested in writing a column on some general topic area in the Virtual Culture (e.g. an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc. ?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing a special issue contact Ermel Stepp Editor-in-Chief of Diane Kovacs Co-Editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. You can retrieve the file EJVC AUTHORS via anonymous ftp to

 

byrd.mu.wvnet.edu

(pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to

listserv@kentvm

 

or

 

listserv@kentvm.kent.edu

 

Cordially,

Ermel Stepp, Marshall University, Editor-in-Chief

MO34050@Marshall.wvnet.edu

Diane (Di) Kovacs, Kent State University, Co-Editor

DKOVACS@Kentvm.Kent.edu

 

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•      Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology

 

“Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology” by Chuck Welch is to be published in Fall 1994 by University of Calgary Press. The 42 chapter, 350 page text includes an index, 147 illustrations and six major appendices including the largest extensive listing of underground mail art zines in existence. A thorough listing of nearly 100 international private and institutional mail art archives appears in another important appendice.

 

But what is mail art? Mail art is a paradox in the way it reverses traditional definitions of art; the mailbox and computer replace the museum, the address becomes the art, and the mailman brings home the avant-garde to mail artists in the form of correspondence art, e-mail art, artistamps, postcards, conceptual projects, and collaborations. “Eternal Network introduces readers to a lively exchange with international mail art networkers from five continents. The book include snail mail and e-mail addresses, fax, and telephone numbers for many active mail artists. Readers are invited to participate — to corresponDANCE with global village artists who quickstep beyond establishment boundaries of art.

 

Among the forty-two distinguished contributors appearing in “Eternal Network” are New York City art critic Richard Kostelanetz; physicist, poet Bern Porter; Director of the Museum of Modern Art Library, Clive Phillpot; famed Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman; University of Iowa art historian and archival director Estera Milman, and mail art patron Jean Brown who has collected the world’s largest assemblage of mail art material now undergoing documentation at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.

 

Many of the forty-two chapters appearing in “Eternal Network” are original, unpublished essays pertaining to the origin and history of mail art networking, collaborative aesthetics, new directions for mail art networking in the 1990’s, mail art projects exploring the interconnection of marginal on and off-line networks, mail art criticism and dialogue, and finally, parables, visions, dances, dreams, and poems that articulate the living mythology of mail art.

 

Edited by Chuck Welch, an active mail artist since 1978, “Eternal Network” makes an important first step towards introducing mail art to non-artists, artists, and academic scholars. For more information send e-mail to

 

Cathryn.L.Welch@dartmouth.edu

 

 

or write to

 

“Eternal Network” PO Box 978, Hanover, NH 03755

 

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•      GENDERS
  Ann Kibbey, Editor University of Colorado, Boulder

 

Since 1988, GENDERS has presented innovative theories of gender and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography, TV, and film. Today, GENDERS continues to publish both new and known authors whose work reflects an international movement to redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines.

 

——————————

 

GENDERS is published triannually in Spring, Fall, Winter

 

       Single Copy rates: Individual $9, Institution $14
                  Foreign postage, add $2/copy
       Subscription rates: Individual $24, Institution $40
             Foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription

 

Send orders to:

 

University of Texas Box 7819 Austin TX 78713

 

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•      Hot Off the Tree

 

HOTT — Hot Off The Tree — is a FREE monthly electronic newsletter featuring the latest advances in computer, communications, and electronics technologies. Each issue provides article summaries on new & emerging technologies, including VR (virtual reality), neural networks, PDAs (personal digital assistants), GUIs (graphical user interfaces), intelligent agents, ubiquitous computing, genetic & evolutionary programming, wireless networks, smart cards, video phones, set-top boxes, nanotechnology, and massively parallel processing.

 

Summaries are provided from the following sources:

 

Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe, Financial Times (London) …

 

Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report …

 

Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, The Economist (London), Nikkei Weekly (Tokyo), Asian Wall Street Journal (Hong Kong) …

 

over 50 trade magazines, including Computerworld, InfoWorld, Datamation, Computer Retail Week, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, LAN Times, Communications Week, PC World, New Media, VAR Business, Midrange Systems, Byte …

 

over 50 research journals, including ALL publications of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies, plus technical journals published by AT&T, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, Sharp, NTT, Siemens, Philips, GEC …

 

over 100 Internet mailing lists & USENET discussion groups …

 

plus …

 

•      listings of forthcoming & recently published technical books;
•      listings of forthcoming trade shows & technical conferences;
•      company advertorials, including CEO perspectives, tips & techniques, and new product announcements.

 

BONUS:

 

Exclusive interviews with technology pioneers … the next two issues feature interviews with Mark Weiser (head of Xerox PARC’s Computer Science Lab) on ubiquitous computing, and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg on the information society

 

TO REQUEST A FREE SUBSCRIPTION, CAREFULLY FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW

 

Send subscription requests to:

 

listserv@ucsd.edu

 

Leave the “Subject” line blank

In the body of the message input: SUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST

If at any time you choose to cancel your subscription input: UNSUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST

Note: Do not include first or last names following “SUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST” or “UNSUBSCRIBE HOTT-LIST”

 

The HOTT mailing list is automatically maintained by a computer located at the University of California at San Diego. The system automatically responds to the sender’s return path. Hence, it is necessary to send subscription requests and cancellations directly to the listserv at UCSD. (I cannot make modifications to the list … nor do I have access to the list.) For your privacy, please note that the list will not be rented. If you have problems and require human intervention, contact:

 

hott@ucsd.edu

 

The next issue of the reinvented HOTT e-newsletter is scheduled for transmission in late January/early February.

 

Please forward this announcement to friends and colleagues, and post to your favorite bulletin boards. Our objective is to disseminate the highest quality and largest circulation compunications (computer & communications) industry newsletter.

 

I look forward to serving you as HOTT’s new editor. Thank you.

 

David Scott Lewis
Editor-in-Chief and Book & Video Review Editor
IEEE Engineering Management Review
(the world’s largest circulation “high tech” management journal)

 

Internet address:d.s.lewis@ieee.org
Tel: +1 714 662 7037
USPS mailing address: POB 18438
IRVINE CA 92713-8438
USA

 

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•      Announcing a New Electronic Journal:INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DISABILITIES

 

Below is information about the journal, including the table of contents for Volume I, no. 1, as well as information on editorial staff and explicit instructions for subscribing or using the journal via gopher.

 

IT&D V1N1 Table of Contents 230 lines

 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DISABILITIES

ISSN 1073-5127

Volume I, No. 1 January, 1994

 

ARTICLES

 

INTRODUCING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DISABILITIES

(itdV01N1 mcnulty)

Tom McNulty, Editor

 

BUILDING AN ACCESSIBLE CD-ROM REFERENCE STATION

(itdV01N1 wyatt)

Rochelle Wyatt and Charles Hamilton

 

ABSTRACT: This case study describes the development of an accessible CD-ROM workstation at the Washington Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Included are descriptions of hardware and software, as well as selected CD-ROM reference sources. Information is provided on compatibility of individual CD-ROM products with adaptive technology hardware and software.

 

DEVELOPMENT OF AN ACCESSIBLE USER INTERFACE FOR PEOPLE WHO
ARE BLIND OR VISION IMPAIRED AS PART OF THE RE-COMPUTERIZATION
OF ROYAL BLIND SOCIETY (AUSTRALIA)

(itdV01N1 noonan)

Tim Noonan

 

ABSTRACT: In 1991, Royal Blind Society (Australia) and Deen Systems, a Sydney-based software development company, undertook a major overhaul of RBS information systems intended to enhance access to RBS client services as well as employment opportunities for blind and vision impaired RBS staff. This case study outlines the steps taken and principles followed in the development of a computer user interface intended for efficient use by blind and vision impaired individuals.

 

THE ELECTRONIC REHABILITATION RESOURCE CENTER AT
ST. JOHN’S UNIVERSITY (NEW YORK)

(itdV01N1 holtzman)

Bob Zenhausern and Mike Holtzman

 

ABSTRACT: St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York, is host to a number of disability-related network information sources and services. This article identifies and describes key sources and services, including Bitnet listservs, or discussion groups, the UNIBASE system which includes real-time online conferencing, and other valuable educational and rehabilitation-related network information sources.

 

THE CLEARINGHOUSE ON COMPUTER ACCOMMODATION (COCA)

(itdV01N1 brummel)

Susan Brummel and Doug Wakefield

 

ABSTRACT: Since 1985, COCA has been pioneering information policies and computer support practices that benefit Federal employees with disabilities and members of the public with disabilities. Today, COCA provides a variety of services to people within and outside Government employment. The ultimate goal of all COCA’s activities is to advance equitable information environments consistent with non-discriminatory employment and service delivery goals.

 

DEPARTMENTS

 

JOB ACCOMMODATIONS

(itdV01N1 jobs)

Editor: Joe Lazzaro

lazzaro@bix.com

 

 

K – 12 EDUCATION

(itdV01N1 k12)

Editor: Anne Pemberton

apembert@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu

 

 

LIBRARIES

(itdV01N1 library)

Editor: Ann Neville

neville@emx.cc.utexas.edu

 

 

ONLINE INFORMATION AND NETWORKING

(itdV01N1 online)

Editor: Steve Noble

slnobl01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu

 

 

CAMPUS COMPUTING

(itdV01N1 campus)

Editor: Daniel Hilton-Chalfen, Ph.D.

hilton-chalfen@mic.ucla.edu

 

Copyright (c 1994) by (IT&D) Information Technology and Disabilities. Authors of individual articles retain all copyrights to said articles, and their permission is needed to reproduce any individual article. The rights to the journal as a collection belong to (IT&D) Information Technology and Disabilities. IT&D encourages any and all electronic distribution of the journal and permission for such copying is expressly permitted here so long as it bears no charge beyond possible handling fees. To reproduce the journal in non-electronic format requires permission of its board of directors. To do this, contact the editor.

 

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Tom McNulty, New York University

(mcnulty@acfcluster.nyu.edu)

 

EDITORS

 

Dick Banks, University of Wisconsin, Stout
Carmela Castorina, UCLA
Daniel Hilton-Chalfen, PhD, UCLA
Norman Coombs, PhD, Rochester Institute of Technology
Joe Lazzaro, Massachusetts Commission for the Blind
Ann Neville, University of Texas, Austin
Steve Noble, Recording for the Blind
Anne L. Pemberton, Nottoway High School, Nottoway, VA
Bob Zenhausern, PhD, St. John’s University

 

EDITORIAL BOARD

 

Dick Banks, University of Wisconsin, Stout
Carmela Castorina, UCLA
Danny Hilton-Chalfen, PhD, UCLA
Norman Coombs, PhD, Rochester Institute of Technology
Alistair D. N. Edwards, PhD, University of York, UK
Joe Lazzaro, Massachusetts Commission for the Blind
Ann Neville, University of Texas, Austin
Steve Noble, Recording for the Blind
Anne L. Pemberton, Nottoway High School, Nottoway, VA
Lawrence A. Scadden, PhD, National Science Foundation
Bob Zenhausern, PhD, St. John’s University

 

ABOUT EASI (EQUAL ACCESS TO SOFTWARE AND INFORMATION)

 

Since its founding in 1988 under the EDUCOM umbrella, EASI has worked to increase access to information technology by persons with disabilities. Volunteers from EASI have been instrumental in the establishment of Information Technology and Disabilities as still another step in this process. Our mission has been to serve as a resource primarily to the education community by providing information and guidance in the area of access to information technologies. We seek to spread this information to schools, colleges, universities and into the workplace. EASI makes extensive use of the internet to disseminate this information, including two discussion lists:

 

EASI@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU

 

(a general discussion on computer access) and

 

AXSLIB-L@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU

 

(a discussion on library access issues). To join either list, send a “subscribe” command to

 

LISTSERV@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU

 

including the name of the discussion you want to join plus your own first and last name. EASI also maintains several items on the St. Johns gopher under the menu heading “Disability and Rehabilitation Resources”.

 

For further information, contact the EASI Chair:

 

Norman Coombs, Ph.D.

NRCGSH@RITVAX.ISC.RIT.EDU

 

or the EASI office:
EASI’s phone: (310) 640-3193
EASI’s e-mail: EASI@EDUCOM.EDU

 

Individual ITD articles and departments are archived on the St. John’s University gopher. To access the journal via gopher, locate the St. John’s University (New York) gopher. Select “Disability and Rehabilitation Resources,” and from the next menu, select “EASI: Equal Access to Software and Information.” Information Technology and Disabilities is an item on the EASI menu.

 

To retrieve individual articles and departments by e-mail from the listserv: address an e-mail message to:

 

listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

 

leave subject line blank

the message text should include the word “get” followed by the two word file name; for example:

get itdV01N1 contents

 

Each article and department has a unique filename; that name is listed below the article or department in parentheses. Do NOT include the parentheses with the filename when sending the “get” command to listserv.

 

NOTE: ONLY ONE ITEM MAY BE RETRIEVED PER MESSAGE; DO NOT SEND MULTIPLE GET COMMANDS IN A SINGLE E-MAIL MESSAGE TO LISTSERV.

 

To receive the journal regularly, send e-mail to:

 

listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

 

with no subject and either of the following lines of text:
subscribe itd-toc “Firstname Lastname”
subscribe idt-jnl “Firstname Lastname”

 

(ITD-JNL is the entire journal in one e-mail message while ITD-TOC sends the contents with information on how to obtain specific articles.)

 

To get a copy of the guidelines for authors, send e-mail to:

 

listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu

 

with no subject and the following single line of text:
get author guidelin

 

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•      M/E/A/N/I/N/GA Journal of Contemporary Art Issues

 

M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas in the arts.

 

M/E/A/N/I/N/G is published twice a year in the fall and spring.
It is edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor.

 

Subscriptions for

 

2 ISSUES (1 YEAR):
$12 for individuals:
$20 for institutions

 

4 ISSUES (2 YEARS):
$24 for individuals;
$40 for institutions

 

•      Foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad and to Canada: $5
•      Foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in U.S. dollars.

 

All checks should be made payable to Mira Schor

 

Send all subscriptions to:

 

Mira Schor
60 Lispenard Street
New York, NY 10013

 

Limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact Mira Schor for information.

 

Distributed with the Segue Foundation and the Solo Foundation

 

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•      Modern Fiction Studies

 

MFS, a journal of modern and postmodern literature and culture, announces the following forthcoming special issues:

 

February, 39.1: “Fiction of the Indian Subcontinent”

 

May, 39.3: “Toni Morrison”

 

November, 40.1: “The Cultural Politics of Displacement” Barbara Harlow, guest editor

 

We also continue to accept submissions for forthcoming special issues on “Autobiography, Photography, Narrative,” Timothy Dow Adams, Guest Editor (deadline: April 1, 1994); “Postmodern Narratives (deadline: October 1 1994); “Sexuality and Narrative,” Guest Editor, Judith Roof (deadline: March 1, 1995).

 

MFS is published quarterly at Purdue University and invites submissions of articles offering theoretical, historical, interdisciplinary, and cultural approaches to modern and contemporary narrative. Authors should submit essays for both special and general issues in triplicate paper copy or duplicate paper copy and IBM-compatible floppy; please include a self- addressed, stamped envelope for the return of submissions. Send submissions to:

 

Patric O’Donnell
Editor
MFS
Department of English
Heavilon Hall
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907-1389

 

 

Address inquiries to the editor at this address or by e-mail at

 

pod@purccvm (bitnet);
pod@vm.cc.purdue.edu (Internet)

 

Subscriptions to MFS are $20 for individuals and $35 for libraries. Back issues are $7 each. Address subscription inquiries to:

 

Nel Fink
Circulation Manager
MFS
Department of Englis
h Heavilon Hall
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN 47907-1389

 

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•      Minnesota Review

 

Tell your friends! Tell your librarians! The new Minnesota Review‘s coming to town!

 

Subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20 institutions/overseas. The new Minnesota Review is published biannually and originates from East Carolina University beginning with the Fall 1992 special issue.

 

Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and subscriptions to:

 

Jeffrey Williams, Editor
Minnesota Review
Department of English
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353

 

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•      NOMAD
  An Interdisciplinary Journal of The Humanities, Arts, And Sciences

 

Manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields!

 

Nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and writing. It is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical, political, and popular writing. While our editorial staff is comprised of artists and academics in a variety of disciplines, NOMAD strives to operate in a space outside of mainstream academic discourse and without institutional funding or controls.

 

Manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of references); any form is acceptable. If possible, please submit manuscripts on 3.5″ Macintosh disks, in either Microsoft Word or MacWrite II format, or by E-mail. Each manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper copy. Otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript. Artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2″ x 11″, and in black and white. PICT, TIFF, GIF, and JPEG files on 3.5″ Macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a paper copy (or via E-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded). All artwork must be camera-ready. Submissions by regular mail should include a SASE with sufficient postage attached if return is desired. Diskettes should be shipped in standard diskette mailing packages.

 

Subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues)
Send Manuscripts and Inquiries to:

 

NOMAD, c/o
Mike Smith
406 Williams Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida, 32306
msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

 

“In NOMAD, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most appreciate them.”

 

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•      OctoberArt | Theory | Criticism | Politics

 

The MIT Press

 

Edited by: Rosalind Kraus
            Annette Michelson
            Yve-Alain Bois
            Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
            Hal Foster
            Denis Hollier
            John Rajchman

 

“OCTOBER, the 15-year-old quarterly of social and cultural theory, has always seemed special. Its nonprofit status, its cross- disciplinary forays into film and psychoanalytic thinking, and its unyielding commitment to history set it apart from the glossy art magazines.”

--Village Voice

 

As the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, OCTOBERfocuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation. Original, innovative, provocative, each issue examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts.

 

Come join OCTOBER‘s exploration of the most important issues in contemporary culture. Subscribe Today!

 

Published Quarterly ISSN 0162-2870. Yearly Rates: Individual $32.00; Institution $80.00; Student (copy of current ID required) and Retired: $22.00. Outside USA add $14.00 postage and handling. Canadians add additional 7% GST. Prepayment is required. Send check payable to OCTOBER drawn against a US bank, MasterCard or VISA number to:

 

MIT Press Journal / 55 Hayward Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1399 / TEL: (617) 233-2889 / FAX: (617) 258-6779 / E-Mail: journals-orders@mit.edu

 

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•      RIF/TE-Poetry Literary Journal

 

In all arts there is a physical component . . . We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts.

 

–Paul Valery

 

This list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution of an interactive literary journal: RIF/T and related exchange, and (2) collection of any information related to contemporary poetics.

 

RIF/T provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal.

 

Dynamic–not static, RIF/T shifts and riffs with the diction of “trad” poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of exchange.

 

Archives of e-poetry and related files are stored in the e-poetry FILELIST.

 

To receive a list of files send the command

 

INDEX e-poetry

 

to:

 

LISTSERV@UBVM

or

LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU

 

 

as the first line in the body of your mail message (not your Subject: line).

 

To subscribe to e-poetry, send the command

 

SUB e-poetry your name
to:

 

LISTSERV@UBVM

or

LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU

 

 

via mail message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not the Subject: line). For example: SUB e-poetry John Doe

 

Owner: Ken Sherwood

 

v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

 

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•      SSCORESocial Science Computer Review

 

G. David Garson, Editor
Ronald Anderson, Co-editor

 

The official journal of the Social Science Computing Association, SSCORE provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire and share information on the research and teaching applications of microcomputing. Now, when you subscribe to Social Science Computer Review, you automatically become a member of the Social Science Computing Association.

 

Quarterly Subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions Single Issue: $20 Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S. Canadian residents add 7% GST

 

Duke University Press/ Journals Division / Box 90660 /Durham NC 27708

 

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•      Studies in Popular Culture
  Dennis Hall, editor.

 

Studies in Popular Culture, the journal of the Popular Culture Association in the South and the American Culture Association in the South, publishes articles on popular culture and American culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events–any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. The journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the United States, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia, which include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion.

 

Please direct editorial queries to the editor:

 

Dennis Hall
Department of English
University of Louisville
Louisville KY 40292
tel: (502) 588-6896/0509
Fax: (502) 588-5055
Bitnet: DRHALL01@ULKYVM
Internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu

 

All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the

 

English Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292

 

Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. Black and White illustrations may accompany the text. Our preference is for essays that total, with notes and bibliography, no more than twenty pages. Documentation may take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the current MLA stylesheet is a useful model. Please indicate if the work is available on computer disk. The editor reserves the right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts.

 

Studies in Popular Culture is published semiannually and is indexed in the PMLA Annual Bibliography. All members of the Association receive Studies in Popular Culture. Yearly membership is $15.00 (International: $20.00). Write to:

 

the Executive Secretary
Diane Calhoun-French
Academic Dean
Jefferson Community College-SW
Louisville, KY 40272

 

for membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets. Volumes I- XV are available for $225.00.

 

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•      VIRUS 23

 

For those brave souls looking to explore the Secret of Eris, you may wish to check out VIRUS 23.

 

2 and 3 are even and odd, 2 and 3 are 5, therefore 5 is even and odd.

 

VIRUS 23 is a codename for all Erisian literature

 

Don Webb
6304 Laird Dr.
Austin TX 78757
0004200716@mcimail.com

 

VIRUS 23 is the annual hardcopy publication of A.D.o.S.A, the Alberta Department of Spiritual Affairs.

 

All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:

 

VIRUS 23
Box 46
Red Deer, Alberta
Canada
T4N 5E7

 

Various chunks of VIRUS 23 can be found at Tim Oerting’s alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in /public/alt.cyberpunk. Check it out).

 

For more information online contact:

 

Darren Wershler-Henry
grad3057@writer.yorku.ca

 

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•      ViViD Magazine

 

The first issue of ViViD Magazine is now available. ViViD is a hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity in cyberspace. We are actively seeking contributions for the next issue.

 

The magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment of a Windows 3.1 Help File. You will need Windows 3.1 to read the magazine.

 

The magazine will also be available via anonymous FTP at “ftp.gmu.edu”, to obtain it:

 

ftp ftp.gmu.edu

 

username: anonymous
password: (your email address)

 

cd pub/library
binary
get VIVID1.ZIP

 

For more information on ViViD, contact the editor, Justin McHale.

 

Internet address:

jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu

 

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•      Zines-L

 

announcing a new list available from:

listserv@uriacc

To subscribe to Zines-L send a message to:

listserv@uriacc.uri.edu

 

on one line type:
SUBSCRIBE ZINES-L first name last name

 

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•      Postmodern Culture announces the relocation of PMC-MOO

 

PMC-MOO has moved. To connect to PMC-MOO, you must now:

 

telnet

hero.village.virginia.edu 7777

 

Once you’ve connected to the server, you should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to PMC-MOO.

 

PMC-MOO is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality environment in which you can meet other subscribers of the journal, sponsor or participate in live conferences. PMC-MOO also provides a way to share and discuss, in real time across the internet, any texts accessible from a gopher server, including those generated by Postmodern Culture and by PMC-TALK. Finally, it provides an opportunity to experience (or help to design) simulated object-lessons in postmodern theory.

 

Your experience of PMC-MOO will be considerably more enoyable with a client program: clients for Mac, DOS, and Unix are available via anonymous ftp from:

 

parcftp.xerox.com

 

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•      AHC’94 — Hull Conference

 

Association for History and Computing UK Branch Conference

 

The Seventh Annual Conference of the Association for History and Computing (UK Branch) will be held at the University of Hull between 12 and 14 April 1994. As well as existing members of the Association, we are anxious to see those of our “mainstream” colleagues who have so far resisted the blandishments of Information Technology, but think they might now want to get involved — particularly with the impending arrival of courseware products coming out the Teaching and Learning Technology Program (TLTP).

 

The “major” theme of the conference will be to explore what computerate historians have to learn from disciplines cognate with History, or those from which we have traditionally filched elements of our methodology. We hope to have sessions which focus on Anthropology, Art History, Economics, Geography, Sociology and Textual Studies, with reference to time-frames ranging from the medieval to the near-contemporary.

 

The “minor” theme is to be the role of computing in the modern History Curriculum, broadly defined: from what’s going on in secondary schools and colleges post-National Curriculum; through the undergraduate program, with special reference to TLTP products; to the IT component of postgraduate training courses being developed under the 1+3 arrangements favored by ESRC and the British Academy.

 

We shall, of course, be issuing invitations to a number of keynote speakers, but would be very grateful to receive offers of papers on any of the subjects identified above.

 

Further particulars and booking forms can be obtained from:

 

Steve Baskerville
Dean of the School of Arts
University of Hull
Cottingham Road
Hull, HU6 7RX
Phone: 0482-465684
(Secretary: Louise Danby)
E-mail: s.w.baskerville@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

 

Ten years ago, before the celebrated Westfield Conferences that gave life to the AHC, there was a select gathering of people interested in historical computing met at Hull to discuss their common interests. We would like to see as many of you as possible come here again in 1994 to discuss the agendas of the next decade!

 

Steve Baskerville
University of Hull

 

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•      4CYBERCONF:
  4th International Conference on Cyberspace
  May 1994

 

In May of 1994, The Banff Centre is Virtually the Only Place to be

 

The Banff Centre for the Arts, in Banff, Alberta, Canada will host two important conferences on cyberspace and virtual reality. The first conference, 4CYBERCONF, to be held May 20 through 22, is a prestigious annual event that brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the implications of cyberspace.

 

Immediately following is the ART AND VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS SYMPOSIUM to be held May 23 and 24. This event focuses on artistic approaches to virtual reality, providing an opportunity for critical inquiry of the political, practical and aesthetic concerns around new media and cultural practices.

 

Over the course of the two conferences, the work of eight groups of artists who have completed virtual environments at the Banff Centre will be installed at various sites.

 

Participants may register for either or both events.

 

4CYBERCONF –
THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CYBERSPACE
MAY 20, 21, and 22, 1994
THE BANFF CENTRE FOR THE ARTS

 

INTRODUCTION

 

4CYBERCONF deals with the issues of cyberspace on many different levels. The technologies of virtual reality, networking and digital media are investigated from a critical standpoint that examines their social and cultural impacts and meanings. This conference considers cross-cultural contributions to the space and time of cyberspace, embraces the challenge of design for virtual environments and cybersound and suggests a new perception of space that challenges conventional views. Cyberspace is a space in flux where shared identities collide with discussions of diversity and the most potent constructions are the discussions that define and delineate these new environments.

 

In the matrices and the nets, there is a growing society that ranges from architects to aboriginal artists to anarchists, from cyborgs to Silicon Valley sophisticates to cyberpunks. 4CYBERCONF offers the opportunity for exchange within and between these confluent and diverse interests.

 

CONFERENCE FORMAT

 

The Fourth Conference on Cyberspace is scheduled to take place over three days, with regular sessions, demonstrations and a “birds of a feather” meeting space for conference participants to exchange ideas and information. In addition, there will be an evening Round Table Discussion on Friday, May 20th and a Dinner on Sunday, May 22nd.

 

CALL FOR PANEL AND PAPER PROPOSALS

 

This is a call for paper and panel proposals, approximately twenty of which will be selected by the Program Committee for development and presentation at the conference. Papers submitted by individuals will be grouped by the Program Committee by theme.

 

The following is a list of the general topics of interest to the Program Committee.

 

ECONOMICS OF CYBERSPACE

 

Everyone talks about the information economy but few are willing to face up to its implications: A nation’s wealth will be based on the information it produces. Commercial services may become the primary focus of the Net. Our copyright laws will need to be totally re- written for cyberspace. Intellectual property will become the most valued commodity of this new economy. Who will determine what’s public domain and what’s privatized? This session will deal with those issues and will provide a forum for exploring a dramatically different approach to economic issues.

 

THE SOUNDS OF CYBER

 

Cyberspace will be an environment vibrant with sound. While much of the technical investigation of virtuality has concentrated on the image, some of the richest and most compelling results have been achieved with audio. This theme will focus on the aesthetics, theory and practice of creating sound in immersion environments, as well as the synergy of sound and image in virtual space.

 

DIVERSITY, TECHNOLOGY AND CYBERSPACE

 

It is tough out there on the planetary streets, but is cyberspace a territory with a better immigration policy? How do individuals and groups gain access to cyberspace? Are technologies culturally, linguistically and gender specific? Are questions of authenticity relevant in cyberspace? How can technology be created and applied to serve the needs of varied communities, such as aboriginal groups and those from the myriad of cultural diasporas? How are the social constructions of body, gender, desire, race, place, economy and language built in cyberspace? What is imported, what is modified and what is created in human interaction and meaning within cyberspace; how does it then affect other experiences?

 

CYBER NARRATIVES

 

How and to whom are stories being structured and told in cyberspace? What are the entertainment industry`s distribution outlets? What tools are available to create cyber tales – and do these permit creative expression? What are the structures of interactive texts? What is the relationship between reading and authoring, viewing and creating? Are there existing forms of criticism – for example, architectural, literary, film, media, art, cultural studies – relevant to describing cyber stories? What new critical tools do we need? Are there genres in cyberspace?

 

THE POETICS OF CYBERSPACE: DESIGNING THE VIRTUAL

 

Traditional concepts of design travel poorly in cyberspace. Papers are invited that investigate the new design issues that must be resolved if virtual environments are to become compelling, evocative and effective. New tools and new approaches and the role of the design profession in cyberspace are critical aspects of this investigation.

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

 

Proposals for papers and panels should be presented in abstracts of approximately 1000 words. Panel proposals should include abstracts of papers. Copies of illustrations and photographs can be submitted at this time. Persons proposing a panel should contact potential panelists prior to submitting. All proposals are due in hard copy and on disk at the address below by February 15, 1994. Papers selected for presentation, either as part of a theme session or a panel, are due May 1, 1994, in hard copy and digital form. Selected presenters will be notified by March 15, 1994. The final papers should be between 3000 and 6000 words. Papers will be allotted a half hour for presentation. Panels should not exceed one hour.

 

Videotapes, recordings and other forms of presentation will be considered as part of panels or as a component of sessions. Submitted material on videotape, optical disk, film, and other media, will be returned.

 

Brief biographical information may accompany submissions on a separate page.

 

Because all accepted abstracts will be published as the Collected Papers of the Fourth Conference on Cyberspace and available at the conference, we ask that you observe the following format guidelines:

 

Proposals should be printed on one side of 8.5″ x 11″ paper, single spaced, with one inch margins and in 12- point Times-Roman, unless there is specific artistic purpose to breaking this convention. Do not number the pages. Provide six copies, and a floppy disk with both ASCII and Word versions.

 

The first page should start with:

 

TITLE
(Proposed Session)
Your Name
Your Affiliation
Body of paper or abstract

 

DEADLINES

 

FEBRUARY 15, 1994 Deadline for submission of papers, abstracts and proposals inclusion in 4Cyberconf.

MARCH 15, 1994 Notification date of selection for presentation:

APRIL 8, 1994 Deadline for registration for both conferences: (Late registration will be available as space permits and at an extra charge)

 

NOTE: Submission of an abstract or proposal indicates your intention, obligation, and capability to write/present/demonstrate the corresponding, full- length work if chosen.

 

All materials should be sent to:

 

4CYBERCONF
THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CYBERSPACE
Submissions
Media Arts
The Banff Centre for the Arts
box 1020-8
Banff, Alberta, T0L 0C0
Canada

 

E-MAIL: 4cyber@acs.ucalgary.caPHONE: 403-762-6652
FAX: 403-762-6665

 

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•      The Art and Virtual Environments SymposiumMAY 23 and 24, 1994
  THE BANFF CENTRE FOR THE ARTS

 

The ART AND VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS SYMPOSIUM will be held immediately following 4CYBERCONF and is intended to facilitate dialogue and debate among artists, presenters and participants.

 

This is an invitation to attend this two-day event that will include presentations and discussions on art, culture and new media technologies in the 1990s. In addition, virtual environment artworks will be exhibited and discussed by the artists. Since many of these works will never be shown again, this symposium represents an opportunity to experience and analyze some of the worlds that are shaping developments in virtual reality.

 

The eight groups of artists who participated in the Art and Virtual Environments Project, include: Will Bauer and Steve Gibson; Toni Dove and Michael Mackenzie; Diane Gromala, Marcos Novak and Yacov Sharir; Perry Hoberman; Ron Kuivila; Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland; Michael Naimark; Michael Scroggins and Stewart Dixon. Over the past three years, these artists have explored this innovative medium at Banff and in the process developed important advances in the field.

 

Presentations on art and virtual environments will be made by writers and thinkers invited to investigate current cultural practices. Speakers may include Frances Dyson, N.Katherine Hayles, Michael Heim, Erkki Huhtamo, Rob Milthorp, Margaret Morse, Jeanne Randolph, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Nell Tenhaaf, Gene Youngblood and others. Writings on art, culture and virtual environments have also been commissioned to stimulate discussion and analysis of culture and new technologies. The end result is one of the most important critical investigations in the short history of virtual reality.

 

The Art and Virtual Environments Project, undertaken by the Computer Applications and Research Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, has been funded by The Department of Canadian Heritage and CITI (Centre for Information Technologies Innovation). The Banff Centre gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions of the Art and Virtual Environments Project sponsors: Silicon Graphics Inc., Alias Research, The Computer Graphics Lab in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Apple Canada, The Intel Corporation, and AutoDesk Inc.

 

LOCATION

 

Both conferences will be held at The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada. The Centre provides a comfortable setting nestled in one of the most picturesque environments in North America. Founded in 1933, The Banff Centre has evolved into an exciting, multi- disciplinary entity that is an experience unto itself. Artists, academics, professionals, business leaders, administrators and scientists come here to learn in an efficient, service-oriented setting that happens to be surrounded by some of the most breathtaking mountain wilderness in the world.

 

Banff is located 125 kilometers, or a scenic 1 1/2 hour drive, west of the city of Calgary. The Calgary International Airport services daily flights from most major centers in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Orient. Bus service is available directly from the airport or downtown Calgary.

 

For Further Information Regarding Registration Please Contact:

 

Virginia Campbell
The Banff Centre for Conferences
Box 1020 – Station 11
Banff, Alberta
Canada T0L 0C0
Tel: (403) 762-6202
Fax: (403) 762-6388

 

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•      Chaos and Society ConferenceUNIVERSITE DU QUEBEC A HULL CHAOS AND SOCIETY CONFERENCE
  June 1-2, 1994

 

This is a summary of the information that will shortly be available on the University of Quebec Gopher. Anybody who wants more information, or a hard copy of this information (plus a small ad to be posted on a physical bulletin board), should contact:

 

Prof. Pierre Lemieux
Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

 

1. About the University

 

The Universite du Quebec a Hull (UQAH) is a branch of the University of Quebec. It is located in Hull, in the Province of Quebec (Canada), just across Ottawa in the National Capital Region.

 

2. The Chaos and Society Workshop at UQAH

 

The June Conference is organized by the Chaos and Society Workshop, directed by Prof. Alain Albert et Prof. Pierre Lemieux. The objective of the Chaos and Society Workshop is to stimulate research on the relations between chaos theory, complexity and the study of society (especially the idea of a spontaneous or anarchistic order).

 

One of the topics that has raised some interest recently at the Workshop were the ideas discussed by Prof. Albert and Lemieux on the possibilities of building models of Artificial Anarchy.

 

3. The June 1-2, 1994, Chaos and Society International Conference

 

3.1. General Description

 

The objective of the Conference is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of academics and scholars interested in the interface between chaos and complex-system theory and the social sciences. This two-day conference is to be held on June 1 and 2, 1994, in the Hull-Ottawa region (Canada). Formal papers will be presented and discussed. Papers can be presented in either English or French. (Most will probably be in English.) We are exploring the possibility of simultaneous translation during some of the lectures and discussions.

 

Examples of Topics of Interest:

 

•      What is the significance of the chaos paradigm for the social and humane sciences (including economics, sociology, political science, ethnology, philosophy…)? To which extent can society be analyzed as a chaotic, complex or living system?
•      What can nonlinear dynamic simulation techniques contribute to the study of society?
•      What is the meaning of information, evolution, and spontaneous order in the social sciences as compared to the physical sciences?
•      To which extent were these elements already present in some schools of social sciences (v.g., the Austrian School of Economics)?
•      After Artificial Life, what is the future of Artificial Economics, Artificial Politics, Artificial Sociology, etc.?
•      What is their relevance to contemporary problems?

 

We expect a group of 50 to 75 participants, mainly academics, at the Conference.
They will include:
1) Authors of papers;
2) Discussants who will comment on the papers and start the workshop-type discussion.
3) Simple participants (academics, scholars, students, government officials and business executives) who will be able to attend the lectures and participate in discussions.

 

Here is a tentative schedule as of December 15, 1993:

 

Wednesday, June 1
8:45-10:30      Opening, paper, comment and discussion
10:30-11:00     Coffee break
11:00-12:45     Paper, comment and discussion
13:00-14:45     Lunch for all participants
15:00-16:30     Workshops I, II, III
16:30-17:00     Coffee break
17:00-18:30     Workshops I, II, III
19:00           Dinner for all participants


Thursday, June 2
8:45-10:30      Paper, comment and discussion
10:30-11:00     Coffee break
11:00-12:45     Paper, comment and discussion
13:00-14:45     Lunch for all participants
15:00-16:30     Workshops I, II, III
16:30-17:00     Coffee break
17:00-18:30     Workshops I, II, III
18:30           End of Conference

 

The Organizing Committee is made of

 

•      Dr. Jacques Plamondon, Professor of Philosophy of Science and President of Universite du Quebec a Hull (UQAH)
•      Prof. Paul Bourgine, Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life Laboratory, CEMAGREF (Antony, France)
•      Dr. Bernardo Huberman, Research Fellow, Xerox PARC
•      Prof. Alain Albert, Professor of Economics, Business Administration Department, UQAH
•      Prof. Pierre Lemieux (Conference Director), Visiting Professor of Economics, Business Administration Department, UQAH

 

3.2. Call for Papers

 

Any person interested in presenting a paper must E-mail a one page abstract to the Organizing Committee before January 31, 1994. Each submission must contain the author’s name, affiliation, address, telephone, fax and E-mail numbers. The Organizing Committee will reach a decision on accepted papers and notify the authors in February. Accepted authors will then be asked to send their papers (hard copy and electronic version) before April 30, 1994, so that they be made available to discussants in time. Papers may be in English or French. They will later be published in the conference proceedings.

 

Please send abstracts to:

 

Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

 

3.3. Registration

 

Registration fees (in Canadian dollars)
Category        Before Feb. 28, 1994    from Feb. 28 to April 30
Academics               150                             250
Students                150                             150
Others                  300                             500

 

The registration fees include dinner on June 1 and lunches on June 1 and 2. Registration fees will be reimbursed if registration is canceled before April 30, 1994. All registration must be paid before April 30, 1994. Please make your check to the order of “Universite du Quebec a Hull.”

 

________________________________________________________

 

Registration form

 

First Name, Middle Initial, LAST NAME:
Title:
Name and title preferred on badge:
Occupation:
Organization/Company:
Address:
Telephone:
Fax:
E-mail:
I would like to register as:

 

        author of paper
        discussant
        participant

 

Please send check (to the order of “Universite du Quebec a Hull”) to Prof. Pierre Lemieux

 

Date:
Please note that all registrations must be paid by check before April 30, 1994. (Special rates apply before February 28; see above.) Please make your check to the order of “Universite du Quebec a Hull” and send to:

 

Prof. Pierre Lemieux
Universite du Quebec a Hull
P.O. Box 1250, Station B
Hull, Quebec J8X 3X7
CANADA
Fax: 1 (819) 595-3924
E-mail: Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

 

3.4. Hotel Accommodation, Information and Registration

 

Forthcoming.

 

3.5. Logistics Information

 

Located on the Quebec side of the Ottawa river, Hull is only a few miles from the National Capital of Canada and 10 miles from the Ottawa International Airport.

 

3.6. Important Deadlines To Remember

 

January 31, 1994 Authors who want to submit papers must have sent a one-page abstract. See “Call for Papers”.

 

February 27 Last date to register at reduced tariff. See “Registration”.

 

February 28 Accepted authors will have been notified by Organizing Committee. See “Call for Papers”.

 

April 29 Last date to cancel registration and get a reimbursement. See “Registration”.

 

April 30 Authors must have sent their papers. See “Call for Papers”. Last date to register. Registration fees must be received at UQAH. See “Registration”

 

4. Whom to Contact

 

For any information on this Conference, please contact:

 

Prof. Pierre Lemieux
Universite du Quebec a Hull
P.O. Box 1250, Station B
Hull, Quebec
Canada J8X 3X7
Tel.: 1 (819) 595-3833
Fax: 1 (819) 595-3924
E-mail:Pierre_Lemieux@uqah.uquebec.ca

 

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•      EJVC: Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture

 

EJVC is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to scholarly research and discussion of all aspects of computer- mediated human experience, behavior, action, and interaction.

 

Information about EJVC may be obtained by sending e-mail to:

 

LISTSERV@KENTVM.BITNET

or

LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU

 

 

with one or more of the following lines in the text:

 

SUBSCRIBE EJVC-L YourFirstname YourLastName
GET EJVC WELCOME
INDEX EJVC-L
Also, the file is available by anonymous ftp to:

 

byrd.mu.wvnet.edu

in the pub/ejvc directory.

 

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•      Call for Submissions

 

Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artistis a research project investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative writers.

 

The project consists of evaluations of software and hardware, critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to sites of publication.

 

We would like to request writers to submit their works for review. Publishers are requested to send descriptions of their publications with subscription fees and submission formats. We are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach creative writing for the hypertext format.

 

To avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a page or two in length. Send works on disk (IBM or Mac) or hardcopy to:

 

Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist
3 Westcott Upper
London, Ontario
N6C 3G6
E-mail: KEEPC@QUCD>QUEENSU.CA

 

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•      THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND POPULAR CULTURECALL FOR PAPERS

 

Scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that meet the following criteria:

 

ISSUES: The Journal invites critical reviews of films, documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual and performing arts. The Journal also invites original manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the topic of popular culture and criminal justice.

 

SUBMISSION PROCEDURES: To submit material for the Journal, please subscribe to CJMOVIES through the listserv and a detailed guidelines statement will automatically follow.

 

To subscribe, send a message with the following command to:

 

LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1:

SUBSCRIBE CJMOVIES YourFirstName YourLastName

 

Manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to:

 

The Editors
Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
SUNYCRJ@ALBNYVM1.BITNET
or SUNYCRJ@UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU

 

MANAGING EDITORS:

 

Sean Anderson and Greg Ungar
Editors
Journal of CriminalJustice and Popular Culture
School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA 135
Western Avenue Albany, NY 12222

 

INTERNET:

 

SA1171@ALBNYVM1.BITNET or GU8810@uacsc1.albany.edu

 

LIST ADMINISTRATOR:

 

Seth Rosner
School of Criminal Justice, SUNY
SR2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or SR2602@thor.albany.edu

 

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•      Call for papers: The Linguistics of Humor

 

High quality papers are solicited for a symposium on the state of the art in the linguistic analysis of humor to be held at the forthcoming ISHS ’94, the Annual Meeting of the International Society of Humor Studies in Ithaca, NY (June 22-26, 1994).

 

Papers in all areas of linguistics dealing with theoretical, empirical, and applied aspects of the study of humor, joking, laughter, etc., from the point of view of linguistics are invited for the first ever symposium on the linguistics of humor.

 

Send three copies of a one page (250 words max) abstract to:

 

Salvatore Attardo
Youngstown State University
Dept. of English
Youngstown, OH, 44555-3415
USA
E-mail attardo@cc.ysu.edu

 

E-mail submissions (ASCII text, TeX/LaTeX or binhexed Macintosh MSWord) are encouraged.

 

Abstracts should state name, affiliation and address of the author(s) and state clearly the problem(s) addressed, the solution(s) provided, and the methodology adopted. An extra page for references, examples, etc. is allowed. References and citations should use the LSA or HUMOR style sheets.

 

Deadline for abstracts: February 15, 1994. Submitters will be notified of acceptance by March 20, 1994. Authors should register for the ISHS conference with:

 

M. A. Rishel
Writing Program
375 Roy H. Park School of Communications
Ithaca College
Ithaca, NY 14850
Ph. (607) 274-3324
Fax (607) 274-1664
E-mail rishel@ithaca.bitnet

 

 

If you have already submitted an abstract to M. A. Rishel and wish to be considered for the symposium, submit the abstract to S. Attardo with a cover letter clearly stating this fact.

 

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•      Conference AnnouncementLITERARY TEXTS IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE:
  SCHOLARLY IMPLICATIONS AND LIBRARY SERVICES

 

31st Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing

 

April 10-12, 1994 Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

Electronic technologies are not replacing the book so much as they are changing its form and its role in scholarship. Rising interest in electronic texts is evident in the development of new computational approaches to the study of literature, the appearance of electronic text centers on university campuses, and an expanding publishing industry in electronic books. This conference will examine the role of electronic texts in the humanities and the implications of these technologies for libraries. Conference speakers will discuss this latest development in the human pursuit of the literary arts from a variety of perspectives, including the production and acquisition of electronic texts, strategies for storage and dissemination, software for the retrieval and analysis of electronic texts, problems of bibliographic control and intellectual property, and publishing trends.

 

Offered in conjunction with the conference is an optional preconference workshop in the practical use of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) in the organization of electronic texts for interchange and research. Conducting the workshop will be C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, an editor of the recently released Guidelines for Text Encoding and Interchange, a text- representation standard based on SGML syntax.

 

Who should attend: This conference will be of interest to librarians, academic computing staff, publishers and distributors of electronic texts, and humanities scholars interested in the possibilities of electronic texts.

 

PROGRAM

 

Sunday, April 10

 

11am-5pm Registration

 

1-4:30pm Preconference Workshop on using Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Editor, Text Encoding Initiative University of Illinois at Chicago

 

5-6:30pm Reception

 

6:30-7:30pm Dinner

 

8pm Keynote Address (Lincoln Hall Theater) AUTHORS AND READERS IN AN AGE OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS Jay David Bolter Professor School of Literature, Communication, & Culture Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Monday, April 11

 

8-9:30am ELECTRONIC TEXTS IN THE HUMANITIES: A COMING OF AGE Susan Hockey Director Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities Rutgers and Princeton Universities

 

THE TEXT ENCODING INITIATIVE: ELECTRONIC TEXT MARKUP FOR RESEARCH C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Editor, Text Encoding Initiative University of Illinois at Chicago

9:30-10am Break

 

10-11:30am ELECTRONIC TEXTS AND MULTIMEDIA IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES: A VIEW FROM THE FRONT LINE Anita Lowry Head, Information Arcade, Main Library University of Iowa

 

HUMANIZING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF ELECTRONIC TEXT PROCESSING Mark Tyler Day Associate Librarian Indiana University

 

11:30am-1pm Lunch (on your own)

 

1-2:30pm COHABITING WITH COPYRIGHT IN AN ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT Mary Brandt Jensen Director, Law Library Professor, School of Law University of South Dakota

 

STANDARDS, INTERCONNECTIONS, AND THE NONPROFIT DOMAINS Michael Jensen Electronic Media Manager University of Nebraska Press

 

3-5pm Software Demonstrations

 

5-7pm Dinner (on your own)

 

7-9pm Software Demonstrations

 

Tuesday, April 12

 

8-9:30am THE FEASIBILITY OF WIDE-AREA TEXTUAL ANALYSIS SYSTEMS IN LIBRARIES: A PRACTICAL ANALYSIS John Price-Wilkin Information Management Coordinator Alderman Library, University of Virginia

 

THE SCHOLAR AND HIS LIBRARY IN THE COMPUTER AGE James W. Marchand Professor Department of Germanic Languages and Literature University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

9:30-10am Break

 

10-11:30am THE CHALLENGES OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS IN THE LIBRARY: BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL AND ACCESS Rebecca Guenther Network Development and MARC Standards Office Library of Congress

 

PROJECT GUTENBERG: TRYING TO GIVE AWAY A TRILLION ETEXTS BY THE END OF 2001 Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext Illinois Benedictine College

 

11:30am-1pm Lunch (on your own)

 

1-2:30pm DURKHEIM’S IMPERATIVE: THE ROLE OF HUMANITIES FACULTY IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES REVOLUTION Robert A. Jones Professor, Department of Sociology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

THE MATERIALITY OF THE BOOK: ANOTHER TURN OF THE SCREW Terry Belanger University Professor, University of Virginia

 

GENERAL INFORMATION

 

Location: Except as noted, all conference events will take place in the Illini Union on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana, Illinois.

 

Registration and Fees: The fee for the conference is $340 ($380 after March 11, 1994), which includes the Sunday night dinner, refreshments, and a copy of the Clinic proceedings. Registration for the optional SGML workshop is $40. Registration is limited, and early registration is recommended. A limited number of reduced-fee registrations are available for those who might otherwise be unable to attend; for consideration, submit a written request by March 11, 1994.

 

Transportation: Champaign-Urbana is served by TWA, Midway Express, American Eagle, and Northwest Commuter. AMTRAK service is available from Chicago and points south. Champaign is located 135 miles south of Chicago on Interstate routes 72, 74, and 57.

 

Accommodations: Rooms have been allocated for participants at the hotels listed below. Participants must make their own reservations, and should do so before March 9, 1994. Please indicate that you are attending the library data processing conference.

 

    Illini Union                  University Inn
    1401 W. Green St.             302 E. John St.
    Urbana, IL  61801             Champaign, IL  61820
    (217) 333-1241                (217) 352-8132
    Single: $54 + tax             Single: $54 + tax
    Double: $62 + tax             Double: $61 + tax

 

Continuing Education Units: Participants will earn 1.1 CEU for attending this meeting.

 

Refunds: Refunds will be made if you find that you cannot attend and you notify us in writing by March 16, 1994. You must cancel your own hotel reservations.

 

IF YOU WOULD LIKE MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE CLINIC, PLEASE CALL (800) 982-0914 OR (217) 333-2973, OR SEND YOUR QUESTION VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL TO:

 

DPC@ALEXIA.LIS.UIUC.EDU

 

 

REGISTRATION FORM

 

Literary Texts in an Electronic Age:
Scholarly Implications and Library Services

 

31st Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing

 

April 10-12, 1994
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

Registration Form

 

Name
____________________________________________________________
Title____________________________________________________________
Organization Name________________________________________________
Business Address_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
Phone Number (___)_______________________________________________
Email
address____________________________________________________

Registration Fees: $340 ($380 after March 11) ________ $40 SGML workshop ________ TOTAL FEES ________

Method of Payment: __Check enclosed (make payable to GSLIS/University of Illinois) __Charge to credit card __Visa __MasterCard Card #___________________________Exp. date_______ Signature________________________________________

Any special needs (access, meals, etc.)?_________________________ _________________________________________________________________

If there are issues you are especially interested in, or if you have particular questions about the topics that will be addressed at this conference, please write them below. We will pass them along to the speakers. _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________

 

You may register by mail by sending this form to the address below, by phone (217-333-2973 or 800-982-0914), by fax (217-244-3302), or by electronic mail:

 

(dpc@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)

 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Library and Information Science Building
501 E. Daniel St.
Champaign, Illinois 61820-6212

 

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•      CALL FOR PAPERS, PANELS, AND PRESENTATIONS

 

National Symposium on Proposed Arts and Humanities Policies for the National Information Infrastructure

 

On October 14th, 15th and 16th, the Center for Art Research in Boston will sponsor a National Symposium on Proposed Arts and Humanities Policies for the National Information Infrastructure.

 

Participants will explore the impact of the Clinton Administration’s AGENDA FOR ACTION and proposed NII legislation on the future of the arts and the humanities in 21st Century America.

 

The symposium will bring together government officials, academics, artists, writers, representatives of arts and cultural institutions and organizations, and other concerned individuals from many disciplines and areas of interest to discuss specific issues of policy which will effect the cultural life of *all* Americans during the coming decades.

 

To participate, submit a 250-word abstract of your proposal for a paper, panel-discussion or presentation, accompanied by a one-page vitae, by March 15, 1994.

 

Special consideration will be given to those efforts that take a critical perspective of the issues, and are concerned with offering specific alternatives to current administration and congressional agendas.

 

The proceedings of the symposium will be video-taped, and papers and panels will be published on CD-ROM. For further information, reply to:

 

jaroslav@artdata.win.net

 

via return e-mail.

 

Thank you, Jay Jaroslav

 

—

 

Jay Jaroslav, Director jaroslav@artdata.win.net CENTER FOR ART RESEARCH 241 A Street Boston, MA voice: (617) 451-8030 02210-1302 USA fax: (617) 451-1196

 

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•      Announcement and Call for Submissions:
  Postmodern Culture

 

Postmodern Culture
A SUNY Press Series

 

Series Editor: Joseph Natoli
Editor: Carola Sautter

 

Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities Michigan State University

 

We invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines–green politics to Jeffrey Dahmer, Rap Music to Columbus, the Presidential campaign to Rodney King–and academic discourses from art and literature to politics and history, sociology and science to women’s studies, form computer studies to cultural studies.

 

This series is designed to detour us off modernity’s yet-to-be- completed North-South Superhighway to Truth and onto postmodernism’s “forking paths” crisscrossing high and low culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business and academy, page and screen, “our” narrative and “theirs,” formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse, analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives, truths and parodies of truths.

 

By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link our present ungraspable “balkanization” of all thoughts and events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. Modernity’s “puzzle world” to be “unified” and “solved” becomes postmodernism’s multiple worlds to be represented within the difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and diversity shapes and then re-shapes.

 

Accordingly, manuscripts should display a “postmodernist style” that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic spheres, “inscribes” within as well as “scribes” against realist and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple- narratives and “culturally relative” rather than “foundational.”

 

Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:

 

Joseph Natoli
Series Editor
20676jpn@msu.edu

 

 

or

 

Carola Sautter
Editor
SUNY Press
SUNY Plaza
Albany, NY 12246-0001

 

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•      Call for PapersPSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness

 

You are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness (ISSN: 1039-723X).

 

PSYCHE is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. PSYCHE publishes material relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Anthropology. Interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. PSYCHE publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a diverse academic audience four times per year. As an electronic journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not attempt to abuse the medium. PSYCHE also publishes a hardcopy version simultaneously with the electronic version. Long articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated, synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version.

 

Types of Articles:

 

The journal publishes from time to time all of the following varieties of articles. Many of these (as indicated below) are peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff.

 

Research Articles reporting original research by author(s). Articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some combination of the two. Articles of special interest occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer commentaries. Peer Reviewed.

 

Survey Articles reporting on the state of the art research in particular areas. These may be done in the form of a literature review or annotated bibliography. More ambitious surveys will be peer reviewed.

 

Discussion Notes critiques of previous research. Peer Reviewed.

 

Tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of consciousness to non-specialists.

 

Letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on editorial policy or upon material previously published in PSYCHE. Screened by editorial staff.

 

Abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal articles, books, and conference proceedings.

 

Book Reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as textbooks.

 

Announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission deadlines, etc.

 

Advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be published: available grants; positions; journal contents; proposals for joint research; etc.

 

Notes for Authors:

 

Unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above categories are welcome. Prospective authors should send articles directly to the executive editor. Submissions should be in a single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if submitted by mail.

 

Submitted matter should be preceded by: the author’s name; address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. Any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100- 200 word abstract as well. Note that peer review will be blind, meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to the referees. In the event that an article needs to be shortened for publication in the print version of PSYCHE, the author will be responsible for making any alterations requested by the editors.

 

Any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ASCII.

 

If that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by readers locally.

 

Authors of accepted articles assign to PSYCHE the right to publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to make it available permanently in an electronic archive. Authors will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge PSYCHE as the original source of publication.

 

Subscriptions:

 

Subscriptions to the electronic version of PSYCHE may be initiated by sending the one-line command, SUBSCRIBE PSYCHE-L Firstname Lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to:

 

LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET

 

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•      RESEARCH ON VIRTUAL RELATIONSHIPS

 

Have you had an interesting virtual relationship  
    on electronic networks? A research team wants    
    your story. Material acknowledged and terms     
      respected. Both research articles and a        
        general press (trade) book planned.          

            Mail to Either Address                   
          USA:                 CANADA:    
           
                     -or-

 

VIRTUAL, PALABRAS P.O. Box 46, Box 175, Stn. E Boulder Creek, Toronto, Ontario California 95006 CANADA M6H 4E1 E-Mail (internet): yfak0073@vm1.yorku.ca Fax: (to Canada): (416) 736-5986

  
              
  -> Please re-post to relevant network sites <-     
  ( A Distributed Knowledge Project Undertaking )

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•      SCREENSITES 94

 

April 22nd and 23rd, 1994
The Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

 

SCREENSITES 94 is a conference organized by the students of the Graduate Program in Communications, McGill University. Papers, presentations, panel discussions, and informal gatherings will discuss the screen as sites of knowledge, control, culture, aesthetics, interaction, power and experience. This conference will give participants a chance to present their ongoing research to an audience from a wide variety of disciplines and fields.

 

The “screen” occupies an increasingly significant position in 20th Century culture. New cultural sites and structuring metaphors inevitably accompany screen-dependent media such as film, television, virtual reality, and computers. These phenomena deserve continued critical attention. This conference seeks submissions that will enhance our understanding of the screen– its lure, its formal properties, its varied uses, its economy, and its ubiquity. Should metaphors of sight be the favored analytical preoccupation when describing the screen and the fixation of its viewers, or would metaphors of “site” hold greater promise? Do screens have distinct, cross-contextual implications or are “effects” more usefully understood as they are determined and/or discovered by users, producers, viewers or spectators? How might the contributions of Communication Studies, Film Theory, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and Performance Theory be helpful in elaborating the utility of screen- or non- screen-specific modes of analysis? Papers addressing issues of class, race, ethnicity, taste and proclivity, gender and orientation are encouraged along with interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical approaches.

 

SCREENSITES 94 will be held at The Graduate Program in Communications building which is located on the main campus of McGill University in the centre of downtown Montreal. For more information please call 514/398-7667 or make contact by e-mail:

 

CYWB@musicA.mcgill.ca

 

 

Send abstract or paper submission on disk or hard copy, by mail or fax to:

 

SCREENSITES 94
Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
3465, rue Peel
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 1W7
tel.: 514/398-7667 or 514/398-4110
fax.: 514/398-4934
electronic mail: CYWB@musicA.mcgill.ca

 

 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 28 FEBRUARY 1994

 

– FIN –

 

La meme-chose en francais (sans accents):

 

A l’ecran 94- Invitation a soumettre des projects de conferences

 

A l’ecran est un colloque organise par les etudiant-e- s du Program d’etudes superieures en communications de l’Universite McGill. Conferences, sessions plenieres, et rencontres informelles seront l’occasion de se concentrer sur l’ecran, et sur l’ecran en tant que source d’information, de controle, de culture, d’esthetique, de societe, de pouvoir et d’experience. Ce colloque donnera l’occcasion aux participant-e-s de presenter leurs recherches a un public provenant d’un grand nombre de disciplines au Program d’etudes superieures en communications.

 

L’ecran occupe une position importante dans la culture du vingtieme siecle. De nouveaux sites culturels et de nouvelles metaphores accompagnent inevitablement les media qui dependent de l’ecran: le cinema, la television, la realite virtuelle et les ordinateurs. Ce colloque sollicite des soumissions que contribueront a notre comprehension de l’ecranQ sa predominance, son attrait, ses proprietes et ses divers usages. Les systemes d’echanges symboliques que determinent la valeur culturelle et economique sont aussi dignes d’interet. Par exemple, les metaphores visuelles devraient- elles etre au centre de nos preoccupations lorsqu’on s’interesse a l’ecran et a ses publics, ou devrait-on plutot utiliser a des metaphores de lieux? Les ecrans ont-ils des implications concretes qui persistent a travers les contextes, ou doit-on s’attarder aux effets qui sont determines et/ou decouvents per les utilisateurs, les productrices, ou les spectateurs? Quelles sont les contributions des domaines des communications, des etudes du cinema, des etudes culturelles, des points de vue “marginaux”, des theories de la performance face a ces questions? Les conferences traitant des questions de classe, de race, d’ethnicite, de genres et d’orientation sont encouragees, de meme que les approches interdisciplinaires et multi-theoriques.

 

Le Program d’etudes superieures en communications est situe sur le campus de McGill, au centreville de Montreal. Pour plus d’information, veuillez composer le (514) 398.76.67 ou communiquer per courrier electronique a l’adresse suivante:

 

CYWB@musicA.mcgill.ca

 

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•      FEMISA

 

FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca

 

FEMISA is conceived as a list where those who work on or think about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world politics, international political economy, or global politics, can communicate.

 

Formally, FEMISA was established to help those members of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association keep in touch. More generally, I hope that FEMISA can be a network where we share information in the area of feminism or gender and international studies about publications or articles, course outlines, questions about sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to the International Studies Association.

 

To subscribe:
send one line message in the BODY of mail-message

 

sub femisa your name

to:

listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

 

 

To unsub send the one line message

unsub femisa

to:

listserv@mach1.wlu.ca

 

I look forward to hearing suggestions and comments from you.

 

Owner: Deborah Stienstra

 

stienstr@uwpg02.uwinnipeg.ca

 

Department of Political Science University of Winnipeg

 

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•      HOLOCAUS: Holocaust list

 

HOLOCAUS on

 

LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET

or

LISTSERV@UICVM.UIC.EDU

 

HOLOCAUS@uicvm has become part of the stable of electronic mail discussion groups (“lists”) at the University of Illinois, Chicago. It is sponsored by the University’s History Department and its Jewish Studies Program.

 

To subscribe to HOLOCAUS, you need and Internet or Bitnet computer account. From that account, send this message to:

 

LISTSERV@UICVM.BITNET

or

LISTSERV@uicvm.uic.edu

SUB HOLOCAUS Firstname Surname

 

Use your own Firstname and Lastname. You will be automatically added. You can read all the mail, and send your own postings to everyone on the list (We have about 100 subscribers around the world right now).

 

Owner:

JimMott@spss.com

The HOLOCAUS policies are:

 

•      1. The coverage of the list will include the Holocaust itself, and closely related topics like anti-Semitism, and Jewish history in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as well as related themes in the history of WW2, Germany, and international diplomacy.
•      2. We are especially interested in reaching college teachers of history who already have, or plan to teach courses on the Holocaust. In 1991-92, there were 265 college faculty in the US and Canada teaching courses on the Holocaust (154 in History departments, 67 in Religion, and 46 in Literature). An even larger number of professors teach units on the Holocaust in courses on Jewish history (taught by 273 faculty) and World War II (taught by 373), not to mention many other possible courses. Most of these professors own PC’s, but do not use them for e-mail. We hope our list will be one inducement to go on line. HOLOCAUS will therefore actively solicit syllabi, reading lists, termpaper guides, ideas on films and slides, and tips and comments that will be of use to the teacher who wants to add a single lecture, or an entire course.
•      3. H-Net is now setting up an international board of editors to guide HOLOCAUS policy and to help stimulate contributions.
•      4. HOLOCAUS is moderated by Jim Mott (JimMott@spss.com), a PhD in History. The moderator will solicit postings (by e- mail, phone and even by US mail), will assist people in subscribing and setting up options, will handle routine inquiries, and will consolidate some postings. The moderator will also solicit and post newsletter type information (calls for conferences, for example, or listings of sessions at conventions). It may prove feasible to commission book and article reviews, and to post book announcements from publishers. Anyone with suggestions about what HOLOCAUS can and might do is invited to send in the ideas.
•      5. The tone and target audience will be scholarly, and academic standards and styles will prevail. HOLOCAUS is affiliated with the International History Network.
•      6. HOLOCAUS is a part of H-Net, a project run by computer- oriented historians at the U of Illinois. We see moderated e-mail lists as a new mode of scholarly communication; they have enormous potential for putting in touch historians from across the world. Our first list on urban history, H- URBAN@UICVM, recently started up with Wendy Plotkin as moderator. H-WOMEN is in the works, with discussions underway about other possibilities like Ethnic, Labor, and US South. We are helping our campus Jewish Studies program set up JSTUDY (restricted to the U of Illinois Chicago campus, for now), and are considering the creation of H- JEWISH, also aimed at academics, but covering the full range of scholarship on Jewish history. If you are interested in any of these projects, please e-write Richard Jensen, for we are now (as of late April) in a critical planning stage.
•      7. H-Net has an ambitious plan for training historians across the country in more effective use of electronic communications. Details of the H-Net plan are available on request from Richard Jensen, the director, at: 
  
  campbelld@apsu

  or

  u08946@uicvm.uic.edu

 

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•      NewJour-L@e-math.ams.org

 

NewJour-L aims to accomplish two objectives; it is both a list and a project.

 

FIRST:

 

NewJour-L is the place to announce your own (or to forward information about others’) newly planned, newly issued, or revised electronic networked journal or newsletter. It is specially dedicated for those who wish to share information in the planning, gleam-in-the-eye stage or at a more mature stage of publication development and availability.

 

It is also the place to announce availability of paper journals and newsletters as they become available on electronic networks. Scholarly discussion lists which regularly and continuously maintain supporting files of substantive articles or preprints may also be reported, for those journal-like sections.

 

We hope that those who see announcements on Bitnet, Internet, Usenet or other media will forward them to NewJour-L, but this does run a significant risk of boring subscribers with a number of duplicate messages. Therefore, NewJour-L IS filtered through a moderator to eliminate this type of duplication.

 

It does not attempt to cover areas that are already covered by other lists. For example, sources like NEW-LIST describe new discussion lists; ARACHNET deals with social and cultural issues of e-publishing; VPIEJ-L handles many matters related to electronic publishing of journals. SERIALST discusses the technical aspects of all kinds of serials. You should continue to subscribe to these as you have done before, and contribute to them.

 

SECOND:

 

NewJour-L represents an identification and road-mapping project for electronic journals and newsletters, begun by Michael Strangelove, University of Ottawa. NewJour-L will expand and continue that work.

 

As new publications are reported, a NewJour-L support group will develop the following services — planning is underway & we ask that anyone who would like to participate as below, let us know:

 

•      A worksheet will be sent to the editors of the new e-publication for completion. This will provide detailed descriptions about bibliographic, content, and access characteristics.
•      An original cataloguing record will be created.
•      The fully catalogued title will be reported to national utilities and other appropriate sites so that there is a bibliographic record available for subsequent subscribers or searchers.
•      The records will feed a directory and database of these titles.

 

Not all the of the implementation is developed, and the work will expand over the next year. We thank you for your contributions, assistance, and advice, which will be invaluable.

 

SUBSCRIBING:

 

To subscribe, send a message to:

 

LISTSERV@e-math.ams.org

 

Leave the subject line blank.

 

In the body, type: SUBSCRIBE NewJour-L FirstName LastName

 

You will have to subscribe in order to post messages to this list.

 

To drop out or postpone, use the standard LISTSERV (Internet) directions.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENT:

 

For their work in defining the elements of this project and for their support to date, we thank:

 

Michael Strangelove, University of Ottawa, Advisor
David Rodgers, American Mathematical Society, Systems & Network Support
Edward Gaynor, University of Virginia Library, Original Cataloguing Development
John Price-Wilkin, University of Virginia Library, Systems & Network Support
Birdie MacLennan, University of Vermont Library, Cataloguing and Indexing Development
Diane Kovacs, Kent State University Library, Advisor

 

We anticipate this will become a wider effort as time passes, and we welcome your interest in it. This project is co-ordinated through:

 

The Association of Research Libraries
Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
e-mail: osap@cni.org

 

(Ann Okerson)

 

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•      popcult@camosun.bc.ca Popular Culture

 

The POPCULT list is now in place. It is open to analytical discussion of all aspects of popular culture. The list will not be moderated. Material relevant to building bridges between popular culture and traditional culture will be very strongly encouraged.

 

To subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, etc, send a message to:

 

mailserv@camosun.bc.ca

 

There should not be anything in the ‘Subject:’ line and the body of the message should have the specific keyword on a line by itself.

S

ome keywords are:
SUBSCRIBE POPCULT
HELP
LISTS
SEND/LIST POPCULT
UNSUBSCRIBE POPCULT

 

It is possible to send multiple commands, each on a separate line. Do not include your name after SUBSCRIBE POPCULT. In some ways this server is a simplified version of the major servers, but it is also more streamlined. I recommend, to start, that you put SUBSCRIBE on one line, and HELP on the next line. That will give you a full listing of available commands.

 

To send messages to the list for distribution to list members for exchange of ideas, etc, send messages to:

 

popcult@camosun.bc.ca

 

Owner:

 

Peter Montgomery Montgomery@camosun.bc.ca Professor Dept of English ph (604) 370-3342 (o) Camosun College (fax) (604) 370-3346 3100 Foul Bay Road Victoria, BC Off. Paul Bldg 326 CANADA V8P 5J2

 

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•      Humanities Consultant Job Posting

 

Princeton University

 

The position of humanities computing consultant at Princeton University is part of a dynamic and forward-looking team of instructional and media specialists whose mission is to support teaching and learning. Please submit resumes to the address below — e-mail submissions are particularly welcome. Apply promptly, as we would like to fill the position immediately. You may also send questions about the position directly to me:

 

balestri@phoenix.princeton.edu.Diane Balestri
Manager, Instructional and Media Services
Princeton University

 

SEARCH REOPENED

 

Humanities Consultant

 

Information Services within CIT at Princeton University seeks a consultant to support faculty members and students in humanities disciplines who use information technologies in teaching and research. The consultant will join the Instructional and Media Services group.

 

Responsibilities include: proactive consulting with humanities departments and faculty about instructional and research needs; identifying, installing, testing, and documenting software tools and applications; supporting faculty and students in software use. In addition, the consultant will work closely with the language laboratory coordinator on acquisition, installation, and use of software and multimedia applications for language instruction. The consultant will provide expertise in text data bases and text analysis for faculty in all disciplines and expertise in word processing and printing with non-Roman characters and fonts.

 

Qualifications: minimally, a Master’s degree in a humanities discipline. Excellent knowledge of one or more foreign languages required. Strong background (at least two years) supporting computer users in one or more of the humanities disciplines taught at Princeton. Knowledge of both instructional and research applications is required, as is the ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously and to move easily among a variety of hardware platforms, including Intel-based and Macintosh systems. Must enjoy outreach to faculty in humanities disciplines and must possess superior oral and written communications skills.

 

Application deadline: February 10, 1994.

 

Send resume and letter of application to:

 

Bruce Finnie
Computing and Information Technology
87 Prospect Avenue
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544
609-258-3943 (fax)
finnie@pucc.princeton.edu (e-mail)

 

Princeton University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.

 

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•      NEH DEADLINES

 

Below is a full list of application deadlines for NEH programs, plus contact numbers for individual programs. All telephone numbers are in area code 202. To receive guidelines for any NEH program, contact the Office of Publications and Public Affairs at (202) 606-8438. Guidelines are normally available at least two months in advance of application deadlines.

 

DIVISION OF EDUCATION PROGRAMS

James C. Herbert, Director (606-8373)

 

PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING

 

Higher Education in the Humanities (Lyn Maxwell White; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 October 1994

Institutes for College & University Faculty (Barbara Ashbrook; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 Summer 1995

Science & Humanities Education (Susan Greenstein; 606-8380) 15 March 1994 October 1994

Core Curriculum Projects (Fred Winter; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 October 1994

Two-Year Colleges (Judith Jeffrey Howard; 606-8380) 1 April 1994 October 1994

Challenge Grants (Thomas Adams; 606-8380) 1 May 1994 December 1994

Elementary & Secondary Education in the Humanities (F. Bruce Robinson; 606-8377) 15 March 1994 December 1994

Teacher-Scholar Program (Annette Palmer; 606-8377) 1 May 1994 September 1995

Special Opportunity in Foreign Language Education Higher Education (Lyn Maxwell White; 606-8380) 15 March 1994 October 1994

Elementary & Secondary Education (F. Bruce Robinson; 606-8377) 15 March 1994 October 1994

 

DIVISION OF FELLOWSHIPS & SEMINARS

Marjorie A. Berlincourt, Director (606-8458)

 

PROGRAM / CONTACT                       DEADLINE          
PROJECTS BEGINNING

Fellowships for University Teachers
(Maben D. Herring; 606-8466)            1 May 1994             
1 January 1995

Fellowships for College Teachers &
Independent Scholars
(Joseph B. Neville; 606-8466)           1 May 1994             
1 January 1995

Summer Stipends
(Thomas O'Brien; 606-8466)              1 October 1994           
1 May 1995

Faculty Graduate Study Program for
HBCUs (Maben D. Herring; 606-8466)      15 March 1994        
1 September 1995

Younger Scholars Program
(Leon Bramson; 606-8463)                1 November 1994          
1 May 1995

Dissertation Grants
(Kathleen Mitchell; 606-8463)           15 November 1994     
1 September 1995

Study Grants for College & University
Teachers (Clayton Lewis; 606-8463)      15 August 1994           
1 May 1995

Summer Seminars for College Teachers
(Joel Schwartz; 606-8463)
   Participants                          1 March 1994            
Summer 1994

   Directors                             1 March 1994            
Summer 1995

Summer Seminars for School Teachers
(Michael Hall; 606-8463)
   Participants                          1 March 1994            
Summer 1994

   Directors                             1 April 1994            
Summer 1995

 

 

DIVISION OF PRESERVATION & ACCESS

George F. Farr, Jr., Director (606-8570)

 

PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING

Library & Archival Research Projects
(Vanessa Piala/Charles Kolb; 606-8570)  1 June 1994             
January 1995

Library & Archival Preservation/Access
Projects (Karen Jefferson/Barbara
Paulson; 606-8570)                      1 June 1994             
January 1995

National Heritage Preservation Program
(Richard Rose/Laura Word; 606-8570)     1 November 1994          
July 1995

U. S. Newspaper Program
(Jeffrey Field; 606-8570)               1 June 1994              
July 1995

 

DIVISION OF PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Marsha Semmel, Acting Director (606-8267)

 

PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING

  Humanities Projects in Media
(James Dougherty; 606-8278)            11 March 1994           
1 October 1994

  Humanities Projects in Museums &
Historical Organizations
(Fredric Miller; 606-8284)             3 June 1994             
1 January 1995

  Public Humanities Projects
(Wilsonia Cherry; 606-8271)            11 March 1994           
1 October 1994

  Humanities Projects in Libraries
(Thomas Phelps; 606-8271)

Planning 4 February 1994 1 July 1994 Implementation 11 March 1994 1 October 1994 Challenge Grants (Abbie Cutter; 606-8361) 1 May 1994 December 1994

 

 

DIVISION OF RESEARCH PROGRAMS

Guinevere L. Griest, Director (606-8200)

 

PROGRAM / CONTACT                         DEADLINE         
PROJECTS BEGINNING

  Scholarly Publications
(Margot Backas; 606-8207)
  Editions
(Douglas Arnold; 606-8207)            1 June 1994              
1 April 1995

  Translations
(Helen Aguerra; 606-8207)             1 June 1994              
1 April 1995

  Subventions (606-8207)              15 March 1994          
1 October 1994

  Reference Materials
(Jane Rosenberg; 606-8358)
  Tools
(Martha B. Chomiak; 606-8358)         1 September 1994          
1 July 1995

  Guides
(Michael Poliakoff; 606-8358)         1 September 1994          
1 July 1995

  Challenge Grants
(Bonnie Gould; 606-8358)              1 May 1994             
December 1994

  Interpretive Research Programs
(George Lucas; 606-8210)
  Collaborative Projects
(Donald C. Mell; 606-8210)            15 October 1994           
1 July 1995

  Archaeology Projects
(Bonnie Magness-Gardiner; 606-8210)   15 October 1994          
1 April 1995

  Humanities, Science, and Technology
(Daniel Jones; 606-8210)              15 October 1994           
1 July 1995

  Conferences
(David Coder; 606-8210)               15 January 1994        
1 October 1994

  Centers & International Research
Organizations (Christine Kalke; 606-8210)
  Centers for Advanced Study            1 October 1994           
1 July 1995

  International Research                1 April 1994           
1 January 1995

 

 

DIVISION OF STATE PROGRAMS

Carole Watson, Director (606-8254)

 

Each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines. Addresses and telephone numbers of these state programs may be obtained from the NEH Division of State Programs.

 

CHALLENGE GRANTS PROGRAM

 

Applications are submitted through the Divisions of Education, Research, and Public Programs. Deadline is 1 May 1994 for projects beginning December 1994.

 

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•      GOPHEUR LITTERATURES

 

Announcing the “gopheur LITTERATURES” at the Universite de Montreal.

 

Address:

 

gopher.litteratures.Umontreal.ca 7070

or through the University of Montreal Main Gopher:

 

Address:

 

gopher.Umontreal.ca

 

Gopher servers are sprouting like mushrooms these days. Not only universities have gopher servers, but also departments now. They can be very useful tools to locate information and students here are very fond of them. They are also the first step towards much more sophisticated modes of accessing collections of research and bibliographic data, e-texts, etc…

 

The “Gopheur LITTERATURES” at the Universite de Montreal (UdM) just happens to be the first gopher dedicated to teaching, research and publications on French Literature, Quebecois Literature and Francophone Literatures, and also the first gopher to do so in french, albeit without the accents for the moment. (In the future we will offer the choice between ASCII and ISO-LATIN, as is currently being done on others gophers in the province of Quebec).

 

The “Gopheur LITTERATURES” is in construction. This means it will be evolving. Items on the main menu indicate a program of research conducted at the Department of etudes francaises. The goal of the gopher is to offer electronic documentation on the Departement d’etudes francaises, and to establish a resource center for information, tools, links, documents, local and international, to be used by the computing community of French scholars and students.

 

All comments and suggestions of sites of interest to French Studies should be sent to:

 

Gophlitt@ere.Umontreal.caChristian Allegre
allegre@ere.umontreal.ca
Universite de Montreal
Departement d’etudes francaises

 

M. Daphne Kutzer

Department of English
State University of New York at Plattsburgh
kutzerdm@splava.cc.plattsburgh.edu

 

Malice, Directed by Harold Becker. Screenplay by Aaron Sorking and Scott Frank. Castlerock, 1993.

 

The latest contender in the Woman as Evil Bitch Film Sweepstakes is Harold Becker’s Malice. The film is less interesting for its portrayal of the Bitch, Tracy (Nicole Kidman), than for its view of what makes a Real American Man. The character of Tracy–a beautiful fraud who pretends to love children and her husband while plotting with handsome Dr. Jed Hill (Alec Baldwin) to make herself sterile and thereby collect insurance money–doesn’t add much to the string of recent screen villainesses in Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Basic Instinct, and others. All share the central quality of denying their feminine and motherly sides and/or exploiting their sexuality to ensnare hapless men. However, the development of the character of Tracy’s husband Andy (Bill Pullman), along with the ultimate fate of handsome Jed Hill, shows us that something both old and new is happening to the men in these films. Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) in Fatal Attraction (1988) is guilty of bringing evil into his domestic Eden, and in the end his wounded wife must kill the bitch. The only man aware of the bitch’s true nature in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1993) is the mental handicapped black handyman, Solomon (Ernie Hudson): the scientist husband is blind to her true nature even once he knows her true identity. In both these films the male “heroes” are weak and ineffectual, if not emasculated. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas again) in Basic Instinct (1992) is made of sterner stuff, but despite his nickname of “Shooter,” the film hints that he, too, will be a victim in the end. Malice provides a step–forward?–in the development of the American film hero, at least in the genre of thrillers.

 

The male leads of the film are Andy and Jed. Andy’s shortened name suggests his initial weakness, while Jed’s name suggests his hunkiness–it’s the sort of name you find attached to cleft-chinned romantic soap opera heroes. The names match the physical attributes of each character. Bill Pullman’s Andy is slightly built, has a non-descript face, and is always dressed in a corduroy or tweed jacket, button-down Oxford cloth shirt, and knitted tie–suitable if stereotypical garb for an Associate Dean of Students. Jed is the former high school running back, solid and athletic (we see him jogging energetically, for instance, while Andy drinks coffee), and the film allows him to doff his shirt frequently, so that the viewer may admire Alec Baldwin’s broad and hairy chest.

 

The way each man handles his women is also instructive. Andy has married, according to the local campus newspaper, his “favorite student.” We aren’t meant to raise our post-Anita Hill eyebrows at this. The detail is provided so that we may understand that Andy is not man enough for a Real Woman: he needs a “student wife,” someone young enough to be malleable in his inexperienced hands.

 

Of course, Tracy turns out to be anything but malleable. The film foreshadows this by way of a sex scene between Andy and Tracy. The happy couple are eating take-out Chinese in bed (perhaps a reference to the scene in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, which also concerns the power balance between an older man and a younger woman). Andy can’t handle the chopsticks, and says to his wife, “Would you think any the less of me if I used a fork?” Tracy coyly begins to feed him from her chopsticks, and before we know it she is straddling him and they are having sex. It is Tracy who is on top, both literally and figuratively. She is less prudish and more aggressive than her husband; she doesn’t mind the curtainless windows and he does. Andy remains passive throughout, and all we see of his naked body is a scrawny lower leg. You can tell he doesn’t jog.

 

Jed, on the other hand, is a Real Man. When we see him having sex, Jed is energetically on top–so much so that he is keeping Tracy and Andy, who live a floor below, awake. We see his bulging biceps and naked torso, and when his partner asks him to slow down on the booze, he replies, “I am impervious to alcohol.” Hard drinking, hard working, and hard playing: an admirable example of the American male.

 

But in the end it is Jed who is killed by Tracy the Bitch, and Andy the Wimp who ends up the hero. How does this happen?

 

It happens improbably, of course. There has been a serial rapist loose on campus, and indeed the rapist’s actions lead to the initial meeting between Andy and Jed– Jed miraculously saves the life of one of the victims, Andy comes to thank him and discovers that Jed is his old high school running back hero. Before long Andy asks Jed to rent the upper floor of his run-down Victorian house. What Andy doesn’t know, of course, is that Tracy and Jed are hatching an evil medical plot right beneath his roof, and that one reason Tracy becomes upset with Jed’s energetic sex life is that she has been having an affair with him herself. Andy is not only cuckolded, but cuckolded under his own roof, by someone who is also “cuckolding” (as it were) his wife.

 

No one counts on the rapist, however. One of Andy’s students fails to show up for an appointment, and the dedicated dean drives to her house to talk to her. We aren’t surprised when he discovers her raped body in the backyard. The local (female) detective asks Andy to give a sperm sample to clear him of suspicion. Furious, he says, “Am I a fucking suspect?” This is the first time he uses the “f” word, but not the last. Up to this point in the film he has been fucked over by the judicial system and by his friend and his wife, and he has not done any genuine fucking himself, although he will ultimately fuck up the insurance scheme. When he is asked to fuck himself, he finally rebels. I emphasize the word “fuck” because it is the biggest linguistic clue in the film as to Andy’s growing manhood. Jed has used it early on–when lambasting a medical colleague, he says, “Do that again and I’ll take out your lungs with a fucking ice cream scoop.” Tracy also uses the word–and the instant Andy starts to, we know his luck is changing.

 

But first Tracy leaves him. Her ovary has burst, Jed performs emergency surgery, and with Andy’s permission removes both ovaries, even though one of them turns out to be viable. Tracy sues Jed (this is part of their scheme, of course) and leaves Andy. Disconsolate, Andy works late, goes to the basement for a lightbulb, realizes the janitor is the rapist, and socks him into unconsciousness after a battle that leaves Andy with a bloodied face.

 

A lightbulb has literally gone off for Andy. Directly after his capture of the rapist, the police detective tells him that the sperm sample he gave showed that he is sterile –and Andy knows Tracy was pregnant when she had emergency surgery. Here is proof that he has been cuckolded and that Tracy is not what she seems. Andy goes off in a fury to Jed (whom he does not yet suspect); to Tracy’s lawyer, whom he assumes is also her lover; and to Tracy’s alcoholic mother (played wickedly well by Ann Bancroft) in search of clues. Everyone he sees says, “What happened to your face?” Of course, in one sense he has lost face completely, courtesy of Tracy, and he has also lost his manhood in that he knows he can’t father children. But in other ways he has re-cast his mild-mannered professor’s face in the shape of the hero’s. He tells the detective, “You want something done right, goddamn it, you call a teacher,” and when Jed asks what happened to his face he says, “I beat the shit out of a seriously disturbed serial rapist.”

 

Andy gets final proof of what is going on when he sees Tracy and Jed together and when he finds a medical syringe in his house. He then confronts Tracy. Tracy doesn’t understand that Andy is on top now, however. She thinks she can seduce him into going along with her scheme. She, too, asks what happened to his face, and he says, “I tripped.” This is meant to be ironic–it plays to his old role as ineffectual academic, not his new one as manly hero. Tracy, once she realizes things aren’t going her way, gets up in a hug and Andy says, “Sit the fuck down.” Stunned by this verbal virility, she says, “What?” “I said, sit the fuck down. I’m running the show now.” “What do you want?” “What does any man want? I want the Red Sox to win the World Series.”

 

This little scene, more so than the fight with the rapist, shows us that Andy is now a Real Man. He can take charge of a woman and make her do what he wants her to do; he can say “fuck”; he can toss around sports references just like Jed Hill. He ultimately asks for half the insurance money, although by now the viewer knows this is just one more step in Andy’s revenge plot.

 

Just as Andy’s masculinity is on the rise, Jed’s is declining. He and Tracy have argued over what to do about Andy and the child witness Andy claims to have. Jed is for compromise–he says give Andy half and be done with it. They argue so heatedly that Jed finally hits Tracy to put her in her place. At first this appears to be in line with Jed’s he-man qualities–but then he makes the mistake of apologizing. In the ethos of the film, this shows him to be weak, despite all of his macho sex and surgery. He is willing to compromise; he is appalled at Tracy’s plan to kill an innocent child; and he apologizes for using physical violence against a woman. What is the proper fate for such a man? Why, death, of course. Tracy plugs him twice with a gun, then goes off to commit child murder solo.

 

She is foiled in her plot–Andy knows what she is going to do and substitutes a dummy for the boy. Tracy ends up going to jail. Andy ends up with a sprained arm, and when we last see him, the female detective (whose only role in the denouement is to masquerade as a nurse and mother), says, “You’re supposed to put ice on that.” He replies, “Fine. I’ll have mine with some scotch on top.” And off they go. Now Andy is the hard-drinking, swearing, womanizing Real Man, and the film’s end hints that he will end up next with a (psuedo) nurse, just like Jed.

 

Malice has links with its predecessors that go beyond the Evil Bitch stereotype. First of all, it shares with them a particular, strategic deployment of the word “fuck.” In all of these films we are given to understand that when a man uses the word, he is a Real Man: when a woman does, she is the incarnation of evil, no matter how beautiful she may be. Peyton (Rebecca deMornay) in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle provides a nice example of this. She twists the arm of a six-year-old schoolyard bully and says, “I’ve got a message for you. . . . Leave Emma alone. . . . If you don’t I’m going to rip your fucking head off.” A scene or two later, she says to Solomon, the wiser-than-he-seems handyman, “Don’t fuck with me, retard.” She not only says “fuck” but picks on children and the mentally handicapped– hard to get much bitchier than that.

 

Second, all of these films portray men as for the most part weak and dim-witted, their wits especially dulled by the siren calls of evil women. Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction has the perfect life, until Alex seduces him into a one-night stand and all hell breaks loose. In the end, he is still so weakened by her that he cannot kill her. He misses one chance in Alex’s kitchen, when he nearly strangles her but then backs off–he’s a nice middle-class lawyer, after all–and botches another in his own bathroom when he thinks he has drowned her, but hasn’t. It’s up to his wife, battered and weak from a car accident, to find the gun and fire the fatal shot. Matt McCoy’s Michael in Hand That Rocks The Cradle has facial expressions blanker than those of the handicapped Solomon, and although other men salivate at the sight of Peyton, he seems oblivious to her charms until nearly the end of the film. Even when he knows who she really is, he is reluctant to call the police and forgets to ask for the house keys when he throws her out; his wife has to ask for them. And in the final confrontation, he is completely out of the action, left in the basement with broken legs while the quick wits of a child and Solomon give Claire the chance to send Peyton out the attic window to her death. Nick in Basic Instinct is apparently somewhat shrewder, but even he misses out on crucial clues, is incapable of saving his best buddy from death, and is obsessed beyond reason with the pantyless femme fatale played by Sharon Stone.

 

Even more interesting is the attitude towards paternity in these films. The fathers in Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle appear on the surface to be loving and involved parents: Dan Gallagher buys his child a pet bunny rabbit; Michael sings operetta to his daughter and plays board games with her. But Dan’s bunny ends up boiled because he has put carnal desires before fatherly duty, and Michael should not be so willing to turn over so much of the family’s care to a nanny.

 

Nick in Basic Instinct has the paternalistic job of policeman, but he also has the nickname “Shooter,” earned by his tendency to wound innocent bystanders. He is not a father, nor does he show any desire to sire children by Sharon Stone’s Catherine, but he is a symbolic and murderous father. In this he points the way to Malice and what may be the latest trend in cinematic visions of manhood.

 

In Malice paternal behavior leads one first to marry the Evil Bitch, and then to discover raped bodies in the bushes. Finding out one is sterile, however, leads to the possibility of endless sexual play without consequences — unless you choose a Sharon Stone, that is. Malice‘s Andy is smarter than Basic Instinct‘s Nick: he figures out the entire scheme on his own, cancels the bitch out of his life, takes up with someone who will nurture him rather than the other way around, and is freed from having to worry about unanticipated pregnancies (one of Dan Gallagher’s problems) or from ever having to worry about evil nannies in his childless household. He’s smarter than scheming Dr. Jed Hill, who ultimately is killed not only for greed, but for his paternal feelings towards an unknown child. Paternity is lethal all the way around in these films.

 

The New American Hero, at least in the genre of popular film, is no New Age Sensitive Guy or angst-ridden Iron John. He’s an updated John Wayne–he can swear and drink, but he doesn’t smoke; he has brains but knows how to use his muscles; and most importantly he can have guilt-free, child-free sexual relationships in which he, of course, is always on top.

 

Kevin Harley

Norwich, England
P280@CPCMB.EAST-ANGLIA.AC.UK

 

Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

 

It’s a long and sordid tale, the history of adult comics. This particular hotbed of intrigue has everything for the perfect television mini-series; suspense, prejudice, passion, censorship, homophobia, Anglo-American cultural relations, exploitation of creative individuals by massive and all-powerful media industries–even, gasp, communism. One wonders why the TV version has yet to be made. In its absence, Roger Sabin’s Adult Comics sets itself the formidable task of presenting this largely untold tale.

 

Sometime in the mid-1980s, the British media suddenly became aggitated over the phenomenon of so-called ‘adult comics.’ Many argued that comics were laying claim to a hitherto absent literary legitimacy, largely through the use of the term “graphic novel” to denote the departure these “new comics” made from the supposedly childish orientations of their predecessors. The media response to this ostensible trend was divided between approval and outrage, but nearly everyone adhered to a suitably comic-book language of wild hyperbole.

 

Among enthusiasts, the general attitude was one of terrific excitement about comics that–wow!–used cats and mice to tell the story of the Holocaust, or–gasp!– looked closely at both the politics and psychoses of superheroes, when the industry was presumed to have hitherto kept its heroes’ reputations untarnished. What’s more, these things called “graphic novels” were full-color, fully painted works of art which–hey!–you did not need to feel ashamed to read in a public place, even if you did look as if you were scouring the porn shelf to get to them (Sabin 72). It was finally safe for comics’ fans to come out and admit to their unspoken love.

 

Others, however, were more hostile. David Lister set the resurgence of comic book popularity in the context of The Novel’s imminent death.¹ Given the supposedly three minute culture in which “we” live, a visually based narrative media (as if television weren’t bad enough!) could only signal a turn for the worse. Lister refused to allow comics to hide behind the cloak of the term “graphic novel,” since this was of course an attempt to disguise the fact that the things were still “merely . . . a diverting entertainment for children.”

 

One can readily set this whole debate over adult comics during the mid-80s in the general context of a series of debates over what constitutes culture. As Sabin notes, the growing popularity of Cultural Studies within British universities, and the faddishness of applying the term “postmodern” to anything that might be seen as challenging high/low culture boundaries, provided a perfect context for the adult comics hype to generate both excitement and outrage amongst its many commentators. Add to this the widely circulating arguments about whether visual literacy could be considered equal to textual literacy, and it is easy to see why the spark over comics briefly became a fire.

 

Stepping in before the embers get cold, Sabin offers Adult Comics primarily as a “primer-textbook” for university teachers who know little about the medium and its histories, but might consider including comics on their syllabi. After all, as a medium it lends itself to all manner of disciplines, perfect fodder for the interdisciplinary age. Media studies, popular culture studies, literature, art history, and even history itself, could all be suitable disciplinary venues for the teaching of comics. Many comics offer themselves as history texts, and many flaunt such a high level of aesthetic-theoretical sophistication that their gradual assimilation into the hallowed halls of academia should not really surprise anybody.

 

In his effort to seize on the moment of comics’ potential legitimization, Sabin casts himself in the role of demythologiser, trampling all over the rubbish that the mainstream British press has been churning out ever since comics became an issue. The death of the novel? Well, popular novels still sell pretty well. The first adult comics? They’ve been going strong since the nineteenth-century, mate, and other countries accepted them long before the English and American press leapt on the bandwagon. The collapse of high/low culture boundaries? A story as old as culture itself. Graphic novels? Been around since the 1940s, and besides they’re called albums in Europe. Etc etc etc. . . .

 

So why, according to Sabin, did the mid-80s see such an explosion of interest in adult comics? There were, he says, basically three groups whose interests converged to produce a dramatic, if short-lived comics boom. Firstly, publishers saw the opportunity for a period of more aggressive production and distribution. Secondly, the media sniffed out a suitably scandalous decline-of-civilization story and got terribly excited about it for a while. Thirdly, creators (as they are known) were able to push the comic book institutions they worked in for better deals than before, now that their names were on the covers and people were actually buying the damn things. All these groups sought to benefit from a public who, as Sabin argues, knew nothing about what they were being sold. “This void made it easy for those with a vested interest in rewriting history: for them, other peoples’ ignorance was bliss. Adult comics had no history, which is why an invented one was so powerful.”

 

Which, of course, leaves a space for Sabin to step in and reveal the truth about the history of a medium much-maligned and under-studied. Appropriately, his demythologising begins with the title of his own book. What is meant by this rather ambiguous term, “adult comics”? It is a term that, as Sabin notes, teases at the ambivalence, in British society at least, over the fault-line that divides most people’s childhood from their adulthood. But is this really a very secure or stable boundary? Obviously many “adults” read comics that are marketed for children, and many children would probably not have too much difficulty getting their hands on so-called adult comics.

 

Whilst Sabin usefully raises this as a problem, his book is not up to the challenge of dealing with it. Given the fact that he has such an enormous history to recover, it’s true that one really cannot expect a lengthy treatise on adult/child distinctions in British society. But it is galling when Sabin tries to tidy up the ambivalences by recasting the adult/child distinction in such terms as “mature” and “adolescent,” as though these were somehow more helpful. Discussing similarities and differences between various types of so-called adult comics, Sabin comments that the “only thing . . . all the comics had in common was their adult nature,” which, he says, distinguishes them from the “traditional adolescent fare.” To depend on such undefined terms for one’s evaluative criteria creates all manner of anomalies, and reinforces some unjustified prejudices. A comment on Tim Burton’s Batman movie is typical. According to Sabin, the film’s release with a “12” certificate rather than a “15” could rightly have been read as a disappointing signal by audiences hoping for something more sophisticated. But why should the age of the viewers at which a work is pitched be taken as an index of its sophistication?

 

This is not the only example of a lack of terminological and conceptual clarity in Adult Comics. Similar instances arise from Sabin’s obvious contempt for ‘fandom’ and for superhero comics. In his view, the latter pander to the “adolescent,” “male-power fantasies” of the former; the entire genre of superhero comics is dismissed as juvenile fodder either for those in their early teens or for older men who don’t want to leave their early teens behind. All these “fanboys” are to Sabin suspect persons, “anal-retentive, adolescent, and emotionally arrested.” The whole account depends on our accepting “adolescent” as a pejorative term: superhero fans are largely adolescent, therefore superhero comics are bad and their adult readers must be stunted.

 

Indeed, Sabin’s approach in general avoids an engagement with fandom, offering a narrative not so much of specific patterns of reception and appropriation as of sweeping “historical and cultural imperatives.” At the same time, however, his own chapter on “Fandom and Direct Sales” makes clear that it was to some considerable degree the strategic activities and choices of fans that drove the emergence of the graphic novel and opened doorways into the industry for new and more ambitious creators. In view of his own research, it seems odd that Sabin would resist viewing “fanboys” and their strategies of reception as anything less than imperative cultural and historical phenomena where the development of comics is concerned.

 

This blind spot in Sabin’s analysis is particularly unfortunate given that fandom and fan cultures are areas that have generated much critical literature recently. The essayists in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media² seek to clear a cultural space for the respectful analysis of popular culture fans with many different generic interests. Jensen’s essay, for example, argues that media commentaries or critical writing on fans is frequently marred by a “them” and “us” mentality, in which critics regard themselves as intrinsically superior to fans. This is probably because the genre to which the fans in question attach themselves has been perceived as an inferior one anyway, and possibly because it is presumed that fan-affiliations are singular: one fan, one genre. Sabin makes exactly this assumption when he suggests that a fan of Daredevil is unlikely to get very excited about Raw! (a collection of avant-garde comic strip work, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly), or vice versa. Sabin quotes no ethnographic evidence for this, and I could cite myself and many others as contradictions to the supposed rule. The superhero fanboys are not, I suspect, as discrete or as homogeneously imbecilic a group as Sabin is determined to make them out.

 

Nor, it seems to me, are the superhero comics deserving of such a cursory and dismissive analysis. Unless we accept Sabin’s view that all the adults who read these texts are dull-witted, then there must be something other than self- reflexivity and lots of violence that earned the 1980s superheroes the label “adult.” Until Sabin’s claim to have looked “in detail” at the big three sellers in Britain during this period (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus) is lived up to–and his one paragraph on each hardly accomplishes that–then we won’t know.

 

But what of the comics that don’t buy into the mainstream superhero agenda? On these, Sabin’s book is superb. The attention he devotes to the underground comics and the relationship between women and comics far exceeds his sweeping judgements on superhero texts. While showing that the comic book medium and the specialist shop culture generated around it has tended effectively to exclude women, Sabin makes it clear that there are women’s comics, even if they are not part of the perceived mainstream. Like most comics, they have of course suffered at the hands of somewhat over-zealous customs officials and censors, particularly if they are so bold as to deal with such a taboo subject matter as sex in a medium which everyone knows is really only a diversion for children. “So far as the British authorities generally were concerned, men dealing with sex in comics was bad enough: women dealing with sex was beyond the pale. The worst example of censorship occurred in 1985, when Melinda Gebbie’s solo comic Frezca Zisis was declared obscene by the courts and destroyed” (289). Even recently, an erotic graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Gebbie (Lost Girls) had trouble getting through customs in its serialized format as part of the quarterly collection of comic strip material in graphic novel format titled Taboo.

 

It is obviously true, however, that where “women’s comics” are concerned censors probably have less to answer for than the comics industry itself. Sabin notes that when the underground comics went into decline with the rest of the counter culture in the early 1970s, women’s comics were considered expendable and were “the first to go.” The specialist shops that subsequently emerged in Britain conveyed, says Sabin, a “locker-room atmosphere” that, aside from being intimidating to anyone less literate in comics than the fanboys, was far from welcoming to women. And even if comics became in some sense more “adult” by the mid to late 1980s, this rarely translated into more progressive attitudes towards women on the part of male comics writers. Indeed, as Sabin sees it, “some of the worst cases of negative representations of women in the history of comics can be identified in this period.”

 

Nevertheless, despite their marginalization by the “mainstream” writers and marketers, women’s comics make up an important part of the history of comics. And it is in recovering this and other marginalized histories that Sabin excels. He shows that whilst women have served as a primary satiric butt for comics at least since the late nineteenth century (in, for example, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday), they were always “recognised as an audience” and, in fact, have always constituted at least a small fraction of the creators of adult comics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an “underground” women’s comics movement emerged in force as a critical reaction against the macho and misogynist work of creators like Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. By the mid 1970s even the comics mainstream showed some signs of feeling the impact of the women’s movement, and a number of established male writers (including Alan Moore) took to writing pro-feminist narratives. Whilst women creators themselves still do not hold very prominent positions in this mainstream, Sabin lets us see their work as extending a crucial counter-tradition.

 

Sabin is also quite good at tracing the concrete histories of comic book production and distribution. Take, for example, the characteristically “convoluted” history of Bryan Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. This comic first appeared in the 1972 underground comic Mixed Bunch, moving from there to Near Myths in 1978, then onto Pssst! in 1982. Soon thereafter it was published in its first collected-volume format by Never Ltd., and then in 1988 as a nine-issue comic book series by Valkyrie Press. Valkyrie then republished the second volume, while volumes one and three were reprinted by Proutt, and, in 1991, the whole lot was republished, with all new covers, by Dark Horse Comics. Sabin can be commended for the thoroughness with which he has retraced these sorts of strange trajectories, but at times the minutiae can be overwhelming. Moreover, such publishing-centered approach to comics history can have the effect of submerging the cultural specificity of a text under the mere facts of its publication. Sabin describes both Dark Knight and Watchmen as “American in origin,” which is true enough as concerns their publication histories. But while Frank Miller’s Dark Knight certainly derives from an American perspective on superheroes, Moore’s Watchmen seems just as certainly to derive from a British one. Something of the cultural and ideological resonance of both texts is lost when the origins of their production are understood entirely in terms of the sites of their initial publication.

 

But even allowing for this and other shortcomings, Sabin’s book is a valuable one. Sabin has succeeded in mapping out an extensive cultural terrain on which new analysis and research might find room to develop. He has opened a host of avenues for inquiry, even if some of the most promising of these may lead readers away from his own positions. Hopefully, Adult Comics will be taken up as the “primer-textbook” of comics studies, and provide the point of departure for much future work.

 

Notes

 

1. David Lister, “Traditional novel ‘in danger’ as teenagers turn to comics”, The Independent, 9/9/1989, p. 3.

 

2. Lisa A. Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992).

 

Susan Schultz

Department of English
University of Hawaii
schultz@uhccvm

 

Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

 

Susan Howe, The Nonconformist’s Memorial. New York: New Directions, 1993.

 

 

Somewhere Thoreau says that exaggerated history is poetry.

 

— Susan Howe,

“The Captivity And Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”

(Birth-mark 96)

 

 

The recent publication of two books by Susan Howe marks a further climb in the upward curve of her reputation as one of the most serious, and important, poets of our time. The nearly simultaneous publication of her latest books of poems and essays displays her ambition to change not only our way of writing poetry, but also our reading of it–although one is at times hard pressed in reading Howe’s work to decide what is “poem,” what “essay.” Howe, more than most poets, combines and confuses genres; she also experiments with typography, writing books that have to be turned over and side-ways, in order that they be read both as pictures and as texts. Despite her distinctly avant-garde surfaces, however, Howe straddles the lines between modern and postmodern poetries; she may be postmodernist in her method, but her intentions often appear to be those of a last modernist. Her fragments are every bit as artful as Eliot’s, and her desire to make them cohere (in literary and religious terms) is equal to that of Eliot, Pound, or Hart Crane.

 

Howe’s poems are puzzles, in other words, but they are puzzles with answers. The acts of nonconformity that form the substance of Howe’s books stretch our assumptions about what texts are, and how they operate. Yet the more I read and teach her work, the more forcefully I am struck by the essential conservatism of her poetics, evident again in these new books. Howe believes in history (what she terms in Singularities “narrative in non-narrative”) and furthermore she believes, unfashionably, in the possibility that history (and gender) can be transcended through art. Unlike her colleague Charles Bernstein, also on the faculty of SUNY-Buffalo, she has faith that poems exist in order to communicate meaning; the radical nature of her texts reflect nothing so much as the difficulty of communicating new meanings, new histories.

 

Howe adopts the mask of an editor, reviser, or “redactor” (a fine word that combines “reading” with “acting,” in both its senses). That is, she takes as given that our histories and literature have already been written, and makes it her task to alter rather than reinvent the record. As editor, however, she does not seek to purify her source texts, but to recom- plicate them, implicate them in the “wilderness” that was overrun by European immigrants, as by white male editors. Like her fore-fathers, Howe writes a frankly backward-looking prophecy, revising texts by stripping them of their rhetorical histories, and so giving voice to women and others silenced by previous editors and historians. As she tells Edward Foster:

 

     There you have Charles Olson at his
wisest.  "The 
          stutter is the plot."  It's the stutter in 
          American literature that interests me.  I hear the 
          stutter as a sounding of uncertainty.  What is 
          silence or not quite silenced [as in Billy Budd]. 
          . . . A return is necessary, a way for women to 
          go.  Because we are in the stutter.  We were 
          expelled from the Garden of the Mythology of the 
          American Frontier.  The  drama's done.  We are the 
          wilderness.  We have come on to the stage 
          stuttering. (181)

 

Howe does not create a new meaning for “wilderness,” but adopts the old meaning (the wilderness as woman in Hart Crane’s The Bridge, for example) and translates it, feminizes it. She disrupts old narratives not because she has no faith in narratives, but because she means for the reader to see in her gaps and verbal impasses the opening for new narratives. The danger is that the new language is too close to the old; by using the old words, she threatens to reinscribe old forms. Howe makes of these risks both revelation and paradox–the oppositions that Howe so often attempts to transcend threaten to undermine her historical (and so untranscendental) project.

 

One of the central paradoxes in Howe’s work involves the function of silence in poetry, especially poetry by and about women. Howe’s revision of literary history problematically reproduces women’s silences in the text even as it permits their voices to speak through the agency of the reader, who transforms Howe’s compressed “narrative in non-narrative” into story. (This is something that can happen to marvelous effect in the classroom.) Silence is at once a negative social fact for women and a positive religious state; silence, like so much in Howe’s work, straddles the line between history and transcendence, thereby calling both of them into question. As she states the problem in her brilliant book My Emily Dickinson, “Identity and memory are crucial for anyone writing poetry. For women the field is still dauntingly empty. How do I, choosing messages from the code of others in order to participate in the universal theme of Language, pull SHE from all the myriad symbols and sightings of HE” (17-18). That she does pull the “she” from the “he” by taking advantage of the language’s frequent material self-betrayal only makes her thinking more complex; in her previous book Singularities, for instance, she literally un-mans the Puritan Hope Atherton, whose wanderings in the wilderness become the history behind her poem “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” She does so by commenting that “Hope” is now considered a woman’s name. As if by fiat, she begins an American epic of reduction and reconstruction through a simple linguistic sex-change operation. “Hope” for the American poet (or, as she puts it, for “the artist in America”) becomes a feminine aspiration.

 

Howe’s view of Dickinson’s silence is both enabling and disturbing because it values that silence over publication: “I think,” she tells Ed Foster, “she may have chosen to enter the space of silence, a space where power is no longer an issue, gender is no longer an issue, voice is no longer an issue, where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap” (170). The difficulty of Howe’s work may, in part, stem from the fact that she herself uses language to aspire to the condition of silence and the immateriality to which her books cannot aspire. As she writes in the “Silence Wager Stories” section of The Nonconformist’s Manual:

 

     Words are an illusion 
          are vibrations of air 
          Fabricating senselessness 
          He has shattered gates 
          thrown open to himself  (38)

 

These are lines that no Language poet would set upon the page; given a more complete syntax, the passage might be claimed by that American metaphysician, Wallace Stevens. The illusions of words often work through Howe’s manipulation of puns, as in her use of the word “word” in the following lines: “Language a wood for thought / over the pantomime of thought / Words words night unto night” (39). So language can be considered a “word” for thought; or the word may pertain to the wilderness that engenders thinking like Howe’s own; or language may (in an older sense of the wood-word) participate in madness’ meaning. “Much madness is divinest sense,” we recall from Dickinson. Dickinson’s poem, too, sets the social against the visionary world; categories are human inventions, but the states that they circumscribe approximate the divine.

 

The illusive word is purposely allusive; Howe depends on the aura of words more than most poets (the example of Hart Crane comes to mind again). Like Crane, and like St. John the Divine, and despite her own claim not to believe in origins, she tries to wend her way through words (or woods) back to the Word. The fields of words that cover pages of Singularities, for example, contain not just the European words that helped to tame the wilderness, but also native American words that can now be used to re-claim it. Prophecy, in Howe’s lexicon, is re-vision in the sense that it both reaches forward and back; her quotation from John Cotton in Singularities is appropriate: “Prophesie is Historie antedated; / and History is Postdated Prophesie” (4). Of the Word, she writes in a more direct address from poet to reader than she is usually wont to make, in a section of the “The Nonconformist’s Manual” that begins with the poet’s address to her reader as a “confessor” (23):

 

     Reader I do not wish to hide 
          in you to hide from you 
          It is the Word to whom she turns 
          True submission and subjection  (NCM 30)

 

The “she” who is pulled from the “he” of tradition here refers to any and all women who have chosen not to conform–from the Puritans to Howe herself.

 

That this operation is not necessarily “true” to history does not bother Howe, who rather cannily asserts in an interview with Edward Foster (editor of Talisman ) reprinted in the new Wesleyan book, that “Poets aren’t reliable. But poetry may be. I don’t think you can divorce poetry from history and culture. The photographs of children during the war in Europe . . . prevented me from ever being able to believe history is only a series of justifications or that tragedy and savagery can be theorized away” (163-4). But Howe, who here insists that poetry and culture cannot be divorced, elsewhere makes pronouncements to the contrary. In My Emily Dickinson, for example, while defending Dickinson’s “illogical” syntax against the normalizing force of the “two feminist scholars,” Gilbert and Gubar, Howe asserts that “there is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology” (13). I am reminded, perhaps in spite of myself, of the words of one of the members of Run DMC quoted recently in The New York Times; rap, he claimed, is poetry, and therefore has no effect on the world. Howe’s transcendent claim, along with another anti-worldly statement against the power of “Mammon,” where she (and/or Dickinson) asserts that she must “renounce attachment to friends and worldly accomplishment” (49), resemble similar polemics by Gertrude Stein. Yet Stein was no advocate of poems “including history,” as was another of Howe’s forerunners, Ezra Pound. Rather, Stein more resembles John Ashbery or Charles Bernstein, poets for whom history (in their poems, at least) is more immediately a sequence of syllables than of political events.

 

Thus, even as she attempts to give voices to those who were silenced by official histories, she claims also to get to a point past gender and past politics. It seems to me that, while each of these goals is admirable in and of itself, her conflation of them undermines each ambition. Despite her brilliant operation on Hope Atherton, and her vociferous attempts to reclaim Dickinson from the clutches of what she sees as a male-dominated editorial conspiracy, Howe thinks of poetry as an art that breaks beyond the confines of gender politics. As she writes toward the end of her book on Dickinson: “Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun that an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night’s frame” (138). In these amazing sentences Howe succeeds in troping no one so much as herself; where she had argued that Dickinson’s “gun” (from the poem that begins, “My Life it Had stood–a Loaded Gun”) rightly belonged in the history of the American frontier, a claim that historicizes Dickinson’s work in a valuable and provocative way, she now claims for the gun a part in the allegory of a pilgrimage into the capitalized “Night” that no longer seems especially American, or especially historical. The “allegorical pilgrim” is not history, but history’s idea of itself.

 

For better or for worse, then, Howe is less a historical poet than a religious one; like the Puritans with whom she identifies, she sees American history running parallel to a religious text. The Puritans give Howe historical force, though one wonders if their metaphors haven’t lost some of their currency in our secular age. It seems telling that the best purveyors of these metaphors in the last decade have been Ronald Reagan and Mario Cuomo, hardly our finest spiritual guides. Howe is that curious combination, a deeply spiritual iconoclast, one who seeks to replace a set of icons not with a heap of broken images, but with a new set of icons, inaugurated through her use of the page of words as a visual artifact. Thus, writing of Mary Magdalene and the poet in “The Nonconformist’s Memorial”:

 

I wander about as an exile 
          as a body does a shadow 
          A notion of split reference 
          if in silence hidden by darkness 
          there must be a Ghost 
          Iconic theory of metaphor 
          a sound and perfect voice 
          Its hiding is understood 
          Reader I do not wish to hide 
          in you to hide from you

 
It is the Word to whom she turns True submission and subjection.
 
Her vision of writing (and editing) is of a spiritual and loving act. “If history is a record of survivors,” she writes in “Incloser” (previously published in PMC), “Poetry [with a capital P] shelters other voices” (Birth-mark 47). Or, again allegorizing poetry as “Poetry”: “In the precinct of Poetry, a word, the space around a word, each letter, every mark, silence, or sound volatizes an inner law of form–moves on a rigorous line” (145). This sentence sounds suspiciously old formalist; the other sheltered voices may obey nothing more than “an inner law of form” that is purely poetic. Parts of words and phenomena of prosody “form a ladder to an outside state outside of States. Rungs between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling” (46). Thus the work of an editor is to get past (or before) the words themselves, a task that one might see as dangerously close to the editorial farce featured so prominently in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In her introduction to the second section of The Nonconformist’s Manual, “A Bibliography of the King’s Book or, Eikon Basilike,” she writes:

 

     A bibliography is "the history,
identification or 
          analytical and systematic description or 
          classification of writings or publications 
          considered as material objects."  Can we ever 
          really discover the original text?  Was there ever 
          an original poem?  What is a pure text invented by 
          an author?  Is such a conception possible?  Only 
          by going back to the pre-scriptive level of 
          thought process can "authorial intention" finally 
          be located, and then the material object has 
          become immaterial.  (50)

 

In this long poem, Howe obviates the issue by writing about–and off of–a text whose authenticity is in doubt: “The Eikon Basilike is a puzzle. It may be a collection of meditations written by a ghostly king; it may be a forged collection of meditations gathered by a ghostwriter who was a Presbyterian, a bishop, a plagiarizer, and a forger” (49). In other words, the answers to her seemingly rhetorical questions, above, are all pronounced in the negative. And yet, in a move typical of Howe and characteristic of her risk-taking as a writer, one senses the desire that there BE an original text, an original poem, and that she–as editor and reviser–be permitted access to “authorial intention,” hence the pre-scriptive level of thought, a level that precedes proscription. Her work on Dickinson is full testimony to this desire on her part; as she tells Foster, “That’s what I wanted to do in My Emily Dickinson. . . Not just to write a tribute but to meet her in the tribute. And that’s a kind of fusion.”

 

Howe’s central figures in the new book of poems are not silenced women, as they were in Singularities, but male writers who have been either silenced or marginalized. In her newest essays and poems Howe attempts to rewrite the American renaissance by adapting marginal texts by male writers; Melville’s marginalia form an ironic centerpiece to her book. Melville is celebrated as the author of that most silent of American heroes, Bartleby the scrivener, who was himself something of an editor of texts, if only in his refusal to copy them. That this renovation is at once personal and historical becomes clear in Howe’s autobiographical introduction to the essays, and in the discussion with Foster that forms a kind of postlude to the book. The American renaissance, it seems, was a personal concern of Howe’s family, one of whose friends was F.O. Matthiesson–whose famous book might be retitled, following Howe, as My American Renaissance.

 

Not only is she taking on her literary fathers in her ongoing poetic and editorial project, but also her own father, who was at once her scout and her “encloser.” Her father, who wrote a history of American law entitled The Garden and the Wilderness, “said it would be trespassing” if his daughter Susan entered the stacks of Widener Library (the name of which comes to resemble a Howe pun) at Harvard, where he was a professor. So books became her wilderness; “Thoreau said, in an essay called ‘Walking,’ that in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. What is forbidden is wild. The stacks of Widener Library and of all great libraries in the world are still the wild to me” (18). In becoming what she calls a “library cormorant,” she is at once her father’s imitator and his reviser. The texts that were for him authentic appear to her to be tissued with silences, gaps; Harvard was, in her view, a false community of scholars. “I don’t want to be so hard on it because these were honorable scholars, careful researchers, and this was their profession, and they felt it was a calling. But you see, it was false if you were a girl or a woman who was not content to be considered second-rate” (159). So she becomes her father’s mother, assumes like “Hope,” a formerly masculine role that has been rewritten in the “feminine” mode.

 

The baroque complexities of her literary relationship to her father (and by extension her fathers) are reproduced in “Melville’s Marginalia,” a “poem” probably better described as a combination of criticism and poetry, one that covers almost 70 pages. In this work Howe attempts not just to make Melville more central to her project, by making him less central to the American Renaissance as it was understood by F.O. Matthiesson; she also juxtaposes the Melville material with a chronology of the life of the Irish writer James Clarence Mangan, only to reach a rather forced conclusion that Mangan was the source for Bartleby.

 

Howe furthermore investigates Melville’s attitude toward women as shown through his marginalia, and its erasures. Her method resembles that found in her long work of criticism and poetry, My Emily Dickinson, where she argues by juxtaposing texts. This mode of argument, like her mode of writing poetry, trusts the reader to do the work of narrating connections; it also suggests as yet untapped links between American and British literature. (Howe’s sections on Bronte’s and George Eliot’s influences on Dickinson are especially fine.) Both the arguments and the ways of working them out strike me as less necessary and hence less effective in the work on Melville. Howe’s passion for Melville and for Mangan are less evident than her passion for Dickinson, perhaps because they seem so much more purely academic, despite the personal investment we learn about in her interview. And, where Howe carried her work on Dickinson over into her book Singularities, which is almost a work of poetic ventriloquism (Dickinson writing through Howe), her work on Melville has more the aura of exercise than passion. She writes of Melville without writing as Melville, in other words.

 

Howe writes of her purpose and her method: “Names who are strangers out of bounds of the bound margin: I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trails he follows through words of others” (92). This she does, using Melville’s margins as she used Dickinson’s alternate words as a site for her own work. She may hope, with this new foray into American literature, to achieve the “genderlessness” that is at once a promise and a problem in her work. But if that is, indeed, what she does, she does it better in writing from a gendered perspective such as Dickinson’s. Gender, like place, is for Howe a strength; as she tells Foster: “Trust the place to form the voice,” as she remarks on the fact that the differences between Dickinson and Melville may spring from their origins on opposite sides of the Connecticut River. In this instance, she has not trusted the gender (as a placeless place) to form the voice. She has tried too hard to achieve the “transcendence” that is the problematic aim of her work; as a result, “Melville’s Marginalia” is a better example of Howe’s technique than of her vision.

 

The strongest poem in the book, and the one that argues most passionately for the kind of poetry Howe writes, is “The Nonconformist’s Memorial,” part Biblical rewrite, part examination of the relationship between typology and typography, and partial autobiography. Here Howe takes on “The Gospel According to St. John,” arguing against its narrative cohesion and all that that means ideologically; hence the following quotation, which obliges the reader to perform manual labor:

 

       As if all history were a progress 

          She was coming to anoint him [this is written 
               upside-down] 

                         A single thread of narrative 

          headstrong anarchy thoughts [again upside-down] 

            Actual world nothing ideal 

            In Peter she is nameless [upside-down] 

          The nets were not torn 

          The Gospel did not grasp    (7)

 

Thus is the feminine rendered upside-down–as the threatening “headstrong anarchy thoughts”–as if to counter the “single” and coherent “thread of narrative” found in the Gospels. The poetic net is torn here, but the ensuing chaos is not an evil but a good, in the sense that informational entropy is good. That is, the woman’s voice, upside-down as it is, does appear, and shows up (quite literally) the masculine voice, for all its typographical certainty about itself. Woman is figured as an impasse to narrative, but this impasse does not create incoherence so much as re-coherence. Many of Howe’s most interesting pages mimic chaos, while achieving a rigorous coherence of their own. I do not entirely believe her assertion that “If it [The Bibliography of the King’s Book] was impossible to print, that didn’t matter. Because it’s about impossibility anyway. About the impossibility of putting in print what the mind really sees and the impossibility of finding the original in a bibliography” (175). A page like this one–hardly her most radical in this vein–forces an old impossibility, that of woman’s speech, into possibility. That she pushes her reading of this impossibility into metaphysics is, as I’ve been indicating, typical of her ambition. It may also undermine her historical claims by reinvesting the poem and the poet in an old metaphysics, one that keeps everyone–but especially women–silent. While I can envision a new history, as I read Howe, I cannot so easily see a new transcendence.

 

But metaphysics or not, Howe incorporates the Puritan background that is her historical strength into the poem. As an example of the way she combines history and textuality, consider the following lines:

 

     The act of Uniformity 
          ejected her 
          and informers at her heels 
          Citations remain abbreviated 
          Often a shortcut 
          stands for Chapter.

 

The Act of Uniformity, which forced “nonconformists” to leave England for America, was passed by the Church of England in 1662. In a manner reminiscent of Language poetry, Howe writes as if the act itself is actor, not those who wrote it. But her puns are nothing if not controlled, and hence unlike the spontaneous, manic puns of Charles Bernstein, for example. She plays on the double-meanings of “citation” and “chapter,” words that refer not simply to books, but also to legal and religious matters. (What appears in books, in other words, becomes our way of thinking, our syntax.) Thus politics and language are fused, and the nonconformist must choose exile not only in fact, but also in print–hence Howe’s nonconformist setting of type so that the visual shape of the page is as important as the words’ meaning. The lines, “Often a shortcut / stands for Chapter,” provide a micropoetics to Howe’s work, in which she provides the shortcut, the reader Chapter–and verse.

 

Works Cited

 

• Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985.
• —. Singularities. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

 

Lance Olsen

English Department
University of Idaho
olsen@idui1.csrv.uidaho.edu

 

Gibson, William. Virtual Light. New York: Bantam, 1993.

 

I. Cyberpunk 101, or: The Luminous Flesh of Giants

 

Until now, and for no particular reason, PMC hasn’t reviewed a novel. And it seems appropriate that the first novel to be reviewed in these electronic pages should be one by none other than the godfather of cyberpunk, William Gibson. A cultural impulse birthed in the mid-eighties, and disowned as a concerted movement by its creators fewer than four years later, cyberpunk is still very much a cultural phenomenon–as a quick skim through the hallucinatory and info-dense pages of the Berkeley-based magazine Mondo 2000, or its how-to book, A User’s Guide to the New Edge (1992), will tell you. The very name cyberpunk fuses and confuses the techno-sphere of cybernetics, cybernauts, and, most of all, computer hacking, with the countercultural socio-sphere of punk, the embodiment of anarchic violence, fringe mentality, and a sincere (even naive) attempt to return to the raw roots of rock n’roll. Cyberpunk was, and is, in some very spooky and some very exhilarating ways, a whole heck of a lot more than merely a short-lived trend, some simulacrous eighties echo of Poundian Imagism or Boccionian Futurism.

 

For a whole bunch of people it’s a way of life–a phenomenon that far exceeds the discourse of its shrill self-proclaimed mouthpiece, Bruce Sterling (whose cyberpunk manifesto appeared in his 1986 cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades), as well as that of Marc Laidlaw, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, K. W. Jeter, Lewis Shiner, and the other writers originally associated with the term.

 

Just modem into a couple of underground bulletin boards around the country–The Temple of the Screaming Electron (510-935-5845) with Jeff Hunter’s BBS Review, a comprehensive listing of international fringe BBS’s; or maybe Private Idaho (208-338-9227) with its deep-seated information-wants-to-be-free message; or perhaps Burn This Flag (408-363-9766) with its cybersex scenarios involving, I kid you not, everything from nose fetishes to water sports–and you will find a lot of people who want, like Andy Warhol, to be a machine. The plethora of electronic subcultures, each with its own codes, languages, and styles, can make you feel old at twenty-five, already past the point of ever being able to keep up with it all.

 

Little cults embrace Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, with its speedy surreal images, thickly textured information, and techno-sleaze ambiance. Sonic Youth dedicates a song called “The Sprawl” to Gibson on the 1988 album, Daydream Nation. Kathy Acker openly pla(y)giarizes whole parts of her 1988 novel, Empire of the Senseless, from Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer. A cover story in Time (February 8, 1993, there goes the neighborhood) focusing on the cyberpunk moment is laid out like a series of pages from, what else, Mondo 2000. Billy Idol’s really bad 1993 album Cyberpunk comes replete with its video about the LA riots, “Shock to the System,” featuring a Terminator-esque Idol transmogrifying into a cyborg with a TV camera protruding from his eye-socket. Scott Bukatman’s fascinating Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, out just months ago from prestigious Duke University Press, nips hot at the heels of the excellent 1991 Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery and containing pieces by everyone from J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs to Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida.

 

Idol’s, Bukatman’s, and McCaffery’s projects of course also suggest that appropriation and commodification– academic and otherwise–have set in. So what else is new? But in many ways, William Gibson continues to stand at the center of this cultural firestorm as the guy whose seminal Matrix Trilogy–composed of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1990), and foreshadowed by some of the stories collected in Burning Chrome (1986)–explored, among other things, computer-generated reality, information as the new power base, and a grungy near-future universe that looked way too much like our own present one for comfort. In these works Gibson did nothing less than help shape the way a large part of the population perceives the world. We now unselfconsciously use the words and concepts he gave us (cyberspace, jacking in, computer cowboys) almost as though they’d had no flesh-and-blood origin.

 

II. A Piece of God Resides in Every Old Movie

 

Gibson, meanwhile, has been forging ahead. His last work, Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992), was a $2000 sweet autobiographical prose poem on a disk created in collaboration with the abstract expressionist painter Dennis Ashbaugh, which was designed to self-destruct after a single reading. Virtual Light is more conventionally packaged. Nevertheless, it bears Gibson’s unmistakable signature.

 

Much conventional science fiction is set in the distant future, peopled with aliens, and enacted on a galactic and heroic scale. Gibson’s SF, on the other hand, extrapolates an all-too-real near-future world set increasingly close to ours (Virtual Light takes place in 2005, more than fifty years before the events in his first three novels), peopled with those at the margins of society, and enacted on a (usually) global and (always) antiheroic scale. “It’s kind of a tragic artifact of science fiction that some people are naive enough to think that science fiction writers are predicting the future,” Gibson recently told the San Francisco Bay Guardian (18 August, 1993). Fredric Jameson put it more academically when he pointed out in his interview for Andrew Ross’s collection Universal Abandon? that SF achieves “a distinctive historical consciousness by way of the future rather than the past” and thus becomes “conscious of our present as the past of some unexpected future, rather than as the future of a heroic national past.” The plain point: SF isn’t about the future; it’s about the present. In SF, tomorrow is a metaphor for today.

 

In Virtual Light the future-present has lost the mystical aspects of cyberspace which dominated Gibson’s earlier trilogy. In its place appears a universe almost completely rooted in the meat world. The effect doesn’t challenge our imagination so much as our sense of political realities, particularly West Coast political realities. Set in a dingy California divided into two states, NoCal and SoCal, Gibson’s novel explores a narrative space in which the manufacture of cigarettes has been declared illegal throughout the US, and the Surgeon General is trying to outlaw convertibles because their use contributes to the high incidence of skin-cancer. An African-American woman is president, there’s massive inflation, and a privatized law-enforcement company cruises LA in tanks designed by Ralph Lauren. Countries like Canada and Brazil have exploded into nation-states, and TV is everywhere, even at the center of a Christian fundamentalist sect whose followers believe that a piece of God resides in every old movie.

 

It’s a radically dystopian vision–or at least it might seem that way to you if, as Gibson underscores in that Guardian interview, “you are a very comfortable middle-class citizen.” Otherwise, it goes without saying, things actually look pretty good in his world. After all, “there’s stuff happening to people, lots of people, right now, all over the planet, that’s incredibly worse and so much more depressing than anything I’ve ever written about.” At least through one optic, then, Virtual Light, a book of profound contradictions if ever there was one, can be read as an optimistic novel. Two key metaphors reinforce this. First is a San Francisco bike-messenger service, one of whose employees, Chevette Washington, steals a pair of virtual light glasses (which produce images in the brain by stimulating your optic nerves without employing photons) from a gross guy at a party on a pissed-off whim. Second is the Oakland Bay Bridge, abandoned by the city after a megalithic earthquake, slowly taken over by the homeless, and currently the topic of research by a young Japanese scholar named Yamasaki, who’s attempting to use the bridge to understand American culture.

 

Through the course of the novel, the bikes and the bridge become important pomo icons. Gibson’s use of the former nods in a gesture of appreciation and appropriation toward the major means of transportation in his friend Lewis Shiner’s excellent 1991 novel, Slam, about the anarchistic world of skateboarding, underground economies, and computer networks. The bikes, like Shiner’s skateboards, are emblematic of environmentally conscious no-fuel freedom, intense energy, exhilarating speed, and sexy fashion. They are the embodiment of the techno-hip, an attitude to which almost all the amoral characters in Gibson’s text subscribe. Skirting society’s periphery, they are out for themselves in a posthuman cosmos that has moved beyond a sense of compassion–or even hope. What counts to these people is the next hit of money or designer drugs, or the next ingot of information.

 

The patchwork dwellings on the brilliantly described broken bridge, from bars to tattoo parlors, sushi shops to rag-tag shelters, inhabited by those living on the edges of our culture, indicate something a little different. They “had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, [the bridge] possessed a queer medieval energy.” Or, elsewhere: the dwellings “had just grown, it looked like, one thing patched into the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and no two pieces of it matched. There was a different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been used for.”

 

The streets find uses for things, Gibson’s narrator notes in Neuromancer, and the result in Virtual Light is an urban crazy-quilt, an emblem of contemporary America. The bridge is also an icon appropriate to the particular novelistic practice of Virtual Light. As in Count Zero, the novel’s chapters are mostly no more than five or ten pages long and, also like those in Count Zero, they form a structure of intersecting plots that moves inexorably toward a jazzy unifying climax. Both bridge and text, then, are examples of Termite Art, a term Gibson lifted from a 1962 essay (“White Elephant Art and Termite Art” in Negative Space) by the iconoclastic film critic Manny Farber. If White Elephant Art embraces the idea of a “well-regulated area, both logical and magical,” as in the films of Francois Truffaut, Farber argues, then Termite Art embraces freedom and multiplicity, as in the films of Laurel and Hardy, going “always forward eating [its] own boundaries, and, likely as not, leav[ing] nothing in [its] path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Rubin, the artist-protagonist of Gibson’s 1986 short story “The Wintermarket,” describes himself as a gomi no sensei, Japanese for a “master of junk.” The same is true of Gibson himself. A literary bricoleur, more techno-hickster than techno-hipster (not even on e-mail, he’s the first to admit just how little he really knows about the computers and other glitzy gadgets that surface in his texts), he shops for his ideas among the aisles of the late-twentieth-century cultural hypermart.

 

Maybe the most surprising result of his latest shopping spree is the often matte-black humor that continually emerges. It’s the antithesis of the bleak flat tone of the books that comprise the Matrix Trilogy. If Neuromancer has all the comic hoopla of the dark prophet himself administering late rites to late capitalist culture, then Virtual Light, virtually light, frequently evinces the bright cartoonish mischief of Pynchon. Characters sport handles like Lucius Warbaby. A surveillance and command satellite is fondly nicknamed the Death Star by those it watches over. A wind-surfing boutique is called, dead-pan, Just Blow Me. There’s a pscyho-killer with the Last Supper tattooed on his chest, a guy who believes TV is the “Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush,” and a woman who’s in San Francisco to get her husband’s cryogenically frozen brain removed from a tank with a whole bunch of others so it doesn’t have to feel so crowded in the afterlife, such as it is. The complex and deeply spiritual exploration of cyberspace that pervaded the Matrix Trilogy here gives way to very funny, if perhaps too easy, parody.

 

III. Miracle Mile, or: It Could be Anybody

 

The presence of such parody flags the essential narrative problem Gibson, now forty-five and a pomo icon himself, has had to wrestle with since the publication of Neuromancer almost a decade ago. Is it possible to keep the news new, the action vigorous and mind-bogglingly hot without skidding off the novel novelistic road into the ditch of self-replication, the slough of self-parody? In part the answer is surely yes, and the way Gibson goes about it is by dosing his text with a powerful hit of comic vision that seems to take nothing (including itself) very seriously. The fresh infusion of humor into his writing takes down the seriousness of his own textuality and grim futurist ideas before someone else has a chance to, destabilizes them in a flourish typical of Termite Art.

 

But in part the answer is also no. Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson’s last solo effort, is set in the Hollywoodish world of Sense/Net. It focuses on the manipulation of young stars by various financial concerns and is shot through with the theme of commercial sellout. Clearly when writing it Gibson was simultaneously beguiled by the glamour and goods associated with that dimension, and bent on satirizing its commodifying impulse. The consequence was a Janus-text that looks to accessibility and tameness on the one hand (its conclusion involves an idyllic after-death marriage of its protagonists in a kind of futuristic restaging of Wuthering Heights), and toward disruptive innovation on the other (the scene can be read as a sharp self-reflexive parody of traditional happy endings). It was a move that prompted Paul Kincaid, in his review of the novel for TLS (12 August 1988), to glance back nostalgically to Neuromancer and observe that “Gibson wrote one book of stunning originality which caught the mood of the time so successfully that he has been condemned to repeat it. By this third volume he is showing clear and dramatic improvement as a writer, but is doing nothing fresh with his talent.”

 

Something along the same lines could be argued with respect to Virtual Light. For all its flash and burn, there’s nothing particularly trailblazing about it. Chevette Washington, the bike-messenger who stole the VL glasses (which provide only a pale simulacra of the cyberspace we find in the trilogy) from a guy who turns out to be a gopher for, what else, a major corporation with some fairly depressing plans for San Francisco’s skyline, as in rebuilding it from the ground up, thereby, in a tactic that’s the antithesis of what the bridge suggests, dispossessing the already dispossessed. Throw in one Berry Rydell, a good-cop-gone-(accidentally)-bad, attach him to Chevette, and you have a variation of the Molly-Case team from Neuromancer, the Angie-Turner one from Count Zero, and the Angie-Bobby one from Mona Lisa Overdrive. They are all edge-dwellers of one kind or another, all caught in the complex workings of megacorporations uninterested in the human or humane, and all situated in a hard-boiled slightly stereotypical naturalist narrative universe, a universe at least as indebted to Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as to Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange–despite its being stacked with really rad techno-weapons, grubby urban landscapes, delightfully grotesque characters, and ultra-hip fashion statements. The break-in plot of Neuromancer devolves into a backwards break-in, or familiar heist plot. The scope shrinks from global to local. The computer shrinks from gateway to surreality into subversive instrument. And the structure tightens (many reviewers, you can bet, will tell you it “matures”), becoming more conventional and more predictable. The happy ending provides a literal deus ex machina to tidy up the loose narrative threads.

 

And yet things aren’t as easy as that, either. After all, most people don’t read Gibson for plot. Most read him for those great gadgets (nanotech birth-control devices, fetal tissue injections that build muscle and make workouts obsolete), which shock you into reconceptualizing your present and reevaluating your future; for those hip fashion statements (Chevette’s bike is a piece of assemblage art), which, like MTV logos, are just pure plain guilty pleasure to view; and for his holographically detailed sentences, frequently more poetry than prose, with more information packed into each one of them than into whole chapters by less energetic writers: “The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic,” Virtual Light launches. “He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod. Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb: seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed.” No one does action like Gibson. The pace of his sentences, his sheer speed of inventiveness, are astonishing. And finally, of course, we read Gibson for his engaged imagination, his breadth and intensity of vision, his ability to shift us onto and across a terrain of crucial cultural issues that most other contemporary fiction (and even some cyberpunk fiction) just doesn’t care about, let alone explore. Gibson’s vision takes in everything from the anarchist hacker underground networks to the rise of religious fundamentalism, from cryogenics to surveillance satellites, from genetic engineering to nanotechnology, from multinational control of information to techno-angst, from the Japanization of Western culture to the decentralization of governments around the world. This is what keeps us coming back to Gibson’s books, and this is why he remains one of the most significant and influential writers on the fin-de- millennium scene.

 

Linda Ray Pratt

Department of English
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
lpratt@unlinfo.unl.edu

 

McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

 
John McGowan’s “postliberal democracy” sometimes sounds just like the place we’d like to be, and sometimes more like the place we’ve already been. To get there, we must dispose of the negative freedom he assigns to most of the major postmodern theorists and abandon the fantasy of the autonomous self. McGowan’s starting point is that postmodernism’s goal of disrupting hierarchical totality by empowering suppressed components circles back politically to “an underlying commitment to democracy.” Our political and moral task is to construct a society in which a social consensus protects the egalitarian procedures through which a tolerant, humanist society can make decisions in the absence of truth. The problem for McGowan is that most contemporary theorists are unable to legitimate the social authority necessary to make democracy work or to use power positively.

 

Describing his critique as “resolutely antifoundationalist,” McGowan also notes that his definition of postmodernism will not satisfy all readers. Later in the book he observes, rightly I suspect, that for disciples of Lyotard, “my discussion of postmodernism . . . will seem to have missed all the important points . . .” (181). McGowan does not miss the important points, but he redefines them into a positive postmodernism that may sound too much like a defense of Western liberal democratic values for many readers to be comfortable labeling it “postmodern.” With keen intelligence and unrelenting logic McGowan tells us what’s wrong with the postmodernism of three major schools: the poststructuralism of Derrida and Foucault; the contemporary Marxism of Jameson, Eagleton, and Said; and the neopragmatism of Lyotard and Rorty. But the most influential figure in the book is not under examination. That is Jurgen Habermas, to whom McGowan acknowledges his debt while distinguishing his own greater willingness to weave key postmodernist characteristics into the model for a postliberal democracy which he proposes at the end of his study.

 

In order to legitimate a postliberal model that can produce democratic political decisions in a non-repressive consensual society without the guarantees of truth, McGowan must expose the trap of “negative freedom” that most postmodernist thought replicates. Most postmodern theorists allow too little freedom to choose and too little consciousness to define a positive social self. Their emphasis on the ways power operates within the Cerberean forces of language/history/capitalism provides too little “play” in the space allowed for thinking and acting. For the postmodernist, the community is associated with tyranny, not freedom, and the postmodernist strategy is to disrupt and diminish power, not legitimate its use as a positive force. McGowan argues that this kind of postmodernist thinking leaves us no foundation for political action because it makes the self incommensurable and autonomous in its social relations. For him the immersion of the self in the social is how we realize its integral social and thus “semiautonomous” nature.

 

McGowan’s postmodernism embraces antifoundationalism and pluralistic democracy, but rejects in the critics under discussion the tragic sense of human life, the tyranny implicit in power, the limited space in which self or language can freely act, and the problematic nature of democracy itself within Western capitalism. One wonders if the postmodern baby has not been tossed out with the bath water. Instead of a positive postmodernism, are we not left instead with a refurbished modernism? Regardless of which label is more accurate, the real issue is the substance of the alternative model McGowan poses for a positive postmodernism.

 

McGowan’s social vision is attractive, and it is hard to counter it with a political stance as hopeful or potentially effectual. The list of principles which constitutes his “summary and a final appeal” is as sound a set of assumptions as we are likely to find in anything resembling a rationale for the feasibility of social action. He notes, among other things, that “the principle of democratic egalitarianism” is culturally and historically specific, which means that civil liberties are an historical creation and not a transcendent right, but that the social consensus in Western democracies “has proved remarkably durable in the absence of fundamental guarantees” (264). The “existence of a social consensus by no means ends social conflicts” (265); on the contrary, agreement on the legitimate social norms “is precisely what makes conflict possible [i.e., comprehensible as conflict]” (266). The “procedures of decision making that currently embody the community’s sense of how best to ensure its norms” provide the “consensual grounds,” the “conditions” which “enable politics, which is understood as the negotiations, compromises, arguments, and procedural steps taken to reach and to implement collective decisions” (267). Such collective decisions, in which philosophy is submitted to the political through democratic procedures, “return us to positive power” which can combat the tyrannical exercise of power or the domination of decision making by elite groups (269). Reform of procedures within the norms safeguards a society from violence, and “freedom from violence” secures “the freedom of participation” (270). In a participatory democracy, politics calls on “the various semiautonomous spheres” to foster the “normative goods” of the social totality in which the self has its integral relation (271).

 

In this “appeal” to accept a more positive social model in the name of postmodernism, McGowan has submitted postmodern theory to political practice. Or rather, to theoretical political practice. What is lacking is a history of political practice whose record would inspire the confidence that McGowan’s model can be trusted to work better than other hopeful visions of democracy. “Postmodernism” itself is borne out of the tragic skepticism that replaced the failed optimism of Modernism. The history of practice which embodied twentieth century political ideas–whether utopian or despotic–teaches postmodernism its distrust of the claims of power and idealistic possibility. Although I am moved by McGowan’s vision, I find myself reaching out to Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Said, and Rorty on just those points which McGowan wants to dispose of in their thought.

 

Like Nietzsche’s, Derrida’s thought is “marked everywhere by the tragic revelation of irresolvable contradictions” (91) and his belief that language is too embedded in a repressive Western metaphysics to affirm differences. Derrida’s “perpetual uneasiness” with political action and theory leaves in doubt whether differance offers anything better than the violence or oppression of the existing hierarchies. Given his “proclivity for tragic impasse” (113), Derrida can only anchor his ethics and his politics in some “mystical” hope; his theory can only register “a protest against a certain order without being abe to effect the transformation of that order” (119).

 

From McGowan’s perspective, Foucault’s limitation for a postmodern politics lies in his preoccupation with power as the dominant social bond and his anarchistic tendency to locate freedom in resistance. Edward Said seeks “a community of tolerance and interdependence” (172), but his insistence on keeping his distance opens him to “a residual and foundational individualism” (174) that can be a form of complicity. In short, McGowan’s dismissive “point” is “that the half-baked anarchism of the literary left is necessarily accompanied by a version of individualism that is . . . theoretically unsound and politically counterproductive” (176-77).

 

The neopragmatists generally fare worse under McGowan’s critical eye than the deconstructionists and Marxists. McGowan finds Lyotard’s rejection of “any generalizing explanation or purpose (telos) to which local action must be answerable . . . a conclusion . . . scandalous to most humanistic intellectuals . . .” (183). Lyotard’s concept of language games, his rejection of metanarratives, and his valorizing of conflict in the differend are irresolvably hostile to dialectical syntheses and any potential discourse of a holistic society. Rorty is praised for acknowledging the question of ethics, but his division of self and actions into public and private spheres leads back to the social dead-end of the autonomous individual.

 

One need not even quarrel with McGowan’s critique that postmodernism’s “inability” to endorse a positive model of society is its chief failing to be uncomfortable with the use he makes of it as prelude to his own proposed alternative. Indeed, it is just at the moment I accept his vision of how a consensual democratic procedure may legitimate authority so that power becomes a positive force that I want to recapture its negatives: the sense of tragedy and the limits of play in Derrida; the resistance to power in Foucault; the distrust of the metanarratives and the use of word games in Lyotard; and “the gentle virtue of tolerance needed to keep the conversation going” (200) espoused in Rorty. “Consensus,” “totality,” “positive power” and “normative goods” ring little alarm bells for those whom history has taught to be skeptical of political discourse. These words arrive bearing covert genealogies that need deconstructing, the specifics of which should unsettle and disrupt the ease with which we use them.

 

McGowan is no naive optimist, but his discussion of power and democracy is insufficiently problematized. He illustrates the nature of a semiautonomous self which negotiates relations between its different social spheres with the hypothetical case of the American Catholic who participates in other economic, political, and cultural domains. His point is that relations between beliefs and activities in other spheres must be, and therefore can be, we must assume, negotiated at every turn. Negotiation as procedure does not guarantee accommodation, however, and authority confident of its legitimation is less inclined to negotiate than to exercise power. The American Catholic who wants to “negotiate” between her political self and her religious self may find her church unwilling to recognize her right to do so on grounds outside the absolutes of doctrine or even local interpreters of it. Like “negotiation,” “consensus” implies the negative that is not unanimity. Political consensus may properly refuse to negotiate with its fringes. It may be used to mask or repress dissent, just as tolerance may be used to contain rather than to embrace the other. McGowan observes that non-acknowledgement is power’s best threat, but he underestimates the extent to which democracy’s processes of negotiation and consensus are themselves complicit in the exercise of negative power.

 

McGowan too readily accepts that Western democracy is basically a pluralistic tradition with great social durability. Is that Greek democracy he means? Jeffersonian democracy? Jacksonian? Paine’s or Marat’s? Clinton’s? Was it in place during Reconstruction? The Gilded Age, or World War I? All of these times embody some form of Western democracy. They are not all bad dreams with nothing to teach us; indeed, what they teach is that models are specific to history where they, too, are subject to corruption, to limits, to tragic error, to excesses of violence, to irrationality and mysticism, to rigidities and laxities of procedures for decision making. To say so is not to countenance the irresponsible withdrawal from these flawed systems or to deny that they are the ground on which the creation of an ethical society must nevertheless take place. My discomfort is that McGowan tacitly gives them more performative potential than most postmodern critics can readily accept, including those of us who lean in his direction.

 

If not McGowan’s model, then what? Can one not balance the “cheerful acceptance” of Habermasian possibilities with the resistance to power of Foucault or the cautionary sense of the tragic in Derrida? Perhaps McGowan would answer that such a balancing act results in the violent frustration of impasse, or the disabling confusion of hopeless contradictions, or the irrational resorting to a mystical hope for the social good. Perhaps sometimes he would be right, but postmodernism and its critics level the playing field of history on which the best of players on both sides have already made so many fatal errors. Even on this democratic “site of possible political action” (280), postmodern citizens may need just those characteristics that McGowan thinks are in our way.

Lynda Goldstein

Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
lrg4@psuvm.psu.edu

 

Abelove, Henry, Michele Anna Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993.

 

Gever, Martha, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar, eds. Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. New York: Routledge, 1993.

 

As the newest kid on the interdisciplinary block looking for legitimation (with not a little attitude), Lesbian/Gay or Queer Studies (depending upon one’s political affiliations) poses a number of obvious challenges to academia and publishers. One of these, of course, has to do with the strategic, if not essential, reliance of lesbian and gay studies on a particular kind of identity politics that parallels the institutional maneuvering of other “minority studies” programs. Indeed, lesbian and gay studies can be charted along much the same trajectory as Women’s, African-American, Asian-American or Latino/a Ethnic Studies, all of which were institutionalized (however tenuously in these times of “down-sizing” colleges) at historically specific moments at the conjuncture of their respective (and overlapping) political activism, cultural production, and scholarship. Indeed, lesbian/gay studies shares more with these other emergent subdisciplines than a certain path toward discursive legitimation within the academy (though this is not to suggest that the struggles of every field of study have all been identical). It also often shares theoretical frameworks, and even some specific objects of study. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, has been a recurring area of focus, as queer studies has sought to rethink cultural history in terms of the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, and race.

 

Begun as an inclusion of queer contributions to history here, a special topics course on lesbian and gay “coming out” literature there, and a rigorous theoretical interrogation of sexuality as a constitutive category of subject formation elsewhere, queer studies has reached critical mass in the “gay nineties.” This is evident in the increasing number of gay and lesbian studies undergraduate programs in and across the various humanistic disciplines; the special collections at university and large public libraries from coast to coast; and the critical/theoretical work on the cultural inscriptions of sexuality, much of which would be far more difficult to assemble without the explosive production of identifiably, often “in your face,” queer culture, most especially in literature/comics, theater/performance, music, the visual arts, film/video, and popular style/fashion. My emphasis here on popular cultural productions should not indicate that queer studies traffics exclusively in the popular (though the intersection of queer and popular is an intriguing one), as any study of homoclassics or anthrodrag surely indicates.

 

Perhaps nothing suggests the critical materiality of lesbian and gay studies more substantially than the queer line of critical and theoretical work coordinated by Routledge, cagey publisher to the stars of queer theory. Indeed, as hefty as Routledge’s two anthologies delineating the field of Cultural Studies, and with much the same cutting-edge rationale guiding its journey through the contestatory fields of academic discourse, the compendium anthology, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, establishes itself as an indispensable introduction to the field, at least as it is determined within the (inter)disciplinary boundaries of the arts and humanities. Published just two years after Inside/Out (a collection of essays theorizing lesbian and gay sexual politics and culture edited by Diana Fuss and published by Routledge in 1991), How Do I Look? (the conference proceedings from “How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video” organized and edited by Bad Object Choices) and the “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” issue of the journal differences (edited by Teresa de Lauretis), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader collects forty-two contemporary essays from a variety of disciplines, many of them no doubt known to readers from their previously published incarnations in journals. I mention the earlier collections because they were all distinguished by a theoretical approach that might be broadly defined as that of “cultural studies,” an approach that The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader has not merely adopted but sought to extend by encompassing an even wider range of disciplines and sites of investigation.

 

Indeed, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader is in many ways a continuation of the work begun by Inside/Out. In her introduction, editor Diana Fuss asks, “how can we work [the hetero/homo opposition] to the point of critical exhaustion, and what effects–material, political, social –can such a sustained effort to erode and to reorganize the conceptual grounds of identity be expected to have on our sexual practices and politics?” (1). Certainly one might argue that The Reader represents one effect of working the binary opposition of sexuality, if not to exhaustion, then to a fatigue productive of a visibility of gay and lesbian sexualities. That is, it embodies an attempt to “reorganize” sexuality studies from an oppositional stance that comes dangerously close to solidifying the epistemology of polarity. For those who believe that Gay and Lesbian Studies may only exist, however visibly, in contestation with the (supposedly hetero) core curricula, The Reader proposes a more troubling and independent existence while acknowledging its relational positioning. If as Fuss writes, “any outside is formulated as a consequence of a lack internal to the system it supplements” (3), then we might suppose that the outside status of lesbian and gay studies has everything to do with the constitutive lack of sexuality studies within the academy. In bringing queer studies in from the cold outside, does The Reader make it all too easy for interrogations of sexuality to operate as a “queer thing”? Moreover, in its bid to legitimate an emergent field does it do so at the expense of the political leverage discursive marginalization can accord? These are most difficult negotiations, as both Fuss and the editors of The Reader acknowledge, though Abelove, Barale, and Halperin more decisively throw their lot in with legitimation. It is their intention, after all, that this collection serve as a primary textbook for courses in Gay/Lesbian Studies 101.

 

The volume’s usefulness in the classroom is admirably indicated by its categorical grouping of contents, its Users’ Guide, its alternative organization by disciplines, its essay header notes establishing the authority of the essayist and summarizing the essay’s arguments, and its briefly annotated but extensive bibliography. What all of these together provide is a map with which to navigate the territory of gay and lesbian studies, not only for the undergraduate (though some of these essays may be too difficult for students who are not already conversant with the theoretical debates that animate recent battles over humanities curricula) but for the instructor as well, who may have a thorough knowledge of queer studies in her own field but a lesser acquaintance with work in related disciplines. Fortunately, The Reader collects essays that are theoretically and literally conversant, if not always in agreement, making for a coherent and provocative approach to delineating lesbian and gay studies as a discipline of knowledge. Further, in its organizational structure along lines of thematic interest (for instance, “Politics and Representation” and “The Evidence of Experience”), The Reader suggests the extent to which queer theorists are, indeed, reorganizing the ontological grounds of sexual identity within historically specific cultural contexts. (The editors of The Reader, by the way, choose “lesbian and gay” over “queer” for reasons of institutional efficacy given some already established programs. While suggesting “lesbian and gay” retains a queer reverberation, signalled by The Reader’s inclusion of activist concerns and transgendering phenomena, it is not one that includes bisexuality. This omission poses rather interesting questions to be left for a review of the several recently published anthologies on bisexuality.)

 

Just what does one find in The Reader? Gayle Rubin’s still extraordinary (and revised) “Thinking Sex” initiates the volume, deftly moving feminist theory in the direction of queer theory, an expansive move that others, such as Barbara Smith in her feminist and African-Americanist grounded essay, “Homophobia: Why Bring It Up?,” similarly make in this first section on “Politics and Representation.” In part, essays such as Rubin’s and Smith’s address the limitations of theory that is singularly invested in an identity politics; they pose a kind of coalition politics of theory which would (re)present the problematics of representation of our selves (however that might be defined) within politicized and intersecting cultural fields. For Rubin, this means, in part, tracing the history of “sex panic[s]” in Anglo-American culture since the nineteenth century, a history that reveals moments of repressive police action against populations designated “deviant” or “obscene” within a hierarchized system of sexuality and sexual practices, especially around sado-masochistic images and pedophilia. To fully comprehend how these practices are policed by the state, Rubin argues “that it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to reflect more accurately their separate social existence” (33). Such a move is not to be confused with separating feminism (whose primary concern is gender) from queer theory, however; each has much to contribute to the other. It does mean being very careful not to collapse terms so that differences of social life, and their attendant politicization, are elided. It also operates as a cautionary tale to assimilationist lesbians and gays whose “we’re just like you” liberal politics demonizes non-vanilla (in both the erotic and racial senses) sexual practices.

 

Such a warning is also evident in Smith’s short essay, in which she explicitly works against the hierarchizing of oppression all too evident among some activists and theorists who are willing to further their own political or pedagogical agenda by sacrificing the queers to the oppressive actions of our culture. “What happened at Blues [a police raid against a working-class bar for gays and lesbians of color] perfectly illustrates the ways in which the major ‘isms’ including homophobia are intimately and violently intertwined” (100). What Smith’s and Rubin’s essays both demonstrate in their very different ways are the inextricability of theory and praxis, the necessity to carefully analyze the multitudinous forms of social and cultural oppression, and the responsibility of all activists and theorists (not that these are so easily separated) to work at the intersections and along the fluid boundaries of identity categories. These are concerns shared by a number of essays included in this anthology: Kobena Mercer’s investigation of race, sexuality, and eroticism in Mapplethorpe’s work (a site also privileged by Richard Meyer’s “Mapplethorpe/ The Discipline of Photography”), Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s reading of Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, and Deborah McDowell’s uncovering of Nella Larsen’s lesbian passing masquerading as racial passing under the burden of the morally upright Harlem Renaissance. And Phillip Brian Harper’s wonderfully rich analysis of the place of eloquence in African-American discourse–of the tensions between speech and silence, hetero and homosexualities, Black Nationalism and assimilation–in the face of newscaster Max Robinson’s death by AIDS, serves as a model for disentangling the complexities of cultural identity formation.

 

Another major theoretical paradigm threading its way through the collection is initiated by the second essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet.” Like Rubin, Sedgwick looks to the nineteenth century, firmly establishing it as the historical moment for the political and cultural parameters of modern lesbian and gay identity. Here she outlines the contradictory status of the closet, arguing that it “has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout this century” by mapping a double-bound system of secrecy and disclosure onto identity formation such that “the impasse of gender definition must be seen first of all in the creation of a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization, in this case the node at which any gender is discriminated” (59). What concerns Sedgwick is the systemic incoherence of thinking about sexuality and gender in Euro-American culture dating from the late nineteenth century, an incoherence that ought not to be stabilized by queer theorists but continuously and productively interrogated. In large part, this is precisely the project adopted by The Reader: each wrangles with the epistemological incoherences of identity, representation, and social practices, often with brilliant results.

 

For example, Lee Edelman takes up the visibility/ invisibility nexus of gay male sexuality in “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet.” Obviously punning on Sedgwick’s title, as well as on the stage play and film, Tea and Sympathy (a sense of humor also refreshingly evident in Marjorie Garber’s “Spare Parts,” excerpted from her book Vested Interests, in which she examines surgical transsexualism as a privileged site of the constitutional instabilities of gender and sexuality), Edelman considers Walter Jenkins’s arrest in 1964 for undisclosed sexual activity in the men’s washroom of a Washington, DC YMCA as “a signal moment in which to examine the shifting ideological frameworks within which homosexuality could be read in relation to American national identity” (555). The collision of public and private indicated by the police surveillance of this urinal tryst, like the closet/coming out oscillation of Sedgwick’s essay, raises questions about the stability of the homo/hetero binary, especially as the precise sexual act was unobservable from the vantage point of the police. The unresolvable tensions of sexual/gender border patrolling are further investigated by Stuart Hall in “Deviance, Politics, and the Media,” while the visibility/invisibility binary figures in Teresa de Lauretis’ “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” as well as in Sasha Torres’ essay on prime time television and Danae Clark’s “Commodity Lesbianism,” all of which demonstrate that lesbians as social subjects are rigorously situated on the invisibility side of the fence.

 

The Reader‘s reliance on cultural-studies paradigms is most evident in the several essays that foreground cultural/historical specificity, as well as the immediacy of political activism, to combat early lesbian and gay studies tendencies toward universalizing experience. To this end, John D’Emilio argues that lesbian and gay identities are the result of capitalist economies. Anthropologists Alonso and Koreck deconstruct the catch-all term “hispanics” and its debilitating effects upon AIDS education among various Latino/a populations whose sexual practices are not necessarily commensurate with Anglo-determined sexual identities, while Tomas Almaguer maps identity and behavior among Chicano men. Cindy Patton documents the imposition of idealized bourgeois family values onto a demonized “Africa” without borders that is read as having bred a peculiar and distinct strain of AIDS. In one of the few excursions out of the “modern” period of lesbian/gay identity (along with David Halperin’s and John Winkler’s respective work on the constructions of homosexuality in classical Greece and Sappho’s lyric poetry), Charlotte Furth considers the fluidity of gender boundaries in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century China. And Serena Nanda explores the indeterminacy of the Hijira in Hindu mythology and contemporary social practice, while Harriet Whitehead surveys the body of work on the Native American berdache to demonstrate the efficacy of a methodology of comparative cultural analysis, a kind of destablized theoretical crossing that works to carefully maintain differences of specific systems of gender meaning in each culture under investigation.

 

Yet the experiences of populations within specific historical and cultural contexts ought not to be the project of gay and lesbian history, argues Joan Scott, in her rigorously explicated essay, “The Evidence of Experience.” Arguing that experience too often serves as the ontological foundation for identity, politics, and history, Scott recommends that we not focus on “the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but [focus on] the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself” (412), the narratives of knowledge that constitute that which we call experience. Such a shift in focus has repercussions not only for considerations of autobiography (to which all coming-out literature is indebted) as Biddy Martin’s work on lesbian autobiography acknowledges, but for activist politics and production as well, a consideration which is less consistently realized in Queer Looks. Where The Reader works toward a theoretical and thematic coherence while maintaining a queer commitment to analyzing incoherences, Queer Looks works toward incoherence, a queering of the body of knowledge (re)produced by the more academically integrated Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.

 

Less interdisciplinary in its approach, concentrating on lesbian and gay film and video (all of which is “independent” in its production and distribution histories), Queer Looks expands upon the territory mapped by the aforementioned How Do I Look anthology. More playful in its collection of essays, screenplays/stills, and interactive lampshades (the latter a “Take Back the Light: Lesbian Visibility Lampshade” by Donna Evans and Jean Carlomusto which combines the rigor of theory with the pleasure of popular culture and activism in this year of lesbian chic: think of it as Teresa de Lauretis lite), Queer Looks has no aspirations for legitimacy in academe. Rather, its project is to give its intersecting activists, theorists, and film/video makers the space to work out the possibilities of representational practices by, for and about lesbian, gay, and queer subjects. To an academic, this anthology may seem terribly uneven. While many of the essays consider the ways that queerness is inextricably bound to other categories of identity, most notably race (those of Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar, Jackie Goldsby and Kobena Mercer are obvious examples), some of these (Goldsby) and several of the others (e.g. Barbara Hammer’s “The Politics of Abstraction”) rely upon “experience” in ways that Joan Smith warns are not as productive as thinking about how we structure that experience as identity. Yet the strengths of Queer Looks lies less in its rigorous analyses (though there are these, most especially John Greyson’s “Security Blankets”) than in its proliferation of contending viewpoints that provoke thought, agreement, and dissension for the reader. In their often brief formats these 38 contributors generate queer perspectives on work that remains unavailable to most audiences outside large gay/lesbian film festivals.

 

Neither of these collections is exhaustive. Race continues to be a category most often examined in conjunction with queers of color, “lesbians” appear as theoretical specters or social subjects with narrowly defined experiences, pornography is distanced to the AIDS education category, and the work of a Sadie Benning (legit as her Whitney Biennial inclusion has made her) is overlooked for multiple analyses of Isaac Julien’s and Marlon Riggs’s works (fine as they are). What is obvious in both of these collections is the queer bent that cultural studies has so productively taken. Each provides a wealth of analytical material with which to engage the cultural productions of lesbians and gay men, thereby suggesting ways of thinking about other work not specifically approached within these volumes. For any instructor who has faced a colleague’s snide “but there’s no such thing as lesbian and gay studies,” or any budding film maker who just doesn’t see herself in Hollywood, The Reader and Queer Looks respectively and together provide just the kind of coherent critical and activist incoherence that is needed. These anthologies mark the moment when “queer”–both as a productive knowledge of bodies and as a set of (re)productive bodies of knowledge, is at last finding a place of rest and motion in an institution near you.

 

Gayle Wald

Princeton University
gwald@pucc.princeton.edu

 

The Mark Taper Forum Production of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a work-in-progress that is part of the “On the Road: A Search for American Character” series conceived, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by Emily Mann. Set design by Robert Brill. Costume design by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Allen Lee Hughes. Original music by Lucia Hwong.

 

I saw Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman performance “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” on a cool November evening at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey–more than three thousand miles and worlds away from the site of the first multiracial urban uprising in U.S. history. McCarter was home to the East Coast premiere of Smith’s performance, which had played to near-universal critical acclaim at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and which was directed by McCarter’s Artistic Director, Emily Mann. Though the people in the theater that evening had each paid twenty-five dollars to see “Twilight,” I suspect that many of them had long forgotten (if they had ever acknowledged) the social and economic despair that gave rise to what urban theorist Mike Davis has called “the most violent American civil disturbance since the Irish poor burned Manhattan in 1863.” Indeed, by last November, the trial of the L.A. Four for the near-fatal beating of truck driver Reginald Denny–played in many press accounts as a racial counterbalance to the near-fatal beating of Rodney King–had taken center stage in the white public imagination.

 

When Smith’s performance had ended and the audience had offered its respectful, though not impassioned, applause, a friend of mine overheard a white woman sitting in the row behind us. Turning to her companion, she said in a polite If-you-can’t-say-anything-good-don’t-say-anything-at-all tone of voice, “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it entertaining, but…” The woman never completed the sentence, never said what she would have called “Twilight.” Nor did she explain to her companion what she meant by “entertaining,” though clearly the term carried political, as well as aesthetic, value. Her gloss on “Twilight” also contained an unintended irony: Entertainment, or the production of glossy self-representations, is, after all, the dominant business of Los Angeles. In one sense, I could understand how the woman’s expectations could have felt somewhat let down if by “entertaining” she also meant diversionary; though “Twilight” is at times highly amusing, its effect is to memorialize the voices of L.A. In another sense, “entertainment” is one of the many challenges posed by “Twilight,” a work which seeks to generate theatrical compassion through Smith’s hallmark technique of literal impersonation.

 

The mood on Princeton University’s campus was unusually tense the morning after the verdicts were announced in the first trial of police officers Koon, Powell, Wind and Briseno. After a dreary night spent watching CNN’s live aerial television footage of fires that burned through a twenty-five-block area of central L.A., a group of Princeton’s African American and Latino students–joined by some Asian Americans and whites–staged a midday rally in front of Firestone Library (named after the rubber magnate). The students spoke of their rage at the verdicts and at the beating, their sorrow at the loss of life and the damage to neighborhoods, and of their alienation from some of their white friends, many of whom viewed the trial in Simi Valley as an anomalous miscarriage of justice. An Asian-American student implored the assembly to work together to combat racism and discrimination on campus. Some students voiced concern about friends and relatives living in Los Angeles; others spoke of their apprehension about family sixty miles away in New York, where the possibility of rioting still loomed large.

 

Ironically, April 29, 1992 was also the date set for the New York premiere of Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities,” her award-winning one-woman show about the conflict between Hasidic Jews and African- and Caribbean-Americans spurred by the death of a seven-year-old black child, Gavin Cato. (When her opening was canceled, Smith joined demonstrators protesting the King verdict in Times Square.) “Fires,” a play which enacts the relatively clear-cut dispute between visibly distinct minority communities who share the same New York City neighborhood, is the spiritual and aesthetic forebear of “Twilight,” a work which takes on the considerably more complex task of documenting the multiracial, multilingual and geographically dispersed communities of Los Angeles. Both draw upon a rigorous performance technique that Smith has been developing for over a decade, in which she interviews people and then “performs” them verbatim.

 

For Smith, who is also Associate Professor of Drama at Stanford, the performance of real people’s real words originally functioned as a theatrical exercise, a way of investigating how different characters embody or inhabit language differently. Smith used linguistic and performative “found objects”–clips from often baroque late-night talk shows, for example–to investigate the possibility of “entering” character through the meticulous repetition of that character’s language, including body language. In rehearsal for “Twilight,” Smith listened repeatedly to tapes of her interviewees, then practiced until she had incorporated the voices well enough to “wear” the characters’ words. The technique, she contends, entails both theft–the appropriation of others’ voices–and gift–a mode of re-presenting or returning others’ voices to them. (Sister Souljah once refused Smith an interview, claiming that Smith was “the sister who wants to take my words.”) As her work in “Fires” and “Twilight” demonstrates, such impersonation, or “re-iteration,” as Smith prefers to call it, lends itself particularly well to highly charged media spectacles such as the Crown Heights conflict and the L.A. uprisings, precisely because these are wars of image and voice. A crucial part of the public spectacle that was “L.A.” entailed the struggle of voices speaking on behalf of besieged communities to broadcast their beliefs over the steady din of talking heads reporting official estimates of property damage. In newspaper and television accounts, the rioting itself was often portrayed as what happens when words do not suffice.

 

For the Mark Taper Forum production of “Twilight,” Smith interviewed more than 175 people, including movie stars (Angelica Houston) and politicians (Maxine Waters). With help from four dramaturges–one black, one Latino, one white and one Asian–she later selected twenty-odd characters to be included in the work. Smith’s performances are, by definition, always works-in-progress, since she adds or subtracts characters to suit the needs of particular audiences or her own evolving ideas. The twenty-one people that she performed at McCarter ranged from the well known (Reginald Denny and former L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates) to the lesser known (Angela King, Rodney’s aunt, and Maria, Juror #7 in the federal King trial, whose character was added two weeks into the L.A. performance of “Twilight”). John Lahr’s review of “Twilight” in The New Yorker describes a performance in which Smith did her show for seven hundred L.A. high school students. In the middle of performing Julio Menjivar–a lumber salesman and driver who was arrested for no apparent reason as part of the police round-ups during the riots–Smith interrupted her description (in Spanish) of the police abuse. “I don’t think I should say what the police said,” she told the audience. “Your teachers will mind.” When the kids shouted back their encouragement, Smith continued: “Get up, motherfucker! Get up!”

 

On stage Smith, a light-skinned African American woman, performs barefoot, wearing a plain white shirt and loose, dark pants; in addition to changes in voice, posture and affect, she signifies the “feel” of characters with simple costume changes: a hat taken on or off, the addition of earrings or a string of pearls, a cigarette hanging loosely from the side of the mouth, a man’s striped tie and blazer. Brief blackouts demarcate the shifts between characters, shifts which are left intentionally ragged so that Smith’s audience can witness the uneven process of metamorphosis between, for example, Mrs. Young-Soon Han, a Korean-American and former owner of a liquor store, and Twilight Bey, a young African American male and an organizer of the gang truce between the Cripps and the Bloods.

 

Bey’s self-consciously oracular voice, distinct from the bureaucratese of some characters and the informal, conversational expression of others, literally has the last word in “Twilight.” Bey steals the show, but not in the conventional sense; though his is not the most arresting or profound voice of the performance, it is the one that lends “Twilight” its title and serves as its coda, a surrogate voice for Smith’s voice. In a brief essay about the development of “Twilight,” Smith explains that she was inspired both by Bey’s words and by the rich metaphorical potential of his name. Twilight is a time of danger, when objects ordinarily visible in broad daylight are obscured, and the time of day when much of the first rioting occurred. Twilight is also a time of liminality and, more importantly, creativity–a time, Smith writes, that “asks more of our vision.” Here are Bey’s words, spoken by and through Smith, as he analyzes the relation between “twilight” and the growth of a prophetic voice:

 

  
               So twilight
               is
               that time
               between night and day
               limbo
               I call it limbo
               so a lot of times when I've brought up
                    ideas to my homeboys
               they say
               Twilight
               that's before your time
               that's something you can't do now
               when I talked about the truce back in
                    1988
               that was something they considered
                    before its time
               yet
               in 1992
               we made it
               realistic
               so to me it's like I'm stuck in limbo
               like the sun between night and day

 

Shaman, prophet and intermediary (in the gang wars), ever attentive to the disruptive power of his language, Bey’s character is a stand-in for Smith’s own (absent) voice as performer. Watching her perform each of the twenty-one characters in “Twilight” with obvious care and generosity — even a bewildered Daryl Gates, who seems genuinely mystified at how he became a national symbol of police oppression following “the Rodney thing” (a telling slip)– I had the sense that Smith, too, wants to be a peacemaker of sorts, a multilingual interlocutor who constructs her own unique theatrical voice from the select fragments of others’ voices. Bey’s is the privileged voice of “Twilight” because, in his role as leader of the gang truce, he exemplifies an analogous spirit of Smith’s performance, which is communication across seemingly insurmountable lines of hierarchy and difference.

 

Through Smith, who embodies in her performance the very tape recorder that she uses to conduct interviews, “Twilight” brings to audiences such as the one in Princeton voices that would not normally get a public hearing. People from South L.A. and Koreatown are magically transported to a stage in New Jersey–not through conventional media such as TV, but through “real” physical proximity and presence. With the effect of a verbal patchwork quilt, the pieces sewn together by her own constant bodily presence, Smith’s performance constructs an imaginary–and highly intimate –conversation among twenty-one people who will never share the same room together, then presents this conversation to an audience that has paid twenty-five dollars a piece to listen. In contrast to the “outside” social realities that furnish white voices their immediacy and authority, the defining power of the soundbite, in the safe space of the theater, Smith gives all the voices in “Twilight” equal representation. Everyone has his or her five minutes before the footlights, from the director of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front to the Korean storeowner whose brain was partially blown out by a stray bullet.

 

Moreover, the voices Smith performs are not homogenized through journalistic “smoothing out” (a technique applied liberally to the frequent slips of tongue and verbal lapses committed by heads of state, for example); neither are they necessarily translated for their audience. In one remarkable sequence, Smith performs Chung Lee, president of the Korean America Victim’s Association, speaking in Korean as English subtitles are projected on screens at either side of the theater. While selecting performance material from the archives of her interviews, Smith says she generally looks for the “bumps” in the flow of a speaker’s words and phrases. Her interests lie, paradoxically, in the moments when language “fails” rather than when it succeeds too well, when she believes it speaks us most thoroughly. Her monologues communicate as often through stammering and hesitation, when speakers are tongue-tied, as through moments of linguistic and tonal clarity. Like the woman overheard by my friend during the Princeton performance of “Twilight,” Smith’s characters speak through ellipses, innuendo, intonation and accent.

 

“Twilight” harbors an implicitly populist agenda of breaking down the conventional binary between the “high” — and obviously highly stylized–language of the stage and the “low,” and no less stylized, language of everyday speech. Smith does not construct a multicultural national literature merely by introducing “real” voices into a highly charged aesthetic arena (though in and of itself, this would perhaps constitute a progressive political act); rather, she subtly shifts the contours of this arena by finding the “poetry,” as she calls it, in ordinary language. “Everyone, in a given amount of time, will say something that is like poetry,” Smith writes in the introduction to the recently published book version of Fires in the Mirror. “The process of getting to that poetic moment is where character lives” (xxxi). Later in the same essay, she notes that “character” lives in the digressions, the ways (of universally “bad” grammar, of “ums” and “uhs”) through which we get to the “point.” By mimetically reproducing the details of various characters’ fissures in speech, Smith makes it possible for people to talk–not only to say the sorts of things that are sometimes forbidden or veiled in public discourse, but also to say things in ways that are not usually allowed in the theater.

 

Yet it’s at the precarious line between mimicry and parody that Smith’s work potentially backfires, or at least loses its political potency. While parody promises pleasure for its audience, mimicry seems the more difficult–and possibly the more radical–of the two modes. Closely related to parody, satire depends upon a cultural community that speaks, to a greater or lesser degree, a common language. Mimicry, in contrast, requires that the subject “become” the object of her imitation. Unlike parody, which effects a distance from the thing being mocked in order to provoke a self-conscious laughter, mimicry diminishes critical detachment and compels one to a more direct — though not necessarily less discriminating–engagement with the “other.” Smith sees mimicry as a way of facilitating a radical empathy, of enabling a transformative slippage across socially produced identities of race, nation, gender, and class. “The spirit of acting,” she writes, “is the travel from the self to the other” (xxxvi).

 

Perfect mimicry of the other is, of course, a utopian desire, an impossible fantasy exemplified by Madonna, who in “Vogue” sings that it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, a boy or a girl. As Homi Bhabha has written in the context of colonial subjects, the very precondition for mimicry is the residue of difference–the “almost the same, but not quite“–that distinguishes self from other. Mimicry has the potential to de-naturalize dominant voices, as when Smith’s performances (of an anonymous talent agent, the former president of the L.A. Police Commission, the legal counsel for Officer Briseno, or even Reginald Denny) dramatize, and thus unmask, the privilege of white speakers. The implicit challenge of Smith’s performance style lies in inhabiting these kinds of voices while keeping mimicry and parody in tension. Of the characters she performs, Smith writes: “I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness” (xxxviii).

 

It might seem strange, therefore, that “Anna Deavere Smith” is absent from “Twilight.” Or rather, she’s everywhere present, in the form of a desire which is the structuring absence of the performance. Moments in the performance when characters call attention to Smith’s (invisible) presence are disruptive in this regard, making explicit the ways in which “Smith” mediates our experience of them, as well as the ways in which their own self-representations are shaped by her presence. Elvira Evers, a Panamanian-American cashier whose life was saved when a stray bullet penetrated her back and lodged in the elbow of her unborn baby, speaks to an invisible Smith, asking her midway through the monologue whether it’s alright to bring out her little girl. It’s a crucial moment, not just for transforming monologue into dialogue, but for foregrounding the ways in which Smith’s own voice may have a legitimizing, or hindering, effect upon others’ expression.

 

Ever since “Fires in the Mirror” catapulted her to the pages of People magazine and the couch on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show, Smith’s work has been almost universally acclaimed. (According to one account, now that Smith has become a commodity in her own right, she signs a waiver that guarantees that after a certain threshold she will share profits with her interviewees.) The obvious political merit of “Twilight”–appreciated equally by critics from both the “mainstream” and “alternative” presses –lies in its portrayal of the irreducibility of voices in the noisy public discourse of “L.A.” Whereas the television news pitted riotous “black rage” against indignant white propriety, or black rage against Korean-American cupidity (the role formerly assigned Jewish inner-city merchants), or black rage against Korean-American industriousness (the divisive “model minority” image), “Twilight” offers a more complex rendering. As Gloria Naylor writes in Mama Day, there’s not just two sides to the story in L.A.–my side and your side–but four sides, including “an outside, and an inside. All of it is truth” (230).

 

“Twilight” is a great leveler, a fact which may be simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. While Smith aspires to burst through the limitations of a narrow ethnocentrism, the democratic impulse that guides “Twilight” can tend to obscure the ways in which these voices are in violent struggle with one another. Like all of us, Smith herself is part of this process. When the Mark Taper Forum originally commissioned her to create “Twilight,” some local artists protested that the theater was importing a commercially and critically successful “outsider” to speak their voices. Crusades for cultural justice are often figured in such terms, as conflicts over the ownership of voices and representations. This is not to impugn Smith’s voice; indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of “Twilight” is Smith herself–in particular, the obvious respect and care she demonstrates for the voices entrusted to her. At its best, however, “Twilight” embodies a dialectic: not only does Smith speak for and as “others”; these others also infuse and speak for her.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-133.
• Lahr, John. “Under the Skin.” The New Yorker 69, 19 (June 28, 1993): 90-94.
• Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 1988.
• Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror. New York: Anchor Books, 1993.

 

 
 
 

(Excerpted from the Discussion Group PMC-talk@ncsuvm, 7/92-8/92)

 

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 11-30-93. PMC-TALK is the discussion group for the electronic journal _Postmodern Culture_ (PMC-LIST). Subscription to PMC-TALK is independent of subscription to PMC-LIST; if you are not subscribed to the journal itself, and would like to be, send your first and last name and a request for subscription to PMC@UNITY.NCSU.EDU (internet).

 

Today’s Topics: Boston Univ.’s Pres. Silber

 

---

 

Sender: “Joseph H. Hesse”

Subject: Boston Univ.’s Pres. Silber

 

Hello. I am new to this list (to e-mail as well) and I feel a responsibility to produce some text for this list, rather than just sit in my room consuming the text of others.

 

Has anyone else been reading about Pres. Silber’s recent letter to the faculty of Boston University. There was an article today in THE BOSTON GLOBE. They quote his letter as saying:

 

“Boston University has resisted the imposition of doctrines that would curtail intellectual and academic freedom. It is plain that some versions of critical theory, radical feminism and multiculturism, among other intellectual positions, are ideological in character and inhospitable to free intellectual inquiry.”

 

“Marxism, structuralism, feminism, etc., do not, in and of themselves, threaten academic freedom, but each of these views is highly susceptible to being formulated as dogma, impervious to any arguments or evidence not already in conformance with the basic tenets of the dogma.”

 
“Any university that takes academic and intellectual freedom seriously has an obligation to spot these epistemologies and head them off.”

 
The Globe reports that areas of study that Silber mentioned in an earlier report to the trustees were:

 
“Critical legal studies, revisionist history, Afro-centrism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, the Frankfurt school of Critical Theory, structuralism and deconstructionism, dance therapy, gay and lesbian liberation and animal liberation.”

 
I found so much of this article troubling, on so many different points, that I hardly know where to begin with a commentary on Silber’s statements. And so, I will wait and see if anyone is interested in this subject before I clutter up this list with my text.

 
Any Comments or additional information on Silber?

 
Joseph Hesse

jhhes.mvax.cc.conncoll.edu

 

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-2-93.

 

[ . . . . ]

 

Today’s Topics: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO NOBODADDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS: Meeting of Society for Literature and Science

 

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Sender:

Subject: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

 

As someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, I am profoundly disturbed by President Silber’s reported remarks. Are we in for another round of McCarthyism in American academe? And in what ways is dance therapy a threat to the powers that be?

 

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PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-4-93.

 

[ . . . . ]

 

Today’s Topics: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks Re: Silber

 

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Subject: Re: President Silber of Boston University’s reported remarks

 

>As someone who works with both deconstruction and structuralism, I am

>profoundly disturbed by President Silber’s reported remarks. Are we in for

>another round of McCarthyism in American academe? And in what ways is dance

>therapy a threat to the powers that be?

 

Don’t you know that dancing leads to sex?

 

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From: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu (Bart Simon)
Subject: Re: Silber
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 93 8:40:58 PST

Forwarded message:
> From Michael.Lynch@brunel.ac.uk Thu Dec  2 11:40:10 1993
> Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1993 19:39:20
> From: Michael.Lynch@brunel.ac.uk (hsstmel)
> To: bssimon@helix.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: Silber file
> Message-Id: 
> In-Reply-To: 
> 
> 
> 
> I'm writing this in response to Joseph H. Hesse's message about
> Boston Univ. President John Silber.  Hesse quotes from an article
> in the Boston Globe, regarding Silber's response to a Faculty
> Council inquiry about academic freedom.  Hesse states: "I found
> so much of this article troubling, on so many different points,
> that I hardly know where to begin with a commentary on Silber's
> statements."  I too found this troubling.   I spent six years at
> Boston University, and left two months ago after a very bitter
> battle with the BU central administration over my tenure case.
> I would be happy to discuss my case further with anyone who is
> interested.  However, in this message, I would like to elaborate
> on Hesse's message, and suggest that anyone who finds Silber's
> remarks ominous (and believe me, he substantiates his words with
> deeds) should write to Silber to give him a piece of your mind. 
> I recommend it highly; it is a rare opportunity to engage a
> genuine tyrant in dialogue:
> 
> John Silber, President
> Boston University
> 147 Bay State Road
> Boston, MA 02215
> 
> Be sure to cc. the following parties:
> 
> James Iffland, Chair
> Faculty Council
> Department of Modern Foreign Languages
> Boston University
> 718 Commonwealth Ave.
> Boston, MA 02215
> 
 [ .... ]
> 
> Alice Dembner
> Higher Education Correspondent
> Boston Globe
> 135 Morrissey Blvd.
> P.O. Box 2378
> Boston, MA 02107-2378
> 
  [ .... ] 
> There is a genuine chance that if the academic community
> supports Iffland and Faculty Council against Silber, that we will
> see the end to 23 years of demoralization at BU.  Among the
> reasons for getting involved in this battle are that BU, in the
> aftermath of a faculty strike in the late '70s offers a model of
> a university with a weakened faculty and an administration that
> micromanages the faculty's academic affairs.  Administrators at
> other universities may get ideas from this model.  Silber is not
> the only problem at BU.  His Provost, a fellow named Jon
> Westling, is a particularly nasty piece of work, as is the Dean
> of the College of Liberal Arts, Dennis Berkey.  Silber and his
> gang oversee all appointments and promotions, and consequently
> they have built a substantial base of support among faculty (and
> especially department chairs).  Nevertheless, there are very many
> faculty at BU who would rejoice if Silber's reign came to an end,
> but they rarely speak up for fear of getting their salaries
> frozen, suffering departmental budget cuts, or being denied
> tenure.    
> 
> The following is a series of quotations from the Silber report
> that gave rise to the current flap about academic freedom.  The
> administration's response to a very mild Faculty Council request
> gives some indication of the Orwellian atmosphere of the place.
>

---

> 
> Excerpt from John Silber, President's Report to the Trustees,
> Boston University, April 15, 1993, pp. 93-95.  (The Report was
> delivered as a slide show, and then published for distribution
> to parents and others at the time of Boston University's
> graduation ceremonies.  It was not distributed to the faculty.)
  [though it was subsequently reprinted in the Boston Globe --ML].)

---

> 
> ". . . let me speak of another way in which the stewardship of
> the Board [of Trustees] can be judged.  Beyond anything you've
> seen so far, but just as important, this University has remained
> unapologetically dedicated to the search for truth and highly
> resistant to political correctness and to ideological fads.  In
> my view, it is not too much to say that among this country's
> major research universities we are one of the very few that still
> deserve to be called a university in the true meaning of the
> term. . . .
>  
>      We have resisted relativism as an official intellectual
> dogma, believing that there is such a thing as truth, and if you
> can't achieve it, at least you can approach it.  We have resisted
> the fad toward critical legal studies, which I've mentioned
> [earlier].  In the English Department and the departments of
> literature, we have not allowed the structuralists or the
> deconstructionists to take over.  We have refused to take on
> dance therapy because we don't understand the theory of it.  We
> have resisted revisionist history.  We've resisted the fad of
> allowing every student to do his own thing by determining his own
> curriculum, thereby turning the University into a buffet in which
> the student has whatever kind of mis-education he, in the midst
> of his ignorance, decides he wants.  In the Philosophy Department
> we have resisted the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
> 
>      Across the board we have refused to accept hiring quotas,
> either of females or of minorities believing that we should
> recruit faculty on the basis of talent and accomplishment rather
> than any other consideration.  We have resisted the official
> dogmas of radical feminism.  We have done the same thing with
> regard to gay and lesbian liberation, and animal liberation.  We
> have refused to introduce condom machines into University
> buildings and thereby compete with drugstores.  We refuse to
> believe that students at Boston University need a college
> education in how to perform the sex act.  We believe that
> students in America who haven't figured that out before they get
> to college are too dumb to come to college.  And we have no wish
> to share any responsibility whatsoever for what they do with
> their knowledge.  We will not serve as procurers or facilitators
> of sexual liaisons.
> 
>      We have resisted the fad of Afro-centrism.  We have not
> fallen into the clutches of the multi-culturists.  We recognize
> that Western culture, so-called, is in fact a universal culture. 
> Western mathematics is the mathematics of the world; Western
> science is the science of the world; and the Western culture has
> been philosophically oriented from the start toward finding the
> truth, and starting to approach it as closely as possible.  It
> was in the Western cultural tradition that people began to
> develop courses in anthropology, in the history of foreign
> countries and in comparative religions.  Buddhism, for example,
> was brought into German Universities by Kant and by Hegel.  This
> is a part of the very meaning of Western culture and
> civilization~not to be parochial, but to be universal in one's
> concern."
>

---

 
> The Boston University Faculty Council got hold of this report,
> and in recent weeks the Council's Committee on Academic Freedom
> requested of Silber that he "clarify" what he meant by "resisted"
> in the above remarks.  Silber did not respond for a few weeks,
> and Faculty Council Chairman James Iffland discussed Silber's
> report in the BU student newspaper (The Daily Free Press).

  [....]

 [In response, Silber's Assistant General Council wrote a letter 
  to the student newspaper, in which he objected, incredibly, that
  Silber's academic freedom was violated by the Faculty
  Council's questioning of Silber's statement to the trustees. --ML]

---

> Another BU official was quoted in the Boston Globe (November 25,
> 1993:  'BU official denies curbs on academic freedom' by Alice
> Dembner):
> "'No credible claims of violations of academic freedom have ever
> been made against the university administration,' Carol Hillman,
> vice president for university relations said in a statement. 
> 'Prof. iffland's reported statements are nothing more than a form
> of acadmic McCarthyism:  innuendo based on secret 'evidence' that
> does not in fact exist.'"

---

> 
> Silber finally did respond to the Faculty Council's request, but
> as the quotations in Joseph Hesse's e-mail message indicate, he
> dug in his heels.  I am told that during a recent Faculty
> Assembly meeting Silber accused Prof. Iffland of being a liar and
> a coward.  Clearly, the BU Administration believes that a vicious
> offense is the best defense against criticism.  Iffland and the
> Faculty Council are being pilloried by Silber's propaganda
> machine.  They need support. 
> 
 [The Faculty Council Committee on Academic Freedom
 and the AAUP are currently looking into questions about
 academic freedom at BU, including tenure and promotion
 cases, intrusive efforts by BU administrators to edit
 dissertations and dissertation abstracts, and numerous other
 complaints. --ML]

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-7-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Re: [anti-ideology politics]
     [ .... ]

---

 
Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Re: Digest ending 11-30-94

Regarding the anti-ideology politics of Dr. Silber:

My deepest sympathy to the faculty of BU to find the intellectual
leadership (*is* that what Presidents do in our universities?) of
their institution entrusted to a political demagogue whose audience
is clearly not the serious intellectuals of the BU faculty, but
the media and the mass-market for fear-based, anti-intellectual
politics.

The specific targets mentioned by Dr Silber are exactly the intellectual
movements of our time that challenge establishment orthodoxies and
social and cultural privilege. His claim that they lend themselves
to dogmatic formulations could be made about almost *any* belief
system, including scientific rationalism (have a look at how science
is taught at BU, or almost anywhere, for the evidence).

The best defense of critical intellectual movements is their offense
against established views. Use the tools of these perspectives to
demonstrate the ideological character of modernism, patriarchy,
science, rationalism, and all the historically specific and still
politically dominant intellectual formations which had their origins
in the interests and values of a very small segment of humanity, who
continue to be privileged by them. Demonstrate exactly how these
values, discourses, and practices do in fact favor the interests of
one social caste over those of others. Demonstrate the fallacies of
its claims to universal validity independent of history and culture.
And take the demonstrations beyond the academy to the same media,
and wider political constituencies to which Silber appeals.

If he believes ideology has no place in the academy, convict him
of his own ideology./

I recently had occasion to reply strongly to an editorial in a
professional journal warning of the "slippery slopes of postmodernism".
I am now on the editorial board of that journal. And I received
a lot of support reaction from other professionals in the field,
especially younger, more vulnerable ones, who confirmed my claim
that such statements are not just statements of editorial opinion,b
but, because of existing power relations, create a chilling effect
on intellectual freedom. Silber is apparently using his own position
in a somewhat similarly irresponsible manner. It is actions like
his which constitute the threat to academic freedom, not ideas that
challenge the established wisdom.

I think we have a responsibility to say so, publicly.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-14-93.

[ . . . . ] 
Today's Topics:
     [Re: BU demagoguery]
     leo strauss

---

 

Sender: KESSLER

Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-7-93

 

I am working backwards, up the e-mail in my files, but re Lemke’s remarks about BU: What is a “political” demagogue, in distinction from a demagogue? 2) Who are the “serious intellectual faculty” at BU, as distinct from the mere faculty? 3) Name, please, the “social castes” we have in the USA, and I mean as “caste”? What journal is Lemke helping to edit? he doesnt say? and pardon me if the answers are to be found in previous emails that I will work up the list to look at? And, while I am clear about the note from Lemke, 4) how are faculty nowadays to be distinguished from the mass media, the politicos, etc.?

 

They were not different in the Borking of Thomas, and the Borking of Bork, or the Borking of Guinier, etc. One cannot be a tenured mandarin and ride the rails of hardnosed politics to DC too, can one? ONe never know, nowadays, do one? as FW used to ask. Jascha Kessler, living in this post-Kantian, if not post-Cantian day of ours.

 

---

 

Sender: kv10@cornell.edu (Kazys Varnelis)

Subject: leo strauss

 

The recent discussion of Boston University President John Silber on this list led me to wonder about his possible connection with the academic/political cult/conspiracy/movement around conservative academician Leo Strauss. While I didn’t find any connection, I would like to bring up the question of Leo Strauss, who is a fascinating – and terrifying – ((post) modern) figure for me and I would like to know what other members of the list think about him and his work.

 

For anyone who doesn’t know who Leo Strauss is, the following article, ought to be a start. (I should mention that I have explicit permission from the Nation to reproduce this article on pmc-list).

 

For further reading I would probably start with:

 

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952)

 

and

 

Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).

 

Kazys Varnelis

Ph.D candidate, History and Theory of Architecture

Cornell University

 

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

 

[Because the permission granted by _The Nation_ covered only one posting in PMC-Talk, most of the article has been deleted in this republication. Anyone wishing to retrieve the original logs from PMC-Talk can do so by anonymous ftp to ftp.ncsu.edu, cd pub/ncsu/pmc/pmc-talk, and get 9312. Or, of course, you could get the magazine… –Ed.]

 

The Nation magazine,

Copyright (c) 1992, The Nation Company Inc.

 

November 2, 1992

 

SECTION: Vol. 255 ; No. 14 ; Pg. 494

Minority report; Leo Strauss Column

by Christopher Hitchens,

 

[ …. ]

 

The votaries of Leo Strauss form a sort of cult movement that is crucially ambiguous about the idea of elitism. The core belief of Strauss himself, and the mantra of his many rather odd followers, most of them located in the academy and in the “think tank” culture, was:

 

Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within mass society.

 

The key word here is probably “within”; Strauss made a special study of the esoteric and the cabalistic, and believed that since ancient times authentic philosophers had occluded their true meaning so as to make it clear only to a class of adepts.

 

[ ….. ]

 

Subscriptions:

The Nation, PO Box 10763, Des Moines IA 50340-0763. 1-800-333-8536.

 

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-17-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Leo Strauss
     BU Demagoguery
     re: THE NATION piece

---

 
Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Leo Strauss

The posting about Leo Strauss did indeed push me to think further
about the relation of the academy to democratic ideals. One can
read there an invitation to an elitism with the rather serious
modernist weakness that it imagines that one caste, narrow in its
experience and view of the world, should project its own perspec-
tives as universal and itself as fit to lead the whole of
society. Mistaking the part for the whole does not seem a very
sound foundation for policy-making.

But... Just how realistic is it to imagine instead that someday
everyone is society will take the time, have the interest, ac-
quire the skills, to relate their own perspectives on policy to
*any* model of the social system as a whole? Some policies are
purely local; for them a stakeholder model of participatory demo-
cracy seems reasonable. But other policies necessarily must be
grounded in overviews that encompass relations among many social
groups, agendas, activities. Such overviews will always, in the
division of labor, the specialization of perspective and inter-
est, be the speciality of *some* groups in society. They need not
be monolithically masculine, middle-aged, middle-class,
heterosexual, Christian, Eurocentric, etc. But neither are they
likely to encompass most members of a large, diverse society.
They need not necessarily be allowed the power to impose their
policy choices on the rest of us, but they will be in some sense
in a better position to consider such matters. A lot of the time,
a lot of us just won't care.

And ... Plato, at least, often sounds the theme that people in
general need to believe in certain values, or gods, (or
ideologies) for a social order to operate at all, and that there
is a considerable danger to the social order (*any* social order,
not just the ones we are critical of) when intellectual start to
undermine general confidence in established beliefs. Intellec-
tuals are specialists in critique. We are not supposed to stop at
anything (cf. Descartes, Nietzsche, Postmodernism) in our criti-
cal inquiries. But there is a danger that we could (if we were
listened to, which usually we are not) disturb the social order
in ways that would lead to conditions far worse than those we are
critical of. It seems very plausible to me that Plato wrote with
such notions in mind, and that his works do somewhat cloak his
most dangerous ideas (in the indirectness of the Socratic
dialogues, in the famous allegories and "religious" passages,
etc.). Given the conditions under which many scholars and philos-
ophers have written, even in modern times, not only a moral con-
cern for the danger of their ideas to society as a whole, but a
defensive concern for the danger of repercussions on themselves,
may have led to a certain intertextual "encoding" of their mes-
sages.

We are the intellectual descendants of an elitist tradition. We
know that democratic ideals are the product of a bourgeois (and
masculine, and middle-aged, and modernist, etc.) culture, which
we pride ourselves on criticizing and deconstructing in every
other way. So what exactly might a post-democratic politics be?

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

---

Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      BU Demagoguery

Jascha Kessler asks a few questions about my remarks in the Sil-
ber discussion. The first two seem miss the distinction between
qualifiers and classifiers in English semantics. Social "caste"
is a rather useful idea for postmodernists, I think, since it al-
lows us to refine the matrix of categorial social differences and
name its smallest cells: class by gender by age by cultural back-
ground by .... The term may be less familiar, but the notion is a
useful one, as in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and many feminist
theorists. Only one such caste has traditionally been politically
dominant in our society. ... The journal I co-edit is
_Linguistics and Education_ (thanks for the opportunity to ad-
vertise).

As for what really seems to be bothering our correspondent, I'd
say it is the touchy relationship between the political and the
academic. Personally, I'd be happy to see more intellectuals (and
not many academics today are, I think) enter electoral politics,
or even just the arenas of public opinion-making. What is being
objected to in the case of Dr. Silber is an attempt, not within
the context of civil politics but within that of an academic in-
stitution, to control opinion rather than to lead it. And I take
it some are suggesting that he is motivated as much or more by
the approval of such a move by those outside his university than
by his responsibilities to the university itself.

I am not, I hope, naive about the inevitable political dimensions
of all institutions and indeed of all intellectual inquiry. But
direct politically motivated efforts to control what are or are
not acceptable theoretical perspectives within the academy should
be resisted. The result of such efforts tends to intellectual
monoculture, and extinction.

JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

---

 

Sender: KESSLER

Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-14-93

 

re: THE NATION piece. Why, one may ask, the phrase “CYNICAL briefing”? Why the use of the term briefing, and why the adjective. If one must not put one’s trust in princes, neither should one put one’s trust in “Nations(s).” Let us not forget where that journal is coming from, and who is the cynical editor of it, an unreconstructed Stalinist, to say the best and the least of him, who assumes that his view of the world is a true one. Talk about simpletons in the PM parish. Str.is one thing; Quayle is another. And William Kristol is a lad with a rather superior education and IQ, as indeed is his father. Please don’t start conflating Strauss, Straussians, Kristol and Quayle. It would be rather shoddy argumentation, about anything. Thinking, it is not. Kessler

 

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 12-19-93.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [Plato's ideas]
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [Avoiding bad faith]
     Re: Digest ending 12-17-93  [evil geniuses of poststructuralism]

---

 

Sender: KESSLER

Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-17-93

 

One suggestion may be to ask, What is dangerous about Plato’s ideas? And to whom are they dangerous? And why are they dangerous? What is meant by “post-democratic”? Alpha Beta Delta Gamma, out of bottles? as Huxley suggested in BRAVENEW WORLD? What is a caste? Where are the intellectuals J Lemke speaks of? What makes them intellectuals? Professors are intellectuals? Intellectuals are professors? Such a glibness and fluency of talk is rather worrisome, as it assumes a complaisant audience, knowingness and agreement on categories as defining the world we live in according to this sort of academic argot. Sentimental, suicidal, canting, and bullying in the extreme. As if the folks quoting a Christopher Hitchens did not realize that he publishes in journals supported by megabucks in foundations that are based upon extraordinary wealth. IN Italy years ago, this talk emanated from the “mink coat Communists.” IN the States, today, it is the limousine liberals and their academic janissaries, who know not what they say or do. In a word, it is sheer bad faith. Pontificating bad faith. Kessler here, not even breathing hard, but waiting for a sign, give us a sign.

 

---

Sender: CYWB000 
Subject: Digest ending 12-17-93

I was distressed but not shocked by Kazys
Varnelis' message to pmc-talk about Strauss.
The first two paragraphs of _The Nation_
article seem to demonstrate well enough that
the article is confusing, not very interesting,
boring, probably easy to take apart. But who
wants to comment? I was going to wait to
hear other PMCers reactions, but would like to
address this message by K. Varnelis as a show
of some kind of dissatisfaction with the ideas
of, what I see as the L. Strauss club, and show
my support for those who counteract the LS
club (perhaps by adding a "D" to the end of
"LS").

A question in my own mind seems to be, "If I
only had the force of A.R. Stone or A. Kroker--
featured in the most recent Mondo 2000-- I
could clear up my own confusion, and perhaps
push this issue over the edge?" What little
force I have is the wish to see A.R. Stone,
Kroker, H. Giroux, C. Penley, and D. Haraway
(there are others) placed in the same room
with these folks (the LS club). Perhaps other
PMCers can tell me if this Leo Strauss crowd
would be an easy target.

My reaction is central to the problem of
epistemological battles that go on in
individuals' lives everyday. By
epistemological battle I mean the frustrations
of everyday life-- where proof and burden of
proof are too overwhelming to accumulate
against some wrong that is being committed
to you or to anyone else. The aggression of
silence is a good example. Silence does not
seem to be a discourse, and as Marika Finley-
de Monchy says, the "(silence of) death is not
a discourse". An academic elite, or whatever is
being referenced (I am not familiar with the
texts being discussed; although I know that
Henri Giroux has a major contention with
Bloom, and I side with Giroux), seems to be a
community of silence. It's hard to pin these
kinds of opinions down, not simply because
they are not available but because they are so
unpleasurable. [It is obvious that they are
available, K. Varnelis was given permission to
distribute the article in question.]

The discussion on PMC has been a difficult
one. The reason people and individuals arm
our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with theories, words,
texts, languages, codes, intellectual tools, etc.,
is specifically so individuals and people can,
as Bourdieu advocates, avoid bad faith, and
get on with the business of creating. I suppose
people and individuals might also arm
our/them/onesel(f)ve(s) with good vocal
skills, good writing skills, and a bit of time to
address all these potential threats to the
creations and creativities many would like to
see and do-- not just an intellectual elite.

I am dissatisfied with the issue at hand. It
gets nasty but not nasty enough. Perhaps
Alphonso Lingis is monitoring PMC-talk and
could respond. Perhaps J. Bigras could
respond from the grave. I feel lucky that
Lemke is around; the BU situation is very
gray. I hope we are living something post-
Kantian. Lemke, as for ""post-Cantian"",
well responded to.

Brennan Murray Wauters,
cywb@musica.mcgill.ca

---

Sender: AYEAMAN@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Digest ending 12-17-93

Seems to me that there are some worthwhile points of view being
discussed here beyond the slurs against what Spivak ironically calls
the evil geniuses of poststructural and postmodern inquiry. (See
Spivak's chapter in Reading & Writing Differently.)

I wonder, with a smile, if President Silber took lessons in Resistqnce
from Henry Giroux? 

        --Andrew
Internet: ayeaman@cudnvr.denver.colorado.edu

Dr. Andrew R. J. Yeaman
7152 West Eightyfourth Way #707
Arvada, CO 80003
(303) 456-1592

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 1-4-94.

[ . . . . ]

Today's Topics:
     RE: democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century 
     Post-democratic politics

---

 

Sender: Peter Stupples, University of Otago, New Zealand

pstupples@gandalf.otago.ac.nz

 

I was struck by the importance of the issues raised by Jay Lemke in response to the Leo Strauss exchanges. Is seems to me that the recent and current events in the former Soviet Union illustrate the problems involved in democratic developments at the end of the twentieth-century. The Communist system, as it had evolved under Lenin and Stalin, was clearly non-democratic and had also lost the support of the majority of Russian intellectuals. Communism, in the form it had genetically assumed, has been destroyed and replaced by a swiftly changing array of models that have the appearance of being democratic in the Western tradition. These changes have been accompanied by an almost complete economic collapse. Where stakeholders have had the opportunity to voice an opinion over the past few years they have tended to favour either 1. a return to a form of Communism (better the devil you know – we were better off under Brezhnev – there was a class system in operation in which everyone had a stake and knew the rules) or 2. an inchoate, archaic nationalism (Russia for the Russians, we need a slavonic solution to a slavonic problem, we are the only ones who know how to deal with our historical development). The academy, which was enthusiastically behind forms of socialism in 1917, no longer has a voice – certainly not a voice that is listened to. However I was impressed on a visit to the Russia provinces in May 1992 how well local governments were capable of running their own affairs, able to coordinate local groups of stakeholders into purposeful activity. There seems to be something that can be learnt from this, such as – you cannot interfere with the genetic development of historical processes – Russia is going back to 1916 and rerunning the issues that are pertinent to it – the power of *modern* central governments must be anti-democratic because of the distance from the stakeholders and the self-interests of a vast bureaucracy that is not answerable to those stakeholders. Centralised government is a *modern* idea, it is paternalistic, at best the state looking after the less privileged, who remain without privileges, hope, education, a stake, but are kept fed, clothed and housed to stop them being a social nuisance – post-modernist debates point to the break up of centralising tendencies in the interests of giving stakeholders and stakeholder groups a greater voice and giving room for a diversity of living-choices within communities.

 

The Platonic idea that people in general need to subscribe to a set of beliefs for social order to be possible is one of those leaps of faith that we no longer need to make. When all *beliefs* are undermined then we can all start looking at the construction of the real world, at the hopes and aspirations of real people and try to find the obviously very complex mechanisms that will allow them to flourish. This is not *post*-democratic politics but, perhaps for the first time, real democracy, the voice of the people, all the people, not simply being listened to by the political-class-patriachy representatives. We do not need beliefs but knowledge. Beliefs distort any objective view of the world. Knowledge leads to respect for the views and aspirations of others. Government structures need to be deconstructed in a physical sense until they are responsive to local interests. Policy-making should be local policy-making with pacts between localities to cover equity issues such as the funding of health and education.

 

Silber’s comments are part of the defensive response of the patriarchy concerned about critical ideas that break down belief and reveal a real world and real issues that might be uncomfortable for the elite. Leo Strauss gives such ideas an intellectual gloss but are promted, it seems to me by a disrepect for the views of others, a quest for modernist simplicity at the expense of real-life diversity.

 

Sorry to go on at length and in such prolix randomness. But Jay Lemke posed a question on the nature of post-democratic politics and I thought it wortha response, even one hurriedly and badly put together.

 

---

Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Post-democratic politics

Maybe PMC is more flame-proof than other lists, but KESSLER's ef-
fort to foreground critical perspectives and lament complaisance
seemed somewhere between negative and incendiary in its tone. I
certainly think it unwise to reply in kind. I also suspect that
his specific questions were rhetorical (What makes someone an in-
tellectual? Why are/aren't professors intellectual? etc.) and his
point that we should not take it so much for granted that the
common wisdom of the moment on such matters is enough for our
discussions. But we all know that every assumption, every few
words of every discourse, presents an opportunity for endless
critical re-examinations, none of which ever lead to definite
conclusions, though they are certainly essential to the process
of coming up with newer discourses that serve us in some practi-
cal ways. On PMC I assume that we are not in search of "truth" or
old Believers that somewhere there is one such true and flawless-
ly reasoned discourse which must then prove to be, if not the
only useful one, then the most useful one. All the practices of
life are carried on, often quite well, with discourses in which
any of us could "find" numberless flaws.

I read in Kessler's message (Digest 12-17-93) a certain im-
patience with political superficiality, suggesting someone who,
like me much of time, is more satisfied by analyses of how power
sustains privilege and wraps itself in pseudo-intellectual
mystification and misdirection. But these are old discourses.
They have been around and widely circulated in our communities
for more than a couple of generations now. They feel old,
modernist, not-ours. They seem wonderfully satisfying as critique
and totally useless as a guide to constructive action. Their
political heart, which I largely share, needs a new voice, and
their theoretical assumptions need a good post-modernist updat-
ing.

What would a post-democratic politics be indeed? How can there be
a democracy of equals when we have no idea how in practice to
make a society of equals? when this ideal assumes a privileging
of the isolated individual as the ultimate political unit, and we
know that this assumption is itself a specifically bourgeois
ideological creation? What is the context in which we pose the
problem of politics but that of the bourgeois State, a creation,
like many before it, for the imposition of control by some upon
all. Is there a solution to the paradox of scale in politics that
what works in small communities does not generalize to extremely
large ones? Can an entity like a nation-state operate as a com-
munity except by illusion and artificial manipulation? How can
there be a single ideal of politics in the absence of a coercive-
ly dominant ideology? If political ideals are inseparable from
cultural systems as wholes, what other domains of cultural prac-
tice and belief most influence them? If all political critique is
situated and positioned, then how is the modernist critique of
capitalism, and the subsequent critical obsession with coercive
power relationships itself limited, itself a product of masculine
perspectives, of middle-class perspectives, of middle-aged per-
spectives, of European and Judaeo-Christian perspectives, and of
their specific interests?

I think that postmodernism has largely held back from critical
confrontation with modernist political ideals (and I do not mean
classical liberal representative democracy, I mean neo-Marxist
post-revolutionary participatory democracy) because we would also
indict the political status quo and have not had any alternative
to offer. It may also be because p-m is just crossing over from
the humanities to the social sciences (by dissolving the
modernist boundary between them).

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

---

PMC-TALK digest: postings for the period ending 1-6-94.

[ . . . . ] 

Today's Topics:
     Postmodern politics

---

 

Sender: Jay Lemke 
Subject:      Postmodern politics

Most of the replies I have had, on and off the list, to my
queries about postmodernist, if not post-democratic, politics,
have been seriously thoughtful and I am grateful for their per-
spectives. They all, as well as responses I have had to this
question from others lately, point toward localism as the key.

I am as much in favor of localism as anyone, for dealing with lo-
cal issues, and in earlier posting I pointed out that the
participatory democracy ideal seems workable locally, on the
scale of relatively small human communities.

Many people also noted that the idea of nationwide (much less
worldwide) political ideals or systems is a modernist, centralist
one. And at least one person believed that they were not neces-
sary to large-scale communities.

But I do not think that these answers are good enough. Even the
premise of "Think globally, act locally" assumes that local ac-
tions must take account of a larger view of needs and conse-
quences. Local actions interact. They contribute to emergent ef-
fects on higher scales of organization of self-organizing
ecological-social systems. They produce conflicts which are not
resolvable except by appeal to the interests of some larger sys-
tem. Some forms of action require trans-local cooperation,
whether on the scale of large cities, nation states, world
regions, or globally.

Our present political solution to these problems is an unstable
compromise between the older nation-state system (treaties, EEC-
like confederations, wars, economic power-leveraging, etc.) and
the emerging global economic-communication order (multi-
nationals, economic interdependence, global information
networks). The older system was already shifting from an owners-
decide model to an experts-and-managers-decide model as the scale
and complexity of the systems to be controlled grew; that has now
been accelerated by the transnational developments. This is not a
system that entirely works; it is still biased by the dis-
proportiate representation in it of elite caste interests, but it
has the capacity in principle to take mass popular interests and
perceptions into account, insofar as those trained to do so can
in fact appreciate them. At least this is a model, however
flawed, which has evolved naturally within the social system, and
which faces up to the fact that many decisions require a degree
of global knowledgeability that is not possessed locally.

This basically technocratic political model is thoroughly
modernist. It has a horrendous ideology that buries values issues
under "expert-knowledge" issues. It regards its knowledge as ob-
jective rather than viewpoint-limited. It is still an elite suc-
cessor to the previous elite, making common cause with it against
the rest of us at the same time that it is displacing it. Its
worst failures result from the unrecognized subcultural bias of
its perspectives. But at least it faces global issues realisti-
cally. Localist politics seems to me to be romanticist and
utopian by comparison.

Postmodernism, I believe, is itself a consequence of the
strengthening of global integration, the second stage following
colonialist-imperialist domination, when the exchanges across
cultures (and to some extent genders and classes) have started to
become more reciprocal as power differentials have leveled out
somewhat. It is in that climate that the voice of the Other could
effectively challenge orthodoxies, even among the dominated. I do
not really believe that localism is postmodernist. But neither do
I believe in the modernist ideal of global homogenization to the
culture of the presently dominant elite. Diversity is good, we
want it, and no one could have succeeded in getting rid of it in
a viable world social order anyway. Diversity implies a mosaic of
differences, with coherence on local scales, and global integra-
tion based on horizontal interdependence rather than vertically
imposed control. It is the world social-political order as
ecosystem rather than as organism-writ-large, or as the patriar-
chal family-writ-large.

How is this system going to deal with global issues? The very
distinction between local and global is disappearing as the sys-
tem becomes more integrated! It's getting harder and harder to
find a strictly "local" issue, in terms of impact, means for ef-
fective action, causes, stakeholders .... Granted that there are
going to be many diverse local ways of coming to grips with these
kinds of problems, each of those local communities will find it-
self already embedded in something larger, and limited in per-
spective within it.

One can say, Let's just go local and see what happens -- let the
system self-organize. Perhaps we CANNOT get the kind of global
perspectives on these systems needed to make better local deci-
sions. Certainly we cannot hope to control the systems from
within them (or from the individual-level of organization), but
we are still going to have to make decisions. Those decisions are
part of the activity of the system. If they are made strictly lo-
cally, I suspect the system will re-organize away from global in-
tegration, back toward greater local autonomy, and back toward
the kinds of ideologies and political practices characteristic of
that kind of system (neo-feudalism, anyone?). Such a political
alternative is not going to compete effectively with the present
trend toward greater technocracy. What can? what should? (and if
English had a plural interrogative pronoun, Whats, I would have
used it!)  JAY.

PS. Perhaps we have no choice but to evolve through technocracy
to something else, something we couldn't envision until we're al-
ready living in the new postmodern global system. Maybe that
presumption releases us from moral responsibility for political
vision. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET:    JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET:  JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

 

Elisabeth Crocker

Department of English
University of Virginia
libby@virginia.edu

 

(IMAGE)

 

Like the landscape of Coconino County where he lives, the character Krazy Kat’s gender and race shift, sometimes at random, but more often as a result of his social situation. George Herriman couched his assertions about the socially constructed nature of categories like race and gender, in addition to categories like class, ethnicity, age, and occupation, so deeply in the sophisticated allegory of his comic strip, however, that few readers recognized them. Those who have written on Krazy Kat in the past have confined their comments to Herriman’s drawing style and literary allusions, and to the more poignant but less puzzling aspects of the love relationship between Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse.

 

The situation of the characters remains unchanged over the course of the strip’s run from 1913 to 1944: Ignatz Mouse hates Krazy Kat with a violent obsession that causes him to throw bricks at Krazy’s head; Krazy loves Ignatz with a singleminded passion that causes him to interpret the projectiles as signs of Ignatz’ love; Offissa Bull Pupp loves Krazy Kat and hates Ignatz Mouse, and uses his lawful authority–as well as his billy club–to protect Krazy from the bricks. Ignatz detests the “Kop,” and Krazy does not return Bull Pupp’s affection, but he does not resent the intervention in his relationship with Ignatz. Krazy seems to understand that others cannot see the brick as a token of affection, and he ignores even Ignatz’ own protestations to the contrary, always utterly confident in his perception of the brick as a signifier of love.

 

The love-triangle plot has allowed critics to dismiss the problem of Krazy’s largely indeterminate gender. In the introduction to a Krazy Kat collection assembled shortly after Herriman’s death, e. e. cummings enumerated a number of tropes for Krazy to figure, including free will, democracy, and romance heroine (vii). Because Krazy is so often caught between the hero Bull Pupp and the villain Ignatz Mouse, and is fairly passive as the object of the Pupp’s love and as the object of the Mouse’s hatred, cummings gendered the Kat female. Nearly all critics and comics historians have since referred to Krazy as “she”; even novelist Jay Cantor, who used the Krazy Kat cast and setting for a postmodern psychoanalytic novel of the same name, unequivocally identified the Kat as a Dora-like female. While cummings himself understood that it was Krazy’s role in the romance-plot that was feminine, and not anything inherent in the character, others have since followed cummings’ use of “she,” relying upon his authority to avoid examining a complex issue.

 

When questioned about Krazy’s sex, however, even Herriman would respond that he did not know, and the Kat did not seem sure either (Capra, 40). “I don’t know if I should take a husband or a wife,” Krazy complains in an October, 1915 daily. “Take care,” Ignatz responds, hurling a brick. The narrator nearly always refers to Krazy as “he,” resolving awkward, ambiguous, or gender-neutral moments to the pronoun “him,” rather than to the pronoun “it.” Most of Krazy’s activity is not gender-specific, but in scenarios involving some complication of his normal relationship with Ignatz, Krazy adopts whichever gender role will restore the usual balance. Cases of disguise or mistaken identity in either Ignatz or Krazy, and of rivalry with a party outside of the Kat/Mouse/Pupp triangle, invariably produce gender-bending confusion in the strip.

 

• Full page:
   

  Sunday, April 15, 1923

   

  This episode combines the classic chase scene with the love-triangle plot, further complicated by the intervention of an outside party, Pauline Pullet. Krazy’s behavior here seems to be governed by his innocence and his absent-mindedness, but he actually performs complex maneuvers in order to maintain the most options within the social structures at hand — love and the law.

 

• Full page:
   

  Sunday, July 14, 1918

   

  Roles in love play do not define the only parameters of gender construction in Krazy Kat. Krazy is a black cat only in general, just as he is generally male. When the Kat’s fur changes color, however, his gender categorically changes with it. Krazy, upon emerging bleached white in Madame Kamouflage beauty parlor, ceases not only to be male but ceases even to be a Kat in the dazzled eyes of the Mouse. Ignatz cannot recognize Krazy when Krazy is white, because whiteness in itself is for Ignatz an appropriate object of erotic desire, which then in turn must be feminine.

 

• About:

 

This Krazy Kat hypermedia project began as a ToolBook application compiled for a graduate course in computing and literary study, taught by Hoyt Duggan and Peter Baker. John Price-Wilkin encouraged me to seek platform-independence when expanding it into a dissertation, of which this article is a part. When the dissertation is finished, with the direction of Eric Lott and John Unsworth, and the technical support of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, it will be published on the World Wide Web.

 

Click an image to view a comic.

 

Works Cited

 

• Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: MacMillan Co., 1971.
• cummings, e.e. Introduction. Krazy Kat by George Herriman. By George Herriman. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1946.
• Herriman, George. Sunday pages July 14, 1918, and April 15, 1923, from George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz, vols. 1-9, Bill Blackbeard, editor. Forestville, California: Eclipse Books/Turtle Island Foundation, 1989.

 

Michael Gizzi

 

Ode to Woody Strode

 

Veteran Actor Woody Strode will appear at the 8 p.m. Saturday screening of John Ford’s “Sergeant Rutledge” at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum’s Wells Fargo Theater.

 

–Los Angeles Times

 

Brother Ebon Noggin, Survival Bubba, persona non grata
In the peckerwood’s head, a midden of bushwah shoe-tree’d
Into a montage mob of Queeg fits. Can’t beat it
For sheer eidetic distress of 30 shitkickers with 10 toothpicks recidivism
A runaway braille trimming tremors to the quick
Gimme some skulls, man! not these
Chiropodists down with the croup, Jack, in Drumstick
Gigging like locust on the corn, humming memory loves company
Per Idaho beanfire with chili obligations as
Bronco Nagurski makes the conversion with broken horns

 

As at a theatre corpses calling curtain calls
With their entire cast of improprieties, Errol Flynn
Pinned if only for a second between a crumpet and a scone
The peak of his powers at the end of his rope
The one-eyed King Radio with a mumbling jag on –
This is the chorus of the Caresser’s song
Canoeer than Velveeta were her thighs
I thought I was standing in a movie with a leg wound
An open book of alluvial text approximating flesh
A ceiling dispensary pulled down to reveal
Halfmoons claire de luneing at the world

 

No one has a straight job, wheat snobs rule the waves
Waterbury sidles to his cardspout
Tuberculosis got the camellias. Family trees
May insert any name one chooses for the pedigree of love
Let the foreign woman come ashore, what as the talkers say
You’ll never see at home lost in the delicate rays of folklore
Its minutes recorded with his feet by the Armless Wonder
Thuggees with allergies film greenhouses, hold shining steam
To treebuds, prehensile eyes out stalking vim as if vision
Were a concubine, a rinse cycle lashed to the belly of a Raj
With buckle of swash, Flora Danica waiting in the wings

 

Professor Pretzel Wolf buttons the suit on his portrait
Of trees, an ornamental hombre in a speculum of preen
Asks, “Who’s the forest of them all?”
Why – Woody Strode! spiked with summer drone
His dome chapeau made of breeze, accent grave
Over the trees tight as a coat of Gliddens
Not without ribands or the great socko of Kilimanjaro

 

All these yahoos headed West, have they got names to be blessed?
Bring me the ho-hum, fly it up here verbatim
An eggshell carbon 12 writ in a foreign tongue
As though Johnny Vast had no idea where his howl came from
And fetch us the cretin who et my heart
That’s what makes it green, does it not?
We live in a factory of the future on the edge of a lip
With miniature cowboys banished forever
The precision of faraway herbalists spilling the beans
“Our desires expectorate dutifully” slobbers Crow Bob

 

An ol’ Yakima stuntjockey son of Cannut uproots the tree
Of reason roost, wraith of the treeshirt twinges
Until and when courage is inflated to pressure sufficiently
Pigeon balloon per square inch chest looking comical enough
To glance, getting by the smoketrees you reckon it’s only Gene
Our ofay Autry slit-eyed slimewinder triggering his getaway
Lately ghosted into Christmas while all the leaves go blind

 

Only the shine inside perception lights the street
Yours the campfire that mocks the sun
Never met anyone outside your head who didn’t shimmer fragile timber
What I mean Woody is you look swell
Like them Indian lakes in summer
Air kisses on a nudist clipboard, offbeat green tops o’ trees
Everything Ritz crackers in the polluted lake wrappers
Blue Moon mobile homes for the executive cornhuskers shimmering a song
Cigarette snorkel on fishlip puffing dawn

 

 

Removing the Obelisk

 

From immediate dictation
and against my will

 

“I”s the most embarrassing
character in the world
a deflector from antiquity
pretending to be italic

 

Just another mook on Hungry Hill

 

“I wanna got to collage
I want sun on the phone
to talk me down from here
Nice embalmer. Easy Boy!”

 

Fucks it have to do with me?
This crown ain’t small enough
for the both of us?
Gets so downright overused jellyglass
one has to laugh

 

Another thing those bones do
— make your bed

 

Lump back in on the jungle chaise
Apache horsefly
— Hi little soon to be dead buzz!

 

Later silence
the only visitor from another

 

Parental Guidance

 

Amnesia sweat the emptiness

 

composed of sponges Darryl

Adam Ahab DeGroot

petroglyphs of gringotude

a near myth childhood hovercraft

near a 16 foot insect

 
Die Meistersingerpouts so

 

stream of air might partly stroke

goldfish theories of Cliquot

 
Jugglers with a ducking movement

 

limberdemain over fruit floors

lip an osculation on the glass kisser

from the suicidal kissery, a squeegee

mops any loss of face

 
Out bunkers in addition to the standard

 

facilities provided for comfort have

cuspidors for the use of psychiatrists

strategically sick at heart, nowadays sick

 
A boy’s own wax among his bees

 

and shrapnell blowing salve

on the conjured static, spangled

auras clocked on the draw

 
Out Padres of the dormitory

 

contagion on the hour

 

The Permanence of Whim to Providence

 

Begin in Purgatory where Lamb rassles Chasm
and faults shoot halter of their fanfaronade
nixing any Vita Nuova dynamo nictate deal

 

Then rent a capsicum and travel nonpareil
through the Baboon Lancet
the equipage of a whoop anticipating sinkers
of a low-rent wagonette in a Dexter diluvium

 

Cocoon-steaming the small tales of croupiers
and piazzas yawned at the local salutation
where Brad Bibbler sucks his Beggar’s Double
quick as lily over the paddy in a strabismus off Pulp Space

 

Young Orchards of heartburn licking the salt misogamist
as you turn spangle and motor
towards Sutton, sunburn and snail
thievish as a gospel lottery heard on the racket outside Lack

 

The low rider ruin of Chickasaw Chepachets
turbo charging browsers through the ghetto streaks
damsons lit up like hooves of despite in twaddle
blue denim brooks across their chests

 

Or right here in Blackstone your everlastings
ignoring the dry bones of that stranded drench
where rain actuaries begin their lament

 

Albert Mobilio

 

The Geographics: Step Five

 

Antennae lie buried beneath the floor because the reception is better that way. The airwaves brought us crumbs & pocket change but nothing worth diving in for. We learned whoever pounds the rock makes fire, and whoever plows the flame grows their own flaw. Instinct rode us down, looted our conversation, kept us in our seats. That’s why we cannot listen to these unwrapped winds and murmurs.

 

It’s dark now. It was dark when we started out. The moon is a crooked tooth buried in the sky’s smoke stained roof. Over time you changed my system and now I feel like something northern has happened to us.

 

They’ve left me some taste of mental health. Up in the old hat factory a miniature horse circles a track. Final exams are held between laps; that’s when they test our spoiled grey faces for muscular decisions. We learn how to hold our ass in place, to shake nickels into dimes. A routine physical disclosed how I had been screwed up by savage cooking, the kind done with pencils and safety pins.

 

I titled her the same way she authored me — with bitten facts dealt like marked cards. She raked back her hair so she could bend to her task, and that’s when I felt left out. The forecast called for black ice and dark coughs. An army of starlings broke ranks when some dust blew down from the hills. She was waving from the porch but I stayed clean in a rented van.

 

The paper that cut me was white bond. The fair and chiseled marble remains visible in the way she conjugates her nerves like Henry James. Behind the gas tanks, underneath the carnival tent, or any place where temperature accumulates, a gorgeous pinch of cypress leaves can be hidden. I am summoned by their scent. Out there in the blood thick mist, a cicada drones. Or is it the arrival of my gift of mourning tongues?

 

The Geographics: Step Six

 

Where does the world leave its dying heat? On the Lido, in the stone and stucco courtyards? Does it create mechanic pressures among the city’s darkened swirls? One day the gifts we bought will remind us of arriving in an early morning rain, of that balcony, and of an argument we had behind its beveled glass doors. If we had acted like we belonged, no one would have asked us for our tickets.

 

Some call it a station but he knows it’s a terminal. The train falters in another state, so he swallows and waits until the new pills are proved upon his pulse. He believes his watch is about to burst. The platform is crowded with petals, the tracks hum with a distant approach, and welding sparks lift a small awning of yellow light above two workmen in the tunnel’s gloom. He saw this and knew he had become the ticket-of-leave apostle.

 

I unwrapped a new thesaurus and looked up a synonym for the word desicate but I ended up feeling sad because every word was chained to another. The toxin bled through the old school halls; neon stained snow fell forever in the streets outside.

 

Meeting in rooms. Look at my sofa, listen to my lamp. I live here in an ice-age marriage to my open floor. No one prepares you for this. You get booklets, brochures, and hints from other tourists, but nothing helps. When I turned the dial to the left, there was a rumba; when I turned right, it was cha-cha-cha, but your purple-heart treason has worn my footwork down to a walk.

 

Covered in smoke, buried beneath a painted cowboy-sky, the sun roars through your hair. You once lived a magazine life, then you entered the pedestrian crosswalk that stilled you. Come to me, speak through my microphone scars and soon we will be such lovers I will be able to hear you tanning on the roof. You will smuggle my complaint across your border and we will finally begin to burn where it counts.

 

John Yau

 

Buffalo and Marshmallows

 

It’s an old glory when a toenail crocodile
named Greta Gabo

 

boasts that any tall
thumb tucking

 

pimple popper
still in touch

 

with the bottom of his atavistic roots
will soon be rented out

 

to the King of pencil Toads
and his last iron caravan

 

Dairy wolves howl
at empty spoon

 

while I sleep in black mall
lily padded trailer park

 

answer the second
second

 

I’m stalled in a parallel stupor
squeezed between

 

red hurt of a fall potato
and blue stones of a part-time seed shifter

 

I’m one of the jilted
eager to bite the crust

 

I plead with what’s left of the steam engine
because I know it’s soft pajamas

 

being one of the flies
A free sample sniffing around

 

the tattered drums of the effluvial honey
You get to count creamy blots and carpet burns

 

transmit grains of junked passion
to the weekend handwarmers

 

west of Sandusky, Ohio
adopted home of tormented petal pushers

 

one charm boxers and retired log nuts
the whole glad parking lot of idle fun seekers

 

You even score the church fire
and pray to the invisible camera

 

You get down on your full grown knees
and you begin to stay

 

In better times, I lived on a bingo farm
ate off a checkerboard

 

Each morning, I baked out the stains
and flicked drivel into the yard

 

Virginia Hooper

 

Hauntings

 

The hauntings laced themselves into another year,
Grew into miracles and fertilized the grass.
Spinning absent-mindedly,

 

A thump and a rattle intercepting my dream,
I clutched in fury to my story,
And, uncertain on which side of the glass I had landed,

 

I turned the page to the first window and climbed through.
A cord by which a weight is suspended
To test the perpendicularity or depth of a thought.

 

Anything resembling a plume or feather. To adorn, dress,
Or furnish with plumes. The thread had vanished
Through the maze lined with brilliant blue, an opulence

 

Amazing as the strutting peacock crossing my path.
The hauntings came more frequently,
Settled across the lawn, warmed the eaves. Is this the lesson

 

We were destined to create, tracing sweet edges onto everything,
Legibly exchanging all the fettered excuses
With a lovelier version dangling off into the clear deep pool?

 

A division or boundary marked or conceived
Between adjoining areas. The cord plumbed my ignorance.
The plot stretched endlessly, they reported, endlessly

 

Repeating what came to me one evening
Persuading the windows to cloud,
the stars to brighten, the moon to retreat demurely behind

 

A dark sense of urgency. As though the mist itself were a mirth
Yet grounded into body. Demanded in haste,
Given under duress, a rattled mention remained for dinner

 

Clearing the table until the chairs were neatly arranged
For company. We invited only those missing
All sense of propriety. All cleverness concealed. All desserts aflame

 

With sweetened promises wrapped in tinsel foil
Tucked under the waiting pillow. The room was elsewhere.
The explanation unravelled beyond my understanding,

 

Hedged the border with a wait and see attitude.
Every applicant was scrutinized as a potential messenger.
But me, that was the problem. Me. Trespasser

 

Pressed into service by an aimless habit, a nagging
Obsession drawing me back to the entrance. Relentlessly crippling
My desire to move on. Relentlessly sending me on

 

An errand that folded me back upon myself.
Was this the curse of my preoccupation?
Or merely my blessing. To mingle and combine

 

So as to obscure or harmonize the varying components,
The concerns, they called them, compulsions pushing through
The soil until a garden emerged, organized

 

And flowered new responsibilities — life, they said —
Kept me awake all night. The river remained the same.
But more and more, so did I. Looking the part,

 

Aimless but energized by a new vision
Acquired in darkness, stuffed into my pockets and taken home.
A fortified watchtower, squinting against the light,

 

Caught in the middle of the sacred chamber
Whose floors were laid with marble,
Whose walls held special insight into a vision

 

Pared for comfort, shaved and scaled to match the era,
Chimed the hours. Measured in the stone
Of an old extravagance, a mystery reverberating the present

 

Until lights sing, darkness speaks the spell
Lingering in the confusion, as though the hauntings
Were Enlightenment itself. The distance to be travelled

 

At any cost, its systems and roads mapping vast
Expanses of mind over matter — a mere restoration
Supporting the vaulted roof. These copies

 

And originals identical. Looking for some way in,
Circling the distance to be travelled,
I thumbed through these illustrations of the profound.

 

The cord weighed heavily upon me, sunk deeper
Than my memory allowed. Than my mother allowed.
The cord pulled me back to the old intersection,

 

Laid me bare to be dressed in the plumes of her intrigue.
But was I the trespasser? Lured back again
With the knowledge gleaned from experience, the old promise

 

Made by us both. To encircle by winding or weaving,
Endlessly revolving back to the place of origin.
The logic and elegance of the interior carried me

 

Through its argument, an alphabet building
Its own structure to house an idea hidden
In these secret vaults. I wandered aimlessly.

 

Here was design trimmed to fit
The particular niches of the puzzle, a maze of concentration
Broken only by generations turning the soil.

 

The thought stood perpendicular as a stave
Beside me, a mechanism assigning me greater responsibility,
A trick played well, posted as sentry.

 

They say crusaders were killed endlessly flitting and filing away
The various pieces of the puzzle, sited upon
An inhospitable terrain, just inside the encircling logic

 

Nature obeys. The temple had been filled with sand,
A castle subject to erosion. These were visions
We had to learn, to leave, to stand outside the threshold

 

And peer through. A story half as old as time
Traced back to a source, then broken off.
As much for the onlooker as the maker.

 

A buried circular staircase, circling toward the obscure
But recorded section of a vision sketched into stone.
The fortune lay scrolled inward toward the reader,

 

Its clear message left as a last minute impulse
To render clear the clouded window
Parted for that breath of air, the first glimpse.

 

Temples and Follies

 

Small temples and follies in the woods,
The feeling soon passes
Into extinction, or was it merely the fact

 

We reconsidered the labor of love — the rapture
Of reaching journey’s end when respite
Can’t be sought through an intricate network
Of hedged corridors, or on summer nights it took us through,

 

Sudden views of the vanished lake.
Houses should be lived in again and the landscape
Returned, which we discovered

 

Had been designed to rival Hope’s End serene romance.
The residents are always free to roam.
The feeling soon passes,
But respite can be sought as a labor of love

 

As all rooms share a graded vista
Restoring journey’s end when the guests arrive,
The original owners of the house.

 

A Reading

 

You are impatient, says the oracle.
The weather has arrived cloudy, another’s day’s conclusion
Shot with unraveling paths set back

 

From the shore. An ocean’s breeze reshuffles the cards
Across the deck, disorder restored to pattern,
A chance you pattern yourself toward.

 

Prompted to rethink your question,
Which might, with grace, lift you above the determined
Arrangement currents have washed you against,

 

You play another hand. A chance you pattern yourself
Against lifts back through selves
You have assumed, fools sprung from oracle

 

Beginnings, framed inside the gold-leaf border
Of the cards played in patience
When it wasn’t in the cards to share the evening

 

With another. And what of crossed destiny?
Teased out of solitaire, prompted by impatience,
You think you have been courted by the cards.

 

Strange, how this pattern unravels
Inside the tale arranged for the oracle’s pleasure,
A link, after all, you think.

 

tall blank zebras appear

 

                 A

To care. The aerogramme made a lily of necessity,
stumped box, redolence ribboned far off in the glass
cities I opened and closed to the dandy
drawers. A colt emerged on a clotted pansy. A pan
required fanning. This repose a thread files.
Inside the spitting rope sweeps
like a foppish knot or lighthouse,
a beam where the sun withers like snow
in its box of jewels. Like a towel-like now.

 

tiny broom zippers boxed

 

                 Z

Light as a ruler, I knitted the whiffing train to coverlet.
Dark, I had my lips. They travel apart when I kiss.
Exonerated groove. The captioned stock box
waved to the master’s bedroom.
Clacked suds. All flaking tide and shout
was music walking out a headlamp.
Engined isthmus, emerged track of levels, it could be
nice. The pubescent birdie sleeps
in a closed head. So,
it knows or it knows.
A crumb held out a mighty
citron in a beak, screwed backwards.
But no ox sniffled to an owl
or stockinged box strum through bedroom.

 

 

One And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary?
A “generation and transition” company make the
water muddy. Transitional generation in company
of a muddy mere formality: or was it going Dutch,
in transmission to transition? A mere formality of Dutch,
a merely formal vocabulary, to be used “in company”
of Dutch transmissions. My mission was to dutch
a trans-generation, to formulate transitions.
Or was it going muddy in the company?
I threw mud at mimesis, a mere Dutch formality.
And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary?
Formerly, the Dutch kept company without vocabulary.
My former mission was a mere formality,
but I doubled my Dutch on the company’s transmission.

 

 
Two Primitive haze or composite rejection?
Such training requires persistence–
a fateful hour, a stupid wheel, praiseworthy
annals–the main term “reaction” would be
retained, though searching for innocuous
phenomena. It was not enough to have
a patternbook, a dictatorship, or to claw walls
looking for paint. Returning to the decoding end:
you make it more cryptic. I’ll pant effectively.
Roughly, in the rough, we are roughing it.
This happens when I forget to differentiate–
a false proposition of the first order.
Or say: “When you hate maps, you hate the future.”
Our lines are at stake in the border.