Outside, America: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary American Fiction 9781472543776, 9781441161871

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Acknowledgments This book is based on my doctoral dissertation, which I submitted to Hokkaido University, Japan, in 2007. Since then, I have made sporadic attempts at editing it, dropping half the chapters and writing new ones to replace them. All the chapters of Outside, America have been previously published in academic journals, and I am deeply grateful to the referees and editors for their instructive and encouraging comments. As a Japanese scholar instructed almost exclusively in Japan, I owe my entire academic achievement to the rich tradition of literary criticism in the country. It is one of my greatest regrets to be unable to cite from all the inspiring ideas and perspectives provided by Japanese scholars; I realize how my project seems small compared to their achievements. The least I could do was to mention their names when needed. Every word in this book owes its existence to a number of generous people who have supported me throughout my decade-long scholarly journey through five cities—Sapporo, Tokyo, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Kyoto. First of all, I would like to thank Eijun Senaha, my advisor in Sapporo, who introduced me to the world of literary criticism when I was an undergraduate. He has always been, and will always be, my invaluable mentor, both academically and personally. My study in the graduate program in Hokkaido University would not have been possible without the members of the Hokkaido American Literature Society, who have given me many opportunities to present my ideas. My gratitude also goes to Motoyuki Shibata at the University of Tokyo, who gave me generous encouragement as well as opportunities to translate contemporary American novels. And many thanks to Ted Goossen and his family, whose generosity and hospitality made my Toronto days unforgettable. Thanks to my students and colleagues at Doshisha University in Kyoto. My father in Osaka and my mother in Kobe, as well as my parents-in-law in Sapporo, have always supported my study; I will always feel indebted to their trust. My deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Mayuko, for being beside me from the first word to the last; and to my daughter, Koume, who made us unafraid to carry on in this world.

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Introduction Toward the outside The central inspiration for this book, Outside, America, is undeniably Deleuzian: it will argue that, in contemporary American novels, the “outside” as a spatial idea reveals its limits, and a shift of focus to its temporal dimension is found. Consequently, the expansive idea of the “outside” space, which has provided the framework of American imagination, is transformed into a nonnationalistic mode. Despite its simplicity, this shift introduces a set of mutations in many aspects of conventional literary motifs and styles. The space outside has been a key idea in defining American character from the very inception of the state, as Michael J. Shapiro argues, “The democratic proclivities that Tocqueville ascribed to America were enabled by a more open model of space.”1 A similar insight comes from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: “liberty is made sovereign and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and continuous process of expansion. The frontier is a frontier of liberty.”2 This preoccupation with the “open” nature of the land and American identity has framed American literature from its early phase. The westward travel has thus become one of the most significant motifs in American literature; in Ronald Primeau’s words, the “need for defining a national identity sends many writers on the road in search of their country.”3 Typically seen in such narratives of the road, in which the myth of the West functions as a driving force of writing, open space is where one can achieve the sense of freedom—Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road leaves his home for the West Coast to pursue this ideal. This idea of outside space as an essential condition of American identity is critically examined in contemporary fiction, partly due to its complicity with the violent expansion and appropriation that marked the history of the continent. Indeed, the majority identity, white male American, has been formed in relation to this notion of mobility—for example, Alexandra Ganser describes the spatial idea as “the hegemonic construction of gendered space”4—which entails a number of power relationships 1

2 3

4

Michael J. Shapiro, “Bowling Blind: Post Liberal Civil Society and the Worlds of Neo-Tocquevillean Social Theory,” Theory & Event 1.1 (1997), para 2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), 169. Ronald Primeau, Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1996), 15. Alexandra Ganser, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 18.

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between genders, races, and so on. The critique of the spatial concept of the outside, therefore, involves more than perception of space; it is inseparable from the question of the basis of American subjectivity. Contemporary novels discussed in Outside, America push the spatial idea of the outside to its limit, at which point the concept breaks down. Wherever the characters travel, they cannot reach “pure” space of freedom; they find that their identity is not so much a free entity as a product of power relationships. At the same time, those narratives give a glimpse of a new question of time where space reveals its inability to sustain the myth of the free individual. It is in this sense that the discussion of this book keeps returning to the city on the land’s edge, Los Angeles, because of its singular location, both in American geography and imagination, as a place where the westward movement of the American Dream encounters its limit.5 There is no more outside space: this sense of impasse haunts Los Angeles as it appears in contemporary fiction, in which the belief in the future is replaced by the premonition of personal and social catastrophe. This condition also gives rise to a fundamental change of view; with the exhaustion of the spatial notion of freedom, a preoccupation with time emerges—the “outside” appears as a temporal dimension in contemporary literary imaginings. Of course, the concern with time in fiction is not new in itself: “the place of fictional narrative in the world has altered since the beginning of the twentieth century.” Mark Currie points out, “and . . . fiction has been one of the places in which a new experience of time has been rehearsed, developed and expressed.”6 Yet the time of the “outside” as it functions in the American framework in contemporary fiction offers a significant critical perspective on narrative temporality and its relationship with the collective and social dimensions. Contemporary literary texts in Outside, America, in examining the American self, find that the spatial outside goes hand in hand with a stable sense of time or historical sense of time; the space ahead, waiting to be reached and appropriated, necessarily produces a linear notion of time, in which the American character travels straight toward his/her destination: hence the recurring image of a road stretching toward the horizon. The critique of the self, therefore, must be accompanied by attempts at activating different modes of time. The exploration of the “outside,” then, ceases to be a journey to an external space where one can achieve a sense of freedom and wholeness. Rather, it seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference by which current

5

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This is why the city is frequently portrayed negatively in the genre of road narratives. Sal Paradise avoids Los Angeles throughout Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for the city is perceived as a sort of black hole for the traveler. Arriving at the city for the first time, Paradise sees “the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America” (Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1957), 83), stressing the city’s location in relation to the American Dream. For the traveler on the road, the city marks the end of his journey. Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), 6.

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subjectivity, both in its individual and collective aspects, is transformed. Elizabeth Grosz’s thesis, “the outside is the transmutability of the inside,”7 best describes such a view. Outside, America is an attempt to put this notion in action.

Pragmatics of time Crucial in this interrogation of American identity from the perspective of time is the idea that narrative is an act that practices a specific mode of temporality. “Literary works do not mean so much as they function”8—this Deleuzian insight also applies to the question of time. In contrast to the linear or integrated narrative forms that follow the logic of identity, fragmentary and repetitious styles are understood as pragmatic constructions of different modes of temporality that would enable the exploration of the “outside” of history and identity. Frederic Jameson is right in describing postmodernism as “an age that has forgotten how to think historically.”9 A crucial question in this condition is not making a choice between flat denial and conservation of historical sense; instead, how to activate a multiplicity of temporalities through narrative act in resisting the rule of a single teleological model has become a vital concern of contemporary American writers. “Our narratives,” Declan Sheerin argues, “may be born from different breeds and hybrids of larval selves.”10 A key insight in this line of inquiry is offered by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, who maintains that “postmodern narrative language undermines historical time and substitutes for it a new construction of temporality.”11 While she pays attention to “reader’s time,”12 the discussion of time in Outside, America tries to focus on a specific mode of time in each literary text. This view of literary texts as practices with specific temporal effects of the “outside” is close to the pragmatic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, rather than Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology based on “the time of an individual consciousness.”13 Instead of “narrative identity . . . understood in the sense of oneself as self-same,”14 narrative, seen as a practice, induces a break or a deviation from the given contours 7

8 9

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11

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Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT P, 2001), 66. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (New York: Routledge, 2003), 187. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), ix. Declan Sheerin, Deleuze and Ricouer: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self (New York: Continuum, 2009), 96. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 14. Ibid., 69. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 244. Ibid., 246.

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of the self. In a sense, this book tries to bring out a new possibility of Brian McHale’s seminal thesis that “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological,”15 for the preoccupation with “the outside as being time”16 as potential mutation of current subjectivity is inexorably ontological in nature. Therefore, the fundamental attitude of the project is ethical: to avoid the logic of identity, namely the reproduction of the current power-relationship, and to seek other possibilities in the “outside.” Accordingly, Outside, America presupposes different uses of such postmodernist tools as self-conscious metanarrative, insistence on textuality, principle of fragmentation, and parodic repetition. It picks up these clichés in postmodernist literature to introduce their new uses. As Jeffrey T. Nealon observes, it is “a matter of attempting to extend, broaden, or saturate certain effects within a given field, while trying to constrict, limit, or downplay other effects.”17 The fragmentary style in chapters 2 and 5, for instance, does not suggest the mere absence of unity but calls for attention to how each fragment operates and what kind of system, different from a unitary whole of a linear narrative time, they constitute; the utilization of an existent form of narrative produces a new effect in questioning the traditional mode of thinking. While Linda Hutcheon, in her early attempt to define postmodernism, argues that it “may at least show what needs undoing first,”18 the analysis of narrative temporality in this book will reveal that contemporary literary texts take one step further to construct ahistorical modes of time. The undertone of Ouside, America is, therefore, coherently positive and pragmatic. In a way, these texts can be seen as anomalies of postmodernism: born out of its conditions, they proceed further to the point where new effects are produced. The texts gathered here occupy a threshold between the current literary mode and its potential future.

Map of the book Although the word “turn” is used in its title, this book does not claim to be an advocate of a radical shift of critical perspective, as “linguistic,” “cultural” turns did (“cognitive” and “affective” ones are under way). The realization of the limits of space and the exploration of temporality do not form a chronological, much less progressive, development in literary imagination. Rather, those attempts only appear sporadically, like random flashes, among contemporary fiction. Outside, America aims to serve as a collection of those events to see what effects will be produced out of their connections. To quote Grosz again, “Texts, like concepts, do things, makes things, perform connections, bring about new alignments.”19 Far from a self-sufficient project, therefore, this book is made up of temporary encounters and connections between literary texts. 15 16 17

18 19

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), 10. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 98. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 95. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), 23. Grosz, Architecture, 58.

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The questions and motifs explored in one chapter—for instance, masculine identity, the double, and “cinematic world”—will be taken up again in others and given further variations, which will eventually constitute a system always open to connections to come. In a sense, the operation is similar to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a map: “The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.”20 Outside, America is divided into two parts; the first part discusses how American writers describe the limit of the spatial idea of the outside, while the second argues that the dead end of space is replaced by temporal ideas. Though thematically divided, the question of space and that of time cannot be separated completely; in many novels, they appear entangled, presupposing each other. What distinguishes the two parts is a focal point in each narrative: the novels discussed in the first part foreground the relationship between the American subject and the concept of “open space,” with the glimpse of a temporal motif lurking behind it, while those in the second pay more attention to the question of time in their interrogation of current subjectivity. Part One, Vanishing Space, begins with a brief look at Annie Proulx’s Postcards, focusing on the novel’s subversion of the myth of open space in road narratives while tracing a man’s journey, which turns from a straight westward movement into an aimless wandering. Mainly set in the post-World War II American landscape, Proulx’s novel shows that the sociopolitical forces have seized every dimension of space, leaving no outside to the lone traveler. Postcards completely overturns the imaginary topos of the West as the space of freedom. The following two chapters, dealing with traveling American men in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and William T. Vollmann’s The Atlas, take over this insight of Proulx and interrogate the protagonists’ subjectivity formed in power relationships in foreign lands—the movement beyond the border does not allow the idea of outside space to survive. The characters travel to foreign lands in order to reach the space of freedom, only to find that the relentless dynamics of power, especially those of gender, are at work in every place. The Mosquito Coast in Chapter 1 follows the journey of Allie Fox, a tyrannical father who moves beyond the border with his family to establish his masculine subjectivity in “clear” space in the late 1970s. His practices of masculinity exemplify that the father’s gender identity is a product of power relationships; the outside space, the Honduran jungle, is where the battle of subjectivization is fought. When his masculine identity becomes untenable and eventually collapses, the novel offers a flash of a different kind of “outside,” a temporal zone of the unknown, which is nevertheless sealed off in another regime of masculinity in the coming decade. William T. Vollmann’s fragmentary work also questions the masculine identity, in his case in the post-Cold War global context. The white male American traveler finds that, everywhere he visits, power relationships inescapably establish his position as an 20

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), 12.

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intolerable American man who desperately struggles to find an ideal space of equality and freedom. The travels to the outside places beyond the US border are eventually confined into the self-conscious framework of the American experience, which leaves no room for escape—the wanderer finds his doubles all over the world. Denis Johnson in Chapter 3 also describes this American manhood at a dead end, but his novel, Already Dead: A California Gothic, gives a glimpse of a temporal mode of the “outside.” Referring to the Nietzschean philosophy, the novel pursues the limit of the protagonist’s masculinity, namely a product of ressentiment, at the edge of California. When the profound breakdown of his subjectivity takes place, a new mode of self replaces the nihilistic identity, which involves a radical reconfiguration of the past. The limits of space and subjectivity now witness a question of time. Los Angeles in Steve Erickson’s work serves in a similar fashion. In Chapter 4, the city at the edge in his second novel, Rubicon Beach, is a site where the current self is constantly eroded to become indefinite, and power relationships strives to confine it in a knowable identity. This tug-of-war between escape and capture repeats itself over time, constituting the matrix of American history. The “outside” of the given identity, to which characters are attracted, reveals its aspect as an ahistorical mode of time. These four chapters provide the foundation for Part Two, Time Will Tell, which will take up the motifs and issues addressed in the previous part and explain how they will undergo significant changes in the temporal dimension. In Operation Wandering Soul, Richard Powers focuses on the temporal aspect of road narratives—the traditional attitude toward the space of freedom presupposes a linear mode of time that often appears as progressing history. Set in a pediatric establishment in Los Angeles, Powers’s novel describes an impasse of such an idea of time and suggests that the “outside” lies in an escape, not into open space, but into nonhistorical modes of time. One of those temporalities is at work in Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green discussed in Chapter 5. The novel focuses on the question of freedom in the theater of the Vietnam War, which is constructed as a “cinematic world” of clichés, where soldiers only play their determined roles. Seeking a way out of this frame, James Griffin, one of the American soldiers, discovers the “outside” of this world in the “in-between” of time that enables the constituted self to encounter its potential for mutation. The narrative, made up of fragments of past and present arranged in a nonlinear order, practices a temporality that defies the chronological time of identity. Chapter 6 will take up Don DeLillo’s novella, The Body Artist, and explore a temporal idea that alters the given view of the world and human identity. Using the motif of the double in a repetitive style, the narrative activates a temporality of the “outside” in which the body affirms its ever-changing condition in mutational time. The idea of repetition and its temporal function is further exemplified in Chapter 7, which analyzes Powers’s Prisoner’s Dilemma, and provides a variation on the theme of the “cinematic world” in the Cold War American landscape, where a communal effort by characters to renarrate the past life of their father transforms their own subjectivity in the big picture of the nation. Mobilizing the given identity of clichés in an attempt to solve the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” the metafictional repetition in the novel constitutes an open mode of narrative time.

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The last chapter of the book will revisit the City of Angels and argue that contemporary Los Angeles fiction—in particular, the texts by Sesshu Foster, Kate Braverman, and Steve Erickson are discussed together—grounds itself on the idea of ahistorical time that characterizes the city to explore into the time of the “outside,” in which a new mode of subjectivity and collectivity emerges. Finally, the concluding part will review some of the motifs discussed in the book, and conduct another connecting experiment: the temporal idea of the “outside” will be linked to a new generation of those “American” writers who were born outside the US border. This connection will reveal that the temporal aspect of narrative is also shared in the new century, while the preoccupation with “America” or national identity is dismissed. In other words, it will argue how fast American fiction is moving away from the national paradigm.

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Part One

Vanishing Space

Journey to the space outside, which goes hand in hand with the discovery of authentic self, has occupied a crucial place in American imagination. As Alexandra Ganser aptly argues that “geographical mobility, tied to social ascent, has always had a high symbolic value, shaping distinctly American idea(l) of freedom and national identity,”1 the road as the promise of new self appears repeatedly in American literature, from Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.2 This basic idea of the westward movement as a quest for American identity also survives in contemporary literature, typically in the motif of the road. Contemporary writers, on the other hand, share a critical attitude toward the traditional road motifs. Especially the 1990s saw a number of “anti-road” novels that subverted the conventions of the genre.3 Among them, Annie Proulx’s fist novel, Postcards, stands out with its relentless interrogation of American road experience in its central idea of space and freedom. The 1992 novel subverts the westward movement of American self by describing the lifelong journey of Loyal Blood, a Vermont-born farmer, who eventually turns into an aimless wanderer in the West. Through “a broad 1

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Alexandra Ganser, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 15. The narrator of Kerouac’s novel tries to get away from his stagnant daily life in New York. The opening passage of the novel mentions Sal’s recent divorce and his consequent feeling that “everything was dead” (Kerouac, On the Road, 1). On his way to the West Coast, the hero considers he has entered a new phase of life—“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future” (ibid., 15). The open space of the West appears as a promise of his new life, free from the burden of his past. Still, the novel proceeds to overturn this initial attitude toward the road: countless arrivals and departures in the narrative gradually lead to the narrator’s disillusionment with the spatial “outside.” Exhausting the possibilities of the spatial unknown, Sal Paradise is finally confronted with a sense of growing old that seizes Dean Moriarty, the road spirit incarnated. A skeptical attitude toward the road is seen in Stephen Wright’s Going Native (1994), Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance (1990), and Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope (1996), among others.

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East-West survey of American life during the 20th century,”4 Proulx’s novel undermines the promise of individual freedom in open space. In 1944, a Vermont farmer kills his girlfriend, hides her body, and runs away from his home. The opening lines of the novel depict the moment after the act of murder that launches Loyal Blood’s lifelong journey: Even before he got up he knew he was on his way. Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew. Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way. . . . he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.5

Having impulsively killed Billy, Loyal realizes he cannot continue his life on the farm. The typical road motif of “starting over” is replaced by the sudden feeling that “the route of his life veered away from the main line,”6 and the violent act would haunt him no matter how far he traveled. After disposing off her body, Loyal returns to his house, where he tells his family he is going away to start a new life with Billy and simply drives away from his farm. Another reversal of the road narrative convention is seen here: the hero’s journey is not an autonomous decision of the individual but an unhoped-for reaction to the thoughtless act. While Billy used to insist that “I’m not getting caught. I’m getting out of here and I’m going to be somebody,”7 repeating the typical American faith in the future that lies ahead, now the farmer finds himself on the run. There is no individual choice in the novel; with the event that has already happened, the journey begins even before Loyal understands the reason: “Billy, always yapping about moving away, getting out, making a new start, was staying on the farm. He, who’d never thought beyond the farm, never wanted anything but the farm, was on his way. Clenching the wheel.”8 Thus the reluctant traveler goes on the road in 1944. The year 1944 is significant in the sociohistorical context of the state: World War II and the highway planning. “‘There’s a War on, in case you forget,’” Mink tells his son; “‘Farm work is essential work. Forget out west.’”9 The descriptions of the Blood farm are consistently accompanied by references to the war. There is also a prospect of job at wartime factories, once Loyal leaves Vermont—this is the promise of a new life Billy dreamed of. Moreover, the same year saw the announcement of the plans for Interregional Highways. According to David W. Jones, the 1944 plan “was proposing an extraordinarily ambitious agenda for future highway construction both within and between U.S. metropolitan areas.”10 When Loyal declares his departure, the route to 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

Wes Berry, “Capitalism vs. Localism: Economies of Scale in Annie Proulx’s Postcards and That Old Ace in the Hole,” in The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, ed. Alex Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 171. Annie Proulx, Postcards (New York: Scribner, 1992), 3. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 11. David W. Jones, Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2008), 81.

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Vanishing Space

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the West is not so much a figment as a concrete possibility that the national project has laid ground for. The ex-farmer on the road thus drives westward, at first following Billy’s plan: “He’d drive west, but keep to the border. Those cities she’d named, South Bend, Detroit, Gary, Chicago, those were the places.”11 These cities form a straight westward line from Vermont, loyal to the promise of the road: “West, that was the direction.”12 However, he gradually realizes the impossibility of shedding away his past self; glancing at the farmlands stretching beside the road, or looking down at the plain from a window, Loyal is reminded of his connection to the Vermont farm: His blood, urine, feces and semen, the tears, strands of hair, vomit, flakes of skin, his infant and childhood teeth, the clippings of finger and toenails, all the effluvia of his body were in that soil, part of that place.13

Kent C. Ryden is right in stating that in “Loyal’s remembering, the farm and he are one and the same.”14 This fact is further highlighted by the word “effluvia,” which refers to Loyal’s bodily particles connected to the farmland. The use of the word demonstrates that the self, connected to the soil and the past in its molecular level, cannot be entirely free from the land; the essential components of Loyal’s subjectivity do not change even after getting away from his home. While movement in the road narrative is essentially an opportunity to rediscover oneself as a free individual, Loyal Blood, with his effluvia bound to the earth, finds himself in an opposite condition: loyal to his blood. The narrative follows Loyal’s cross-continental journey and describes the sociopolitical forces in the post-World War II America, which denies his attempts to reach free, open space. Loyal goes through and glimpses every kind of space in the West, only to realize none of them provides him a possibility of freedom—it has already evaporated in the Cold War state. Four decades after he departs from Vermont, the traveler is left with a sense of exhaustion and aging. In 1951, after being robbed of all the money he has earned in factories, he begins to work in a uranium mine called Mary Mugg. This downward movement logically follows his inability to escape from the haunting land-farm-self connection: when the space on the surface could not offer him any possibility of freedom, he goes underground. This space in the West, however, does not lead to any sense of autonomy. As Michael A. Amundson points out, “the growing insecurity of the Cold War led the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to launch a massive uranium hunt to find domestic sources for atomic bombs”15 after the legislation of the Atomic Energy Act in 1946, five years before Loyal comes to the mine. The space beneath the ground is thoroughly seized by the force of the state, now engaged in the Cold War. 11 12 13 14

15

Proulx, Postcards, 24. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 77. Kent C. Ryden, “The Corpse in the Stone Wall: Annie Proulx’s Ironic New England,” in The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, ed. Alex Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 76. Michael A. Amundson, “Mining the Grand Canyon to Save It: The Orphan Lode Uranium Mine and National Security,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001): 324.

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Loyal’s days in Mary Mugg end with an abrupt collapse of the mine. He gives up mining and finds a new job as a fossil hunter in the West. But again, these open fields are not an untouched space; on the contrary, they are connected to the “archeologists and paleontologists from museums and universities back east”16 as the end-buyer of his fossils. Loyal, the fossil hunter, becomes increasingly weary of this fact and finally quits the job. With the open ground and underground space devoid of the possibility of freedom, Loyal’s eyes turn upward: he begins to work as assistant to an amateur astronomer in New Mexico in 1966; this time, too, it becomes clear that outer space is not a free area. “‘I do not get time at a big telescope!’” the astronomer complains to Loyal. “‘My amateur status bars me from the big ones! (The academics stand in line for years to use them.) . . . We are losing the sky, we have lost it.’”17 Even though he claims that “‘Nothing is impossible in space,’”18 the space is closed for amateurs like him; it was the late 1960s, in the middle of the development of the Apollo Program that has appropriated outer space as part of the national strategy. Space cannot be Loyal’s New Frontier. Thus the possibility of freedom in every kind of space is exhausted; the promise of the road—a fresh start in a no-man’s land—is completely removed from the protagonist’s meandering. Instead, the sense of being trapped and growing old begins to dominate the whole text: “He had it straight now; there were special roads and paths across the country that he could travel, but many more roads were closed to him. Permanently closed. . . . His hair had gone mostly white. Damn near sixty years old.”19 Postcards thoroughly overturns the promise of the road.The end of the narrative finds Loyal in Minneapolis in the late 1980s, living as one of the panhandlers on the streets. “Worn out, worn down, used up. That’s all, folks.”20 Proulx’s novel sets the keynote of the first part of Outside, America—the simple affirmation of travelers who take to the road “for the freedom to explore or redefine themselves”21 is no longer tenable, for the seemingly “open” space turns out to be a site where social, political, and economic forces are entangled.22 A number of power relationships have already seized the space of the road, from which the traveler himself cannot be free. Far from an innocent individual seeking autonomy, he is tied to his own identity as the product of the given conditions. Thus the dead end of the road calls for the critical examination of the traveler’s subjectivity.

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

Proulx, Postcards, 147. Ibid., 170–1. Ibid., 171. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 298. Ronald Primeau, Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1996), 15. I borrowed this idea from Keita Hatooka’s discussion of “open space.”

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Journey to the End of the Father: Paul Theroux’s Battlefield of Masculinity in The Mosquito Coast

“The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one’s entire life.”1 In this statement, Paul Theroux joins the most explicit critics of masculinity among contemporary American writers. The Mosquito Coast, his 1981 novel, is a full-blown expression of this critical attitude, delineating the portrait of Allie Fox, a despotic father who struggles to achieve his ideal of traditional manhood by escaping with his family from the United States to Honduras, thus keeping alive the national myth of the road beyond the border. Critics agree that the novel ironically adopts the American mythology of the sovereign individual embodied by Allie.2 However, the novel’s description of his anachronistic pursuit to be a “self-made man” and its eventual breakdown aims at pointing to the conditions of masculinity in the period of transition from the late 1970s to the Reagan era, during which the family’s entire journey takes place. In other words, the task of The Mosquito Coast is to resist the masculine view of the spatial “outside,” instead providing a diagnosis of contemporary American manhood. Through its detailed description of the father’s ascent to the throne of the self-made man, the novel discloses the fundamental mechanism of American manliness: it is a series of practices that capture and subject the male characters, making them 1

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Paul Theroux, “The Male Myth,” in About Men: Reflections on the Male Experience, ed. Edward Klein and Don Erickson (New York: Poseidon, 1987), 217. Samuel Coale argues that Allie reflects “the great American faith in an ultimate self ” (Paul Theroux, 121). Other critics follow a similar path: in Steven R. Luebke’s words, the novel is a “tragic fable about the strengths and weaknesses of American individualism” (“Self ’s Dark Circle,” 230); Hans Bertens agrees with him on this point, noting that Allie “closely echoes such nineteenth-century prophets of self-reliance and authenticity as Emerson and Thoreau” (“The Convention of New Beginning,” 393). Though these critics tend to identify Allie with the spiritual and ideological character of the Emersonian individual, the novel also emphasizes the more practical aspect of masculinity, namely its Franklinian features. Allie’s ideal, with its preference for wilderness and utilitarian self-sufficiency, is an amalgam of these two elements.

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coherent individuals as the end-product.3 The nuclear family sets the boundary of the exercise of the practices, and within this sphere, the process of masculinity takes hold of the bodies of Allie and his two sons. The body as the battlefield where the process of subjectivization is imposed and taken on is the main principle of the novel. In Pierre Bourdieu’s words, “Inscribed in the things of the world, the masculine order also inscribes itself in bodies through the tacit injunctions.”4 However, in spite of his elaborate program of action, the father’s actual practices generate unexpected consequences: the force of resistance is provoked in his children, and collisions with outer organizations undermine Allie’s kingdom. Thus he falls from his sovereignty, and eventually loses the minimum requirement of his masculinity, his body. The father’s journey outside the US border does not provide him the possibility of a free, masculine self. Having witnessed this relentless rise and fall of the “self-made man” in Honduras, Charlie Fox, the 14-year-old son, is ready to return to his homeland at the end of the novel. Despite this seemingly positive closure, it is suggested that another regime of masculinity awaits Charlie with indirect means of subjectivization in the post-Vietnam period. Describing the father’s archaic practices of masculinity in Honduras, the novel indicates another face of the present, a new strategy of subjectivization: while the appraisal of the traditional value of “man” is foregrounded in the system of language, the direct means of capturing the body are replaced by the prevalence of the masculine body-images. A different strategy of masculinity awaits the surviving sons, leaving no pure room for freedom—this is the ultimate destination toward which the entire narrative of The Mosquito Coast leads.

The rise: Thy father, Thy king Through the narration of Charlie, the novel reveals the pragmatics of masculinity: rather than a mere ideology, the father’s struggle to establish himself as an anachronistically traditional “self-made man” is, as described in the novel, a process of concrete practices, both discursive and bodily. Allie’s ideal is not an impossible illusion; it comes into being only after certain procedures of subjectivization are carried out, and his immigration to Honduras with his family is nothing other than the fulfillment of the necessary conditions for his sovereign status as the masculine subject. The story of the family’s exodus begins in Massachusetts, on an asparagus 3

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In the novel, the Oedipal character of the family—the triangle of father, mother, and son, which is permeated with the Law of the Father—is not a pregiven structure that decides the subjectivity of Allie and Charlie in advance. Rather, the Law, or the father’s dominant position, is maintained by an aggregate of his actual utterances and practices. It is a matter of sustaining a power relationship within the family through “a set of procedures for identification, codification, narration, and induction” (Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies, 59) rather than the predetermined Oedipal structure. Allie’s “rise” consists of making this relation unquestionable. Instead of posing the full-fledged subject, the novel depicts the subjectivization, the process of masculine practices that yields the self-made man as an effect. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (London: Polity, 2001), 24.

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farm where the father starts to prepare for the move, not to the West but to a foreign country. The novel’s first half, from the beginning of the family’s departure to the settlement in Honduras, focuses on showing the father’s effort to reject American subjectivity in the late 1970s and become the traditional, self-made man. Allie’s program proceeds in three main phases: his initial assertion of the transcendental image of the self-sufficient man in New England; its application to bodies and its surroundings in the jungle of Honduras; and the ultimate emergence of the masculine and sovereign subject as the end-of-chain product, as is indicated by the construction of the icehouse in the new community. From the beginning of the novel, Allie appears as a man of words, a nonstop talker whose utterances determine his disposition.5 On the asparagus farm, he repeatedly insists on his autonomy, exclaiming, “‘I’m the last man!’”6 thus drawing a dividing line between himself and the outer world—as a discursive practice, his words function as “a division and a rejection”7 differentiating him from others and defining him as a self-sufficient man, who only lacks the space of freedom. Employed as an inventor on a farm owned by Tiny Polski, Allie nevertheless tries to maintain his independence. “It was impossible,” Charlie says, “to think of Polski, or anyone else, as Father’s boss. Father did not take orders. . . . ‘He owns people,’ Father said. ‘But he doesn’t own me.’”8 The father dismisses the owner’s management of the farm as dishonest business, something that exploits his talent as well as the market, and prepares himself for a departure to an “empty place with nothing but his brains and his toolbox.”9 With the myth of the West having already exhausted itself, he chooses Honduras as his outside. As a follower of traditional individualism, Allie vehemently rejects the current mode of American self situated in its relations with outer forces. Preparing to emigrate, Allie continually criticizes the external reality of the United States, especially its economic situation as he witnesses it. Immigrants from Central America as the labor force of the farm, products from Asian countries in every store, and the American currency in the throes of inflation—all things Allie considers the phenomena of nationwide corruption, saying, “‘That’s America. . . . It’s a disgrace. Breaks my heart.’”10 The current state, which, “[i]n the course of the 1970s in particular . . . made a transition from dominance to interdependence,”11 is unacceptable to Allie. This dependence on a network of relations with external factors rankles this man who aspires to an autonomous existence. “‘Get 5

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Although he repeatedly emphasizes the neutrality of his speech by saying, “‘I’m just thinking out loud’” (The Mosquito Coast, 203), Allie’s utterances are, in effect, speech-acts that interfere with reality: his words form “part of the dramaturgy of the real” (Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 160). In the novel, his statements themselves operate on the utterer himself, driving him in a particular direction toward the revival of the traditional self-made man. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 14. Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 28. Ibid., 24 (Italics added). Ibid., 40. Claudia Wörmann, “Reconstruction of Economic Strength?: The (Foreign) Economic Policy of the Reagan Administration,” in The Reagan Administration: A Reconstruction of American Strength? ed. Helga Haftendorn and Jakob Schissler (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 55.

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out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel . . . and let’s talk self-sufficiency!’”12 he declares to his wife. These utterances resonate with the conservative movement of the period, namely the New Right, which gave rise to “the revival of an old American mythology about the self-made man”13 in the late 1970s. In this sense, Allie’s insistence on the nation’s economic independence and the defense of traditional values is not new. The patriarch of the Foxes does not create his criticism of the present but simply repeats the reemerging discourse as his own personal statements: as he comments on his talent as an inventor, it is “just magnifying what already exists.”14 However, even though he shares with the New Right antipathy toward the “weakened” country and inclination to traditional values, Allie’s response to the problem greatly differs from that of the political movement, in that he decides to abandon living in the United States altogether. “‘No one loves this country more than I do,’ Father said. ‘And that’s why I’m going. Because I can’t bear to watch.’”15 Allie’s words impel him toward the establishment, in an archaic way, of the strictly traditional subjectivity of masculine character: “[L]anguage is the site, and the instrument, of subjectivation/subjection.”16 Although his words form a system of the self-sufficient man, the late 1970s, as he witnesses them, lack a corresponding reality reflecting his utterances. He seeks in his exodus to establish a “system of light,”17 namely a concrete environment that functions together with his words, so that the visible and the articulable will constitute a seamless reality. On arriving at Jeronimo in the Honduran jungle, Allie describes the plan of the family-territory that he tries to bring into visible existence: “I see a house here,” he said. “Kind of a barn there, with a workshop—a real blacksmith’s shop, with a forge. Over there, the outhouse and plant. Slash and burn the whole area and we’ve got four or five acres of good growing land . . . and once we’ve got control of the water we can grow rice and do some serious hydraulics.”18

Allie’s program for an ideal community begins with these words, anticipating their realization. To bring this design into existence requires more than endless talking. Charlie likens the primary effort of settlement to a battle: “Soon, most of Jeronimo was slashed and burned. It looked as though a battle had been fought there—black land, black stumps, steam and smoke issuing from cracks in the earth.”19 This violent destruction of the indigenous vegetation prepares the “open” ground where Allie can work. The father then employs his body to the extreme, working without sleeping and refusing to eat in his family’s presence. “After we got to Jeronimo he claimed that he 12 13

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Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 48. Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1982), 328. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 87. Ibid., 73. Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, The Force of Language (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 169. Deleuze, Foucault, 32. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 139. Ibid., 149.

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could go without sleep. He was awake when we went to bed, and he was at work when we got up in the morning.”20 The activity of the father’s body is thoroughly devoted to the structuring of the space in the community. His body is completely utilized and molded in the shape of a laboring man, which becomes the standard in the community.21 Organization, therefore, is the main principle with which Allie is obsessed in his construction of the community. The space of Jeronimo is divided into plots that are assigned to each member of the family—“one plot for each kid, who had to keep his portion weeded.”22 As a consequence of his bodily effort, an ordered space is developed, and the family is constantly under his surveillance in this space. Thus Allie builds a panoptic space in which the family members are put to work to perfect the father’s plan. “It was Father’s policy that no one should be idle.”23 A network of relations is formed, in which the father becomes ubiquitous and dominating. Others are urged to submit to the standard embodied by him—the formula of this organization is “to impose a particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity.”24 This practice of organization has a double effect: it at once constitutes the meaningful and organized sphere inside, and the jungle outside as its negative other, a meaningless chaos. As Charlie repeatedly recounts the clamor of the jungle in the night, the outer territory, as opposed to the ordered community, is regarded as threatening disorder. “Beyond our tents and our little fire,” he recollects, “the jungle was black. The blackness screeched, it grunted—it had risen up and wrapped us in its noise and in its sweet-sour folds.”25 The fear of the unknown and dark space conversely establishes the predictable and secure internal territory or the system of visibility, where the father executes his plan of community.26 “We were organized, Father said.”27 Alongside the division of space, Allie’s strategies also include the manipulation of time, which ensures the self-made man’s identity. “‘The Iron Age comes to Jeronimo,’ Father said. ‘A month ago, it was the Stone Age. . . . We’re moving right along. It’ll be 1832 in a few days! By the way, people, I’m planning to skip the twentieth century altogether.’”28 By rejecting the twentieth century, especially the late 1970s, Allie aims to accomplish the linear “progress” from the state of nature to the year 1832, when the

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Ibid., 156. Seventy-five pushups serve as a criterion of manhood in the novel. “‘How many push-ups can you do?’” (ibid., 78, 125, 128) is one of Allie’s favorite phrases directed toward other male grownups. According to this standard, men are distributed in the hierarchy of masculinity, on top of which stands the father, as he is convinced that “‘I’m the only one around here carrying the ball’” (ibid., 200). Ibid., 148. Ibid., 147. Deleuze, Foucault, 34. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 145. At one point, Allie feigns that he is simply a servant of the family, caring for their welfare and interests. However, this attitude in fact gives him a means of dominance over the family in that the everyday life of each member becomes unsustainable without the father. “Father might say things like ‘I’m working for you’ or ‘Tell me what to do,’ but he was in charge” (The Mosquito Coast, 215). Allie administers and manages all the activity in the community, so that his presence permeates throughout the sphere of the family. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 203. Ibid., 162.

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term “self-made man” was coined in English.29 Fixing the flow of time on this immobile “present” solidifies Allie’s identity as a self-made man. The spatiotemporal boundaries are successfully set by the father: the inside is organized and distinguished from the chaotic jungle, and the inside’s temporality, far from the unstable transition of the 1970s, becomes solid ground for his identity. His body is kept within the boundaries and subjected to the organization that he has established, actualizing an autonomous, self-identical man. “Maintained visible in its post, comparable with the constellation of other individuals . . . the individuated disciplined body has, or is, a value.”30 Thus Allie declares, “‘This is the center of the world!’”31 Following the control of the space-time conditions of Jeronimo, the construction of the gigantic icehouse called Fat Boy testifies to the eventual emergence of the masculine subject. As indicated by Charlie’s admission that “the truth was that ice was not a necessity so far,”32 Fat Boy is an excess in the community, whose primary function is not to facilitate the workings of communal activities but to display, with its foreignness in the environment, the victory of the father’s order over the surrounding world. As an expression of his “superior civilization,”33 the ice machine comes to represent the sovereignty of the patriarch. Entering the machine, the son feels that “this was Father’s head, the mechanical part of his brain and the complications of his mind.”34 Only after the effort of organization is carried out through the labor of the body can the brain, as “the over-all effect,”35 appear to declare the sovereign manhood of the patriarch.36 Ice is the crystallization of these practices that function within the community that includes Allie, the family, the spatial territory of the community, and the temporal progression. “‘You feel a little like God,’”37 Allies says when handling the ice bricks the machine produces. Beneath this throne of the self-made man, Allie’s bodily toil seizes all the elements of the community. As Michael Kimmel notices, the self-made man is “a control freak.”38

The fall: Cracks in the throne The father’s reign does not last long. The order of the community he builds and maintains engenders forces of resistance in the bodies of the children. The two sons, 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 26. Lingis, Foreign Bodies, 60. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 182. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 168. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 93. Allie’s transcendent position is only an effect of his actual utterances and activities, which are themselves situated in concrete conditions in the community. As Brian Massumi argues, “Transcendence, despite its best efforts, is a mode of becoming immanent” (A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, 112). The father’s sovereignty requires the diversity of practices as its precondition. The self-made man is not merely an ideological fiction but actually produced reality, as in Foucault: “power produces; it produces reality” (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, 194). Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 209. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 45.

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Charlie and Jerry, are subjected to the paternal system of masculinity, and they begin to seek another possibility in life through their reproduction of a contemporary American lifestyle. Additionally, when Allie encounters other systems surrounding his, the paternal organization loses its absolute superiority through its failure to subordinate these other systems. Like a downward spiral, the narrative rushes toward the total disintegration of Allie’s plan: after a fatal clash with another system, his community collapses, and eventually it is reduced to a floating house on the river, and finally the father’s masculinity collapses when, mortally wounded after his escapade at the missionaries’ encampment at Guampu, he is no longer able to maintain his masculine body, the fundamental center of his territory. Insofar as the self-made man is an ideal program that requires diverse and painstaking practices, there are always areas of fragility and possibilities of resistance against it in the realm of its actual administration. The growing gap between Allie and his two sons, unexpected armed intruders, and the hostile weather, these local but significant factors decisively lead to the fall of his kingdom. Allie’s strategy of establishing himself as a self-made man is, at the same time, also a process of actualizing the manly subjectivity of the two sons; “he was making me a man,”39 says Charlie. As Allie’s own ideal manhood is realized by the thorough utilization of the body, it also captures the bodies of the sons to make them men.40 Examination of their courage is one of the main tools of this process of subjectivization. On their way to Honduras, Allie repeatedly puts Charlie’s courage to the test, making him stand on a rock surrounded by a rising tide, or climb a mast in stormy weather, saying, “‘Think you can do it, Charlie?’”41 The training in the acquisition of manhood is primarily imposed on the body, to install a manly disposition in the son. During these examinations, however, the son feels resentment toward the father. From the rock on the beach, Charlie regards his father and feels distant from him: “I felt like a stranger to him. We were two people pausing—one on a rock, the other on the sand, child and adult. I did not know him, he did not know me. I had to wait to discover who we were.”42 In this phase, the distance from, or the forces of resistance against, the father emerge as identity confusion. In Jeronimo, where children are incorporated into the manly order of the father, Charlie and other children begin an escape from the paternal sphere, establishing another system on its periphery. Their resistance is carried out as a return to the contemporary way of life denied to them, even back in the United States. They relocate

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Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 169. Masculinity is not simply exercised from above, by Allie; it is also called for by Charlie to differentiate himself from Jerry. The elder brother takes the father’s examination of virility not only to win paternal approval but to prove himself superior to his younger brother—“In order to see Jerry try and fail,” Charlie says, “I would have to do it first” (Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 95). This power relationship between the brothers is maintained throughout the novel, so that the family is permeated with the logic and practices of masculinity. The sons’ resistance to the father does not reach this internalized power relationship, as Charlie calls Jerry “a spackoid and a sissy—it was what Father would have said—and I felt stronger” (Ibid., 213). Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 93. Ibid., 72.

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their bodies into different apparatuses from the paternal one, actualizing different identities than that of the self-made man. In The Acre, a camp the children secretly set up near the community, they reenact the school, the church, and the currency system. “I liked this place,” Charlie recollects, “. . . because it was filled with things that Father had forbidden.”43 In this practice, the children move from one order to another transversely, keeping inside themselves a space that escapes the process of subjectivization administered by Allie. Furthermore, when their bodies connect to the jungle, another way of existence begins to emerge: “[W]e ate the fruit that grew nearby and used anything we found, and adapted ourselves to the jungle. . . . We just lived like monkeys.”44 Charlie and other children actualize several identities according to their interactions with the environment, thus preserving a distance from Allie’s plan.45 It is this contact with the jungle that provokes a fundamental questioning of the paternal cosmos. Shortly after he becomes accustomed to the jungle, Charlie comes to recognize it as another form of organization rather than mere chaos, a view that disarranges the rigid teleological hierarchy produced by the father: This jungle, the start of the high forest, was tall and orderly—each tree had found room to grow separately. The trees were arranged in various ways, according to slenderness or leaf size. . . . I had always pictured jungle as suffocating spaghetti tangles, drooping and crisscrossed, a mass of hairy green rope and clutching stems.46

The jungle, formerly regarded as a frightful and meaninglessness outside, proves to be a system in itself, where various plants coexist. The father’s inside/outside division loses its effectiveness: since the jungle is a system that operates on a different logic than Allie’s community, the paternal space and the jungle do not form a binary opposition between order and chaos, but reveal themselves as simply two different organizations without a hierarchy. Despite his assertion that his plan is a goal of civilization, Allie’s “free” space in Honduras is in reality a new formation of forces established in the midst of other organizations, and accordingly runs the risk of conflict or collision with them. By the father’s expedition to a remote village, the collision between organizations becomes apparent. After a long journey on foot, Allie and his two sons arrive at a village where, in Allie’s view, white men are enslaved by the local residents—the whole village is governed by a different logic than his kingdom. The father urges them to free themselves with his familiar logic of the autonomous individual, saying, “‘They haven’t any right to own you.’”47 However, the men only ask him to leave the village, refusing his 43 44 45

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Ibid., 176. Ibid., 177. While Allie draws a strict line of division between himself and the outside environment so that his individuality can be maintained, the boundaries of the self experienced by the children are more fluid, which gives them possibilities of freedom from Allie’s dominance: they resist the identity imposed on them by discovering within themselves the means for becoming-other. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 191. Ibid., 231.

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suggestion. Allie’s ice-making organization comes face to face with another order, only to fail to transform or conquer it; the paternal order loses its privilege as the absolute telos and turns out to be one of many organizations. This silent battle, which Allie loses, is a watershed in the life of the Foxes in the region: it is evident that Jeronimo, Allie’s shining city on the hill, is surrounded by many forces with which it could collide at any moment. Allie’s kingdom manifests its fragility, which, together with his denial of defeat, disappoints Charlie. “Again and again I tried to remember ice in Father’s hands and amazement on the faces of the Indians,” the son recollects. “But there was none: no ice, no surprise. It had all been worse and odder than his lie. They had told us to go away.”48 The father’s ideal realm thus loses its status. When three intruders come to Jeronimo, wielding guns and showing their intentions to stay there as parasites, the power relationship in the community is significantly shaken. Not having any weapon to scare them away, Allie can no longer act as a sovereign in their presence, but only suggest that they find a better place somewhere else. “‘I am giving you a chance,’ he said. Now he was almost pleading. ‘I am offering you my cayuka. You would be wise to shove off.’”49 However, he fails to get rid of them, revealing the powerlessness of his utterances in the face of a stronger force. Charlie thus witnesses a change in Allie’s system of language. “Father’s mood had changed. He sulked, he chewed his cigar. He did not speak to any of us, but instead walked around mumbling.”50 The father’s sovereignty is undermined by the external force, which disrupts his discursive system that previously dominated other members. In order to make a breakthrough in this situation, Allie and Charlie lure the outsiders into Fat Boy and try to freeze them to death. The eventual explosion of the icehouse, like that of a nuclear plant, makes the whole of Jeronimo unlivable, laying the father’s previous effort in the dust. The coagulation of the power relationships dissipates: the ice melts away. In order to maintain his sovereignty in this situation, Allie revives his persistent eschatological discourse, insisting that “‘Cape Cod’s been blown away. . . . There’s nothing left— nothing at all. . . . Jeronimo was nothing compared to the destruction of the United States.’”51 As long as he remains the sole recourse for the family’s survival, Allie can maintain his dominant position in the family. Referring to an imaginary catastrophe in their homeland, he erases the possibilities of going home, and thereby insists that his is the only space of living: “‘This is the way the first family faced things.’”52 By this assertion, with its disputability being temporally suspended, Allie aims to maintain the organized relations in the community that become mobile and unstable after the

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Ibid., 235. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 284. In his eschatological logic that aims at the subjection of the family, the resemblance of Allie to Christian theology is clear, despite his apparent antipathy toward the latter. The difference between the two systems lies only in the ideal value each carries: God in Christianity is replaced by the sovereign man in Allie’s plan, as he tells Rev. Spellgood, “‘Man is God’” (ibid., 93). Missionary Spellgood and Allie-the-last-man are, in fact, coworkers who exercise the strategies of subjection— both aim to organize the herd (family or native people) with a transcendent value. Ibid., 279.

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collapse of Jeronimo. Nevertheless, his resulting attempt at resettlement culminates in a worse form of life. Confronted with the ruin of his ideal plan, Allie has to modify his objective, replacing the ice with “self-preservation.”53 His superior position is gradually questioned, and his wife explicitly opposes him for the first time: “‘Your garden is imaginary. Your chickens are imaginary. There is no crop. We haven’t planted anything. You talk about livestock and weaving! There’s nothing here but the trash from the beach.’”54 With the absence of visible reality, the father’s order becomes more and more questionable. Allie, unable to show that his plan is a better way of life, can merely invoke the hypothetical catastrophe in their homeland. When the heavy rain finally washes away the new settlement, their house becomes a boat on which they live with Allie the captain, who claims, “‘I planned it this way!’”55 Sailing upstream, the paternal community is cut down to the size of the floating house, in which Allie still strives to maintain his discipline. When the two sons show a sign of defiance, a physical punishment is inflicted on them. As he repeats the gesture of the autonomous man, his tyrannical character is foregrounded; gradually, he becomes a parody, rather than a copy, of the masculine model he worships and aims to embody. The value of the “original” self-made man is put into question by the figure of Allie, who becomes one of “the comedians of this ideal.”56 The crude character of the self-made man reveals itself through a crack in the mask, prompting a mistrust of its value. The tyrannical movement comes to a sudden halt when the father is severely injured in his battle to eliminate the missionary community of Rev. Spellgood that he encounters upstream. Totally paralyzed because of a wound in the neck, Allie finds himself unable to respond to the expectations he has for his own body. “Only Father’s head was alive,”57 while his body lives independently of his own will, showing the nonsubjective aspect of his corporeal life. Having lost the visible correspondence to the body, his words point to the incapacity of the human body. “‘It’s a bad design, the human body,’” he laments.58 Then he goes on to condemn the female body in particular, revealing the status of the feminine as the implicit precondition of his machismo: Women, Charlie, they’re in bad shape. They leak, they drip. It’s terrible about women’s bodies, how they leak. All that blood, all that useless fat. . . . No wonder they’re so mad, wondering what they’re for. It’s humiliating to have a body with a design fault.59

In this discourse that emphasizes the inferiority of the female body, his words at first demonstrate “the process of phallicizing the male body” which, according to Elizabeth 53 54 55 56

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Ibid., 298. Ibid., 298. Ibid., 324. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kauffman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 160. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 372. Ibid., 375. Ibid., 376.

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Grosz, “involves the constitution of the sealed up, impermeable body”60 by excluding the indeterminate flow as the characteristic feature of the feminine.61 However, with his inert body, there is no longer any clear distinction between his body and the female one; his damnation of the female body and his own body forms a continuity, without any difference in nature: “‘I thought I was the strongest man in the world. I’m just pulp.’”62 The principal mechanism of the exclusion of the feminine no longer works, so that Allie cannot maintain his masculine distinctness. Allie loses his ability to utilize language appropriately and connect it to reality, and his speech becomes gibberish: “He spoke in babytalk about living on all fours far away in Mosquitia, and about going to sea in a sieve. Usually, he said nothing. He stared.”63 The paternal discourse, with the downfall of the visible body, loses its support and disintegrates without force on others. As it becomes obvious that the father is no longer able to maintain the power relationships based on his body, his masculinity collapses, and his words are transformed into nonsense.64 Allie’s death on the coast makes eloquently manifest the collapse of his twofold organization of discourse and visibility: he is assaulted by vultures, one of which pulls out his tongue. His defenseless body and tongue as the final prey of birds pose the failure to retain the process of subjectivization. Even though Allie’s discourse presents the self-made man as a transcendent existence, this discourse is in fact produced and maintained in the immanent dimension of the body and actual power relationships, which can be deformed by contingent factors. The intruders, unstable climate, and the accident that befalls the father’s body corrode the foundation of his throne—the space he reigns in—and finally lead to utter ruin.

Another rise: Charlie and the vicious circle Allie’s little kingdom falls. In spite of his assumption that Honduras is an outside space bereft of civilization where his order can enjoy privileged status, there are numerous unforeseen forces that await him and his family, swallowing up his plan. Jeronimo is in fact a focal point where a diversity of forces interact and struggle with one another. The possibilities for mutation and disintegration of

60

61

62 63 64

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1994), 200–1. In this sense, the practice of masculinity in the family inevitably involves the female characters, Allie’s wife and the two daughters. They are not excluded from Allie’s kingdom, but are the silent presupposition upon which the patriarchal order is grounded. In The Mosquito Coast, the wife and the twins almost always follow the father’s decisions, so that the father-women relations are kept stable. There is, therefore, a mute battle imposed on the female characters, which is not fully delineated in the novel. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 376. Ibid., 379. Allie’s babytalk about going to sea in a sieve is an allusion to “The Jumblees,” a nonsense poem by the Victorian poet Edward Lear. The father’s previous utterances also include quotations from T. S. Eliot.

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the sovereign subject are therefore inherent in the community itself; as Foucault argues, “no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings.”65 With the patriarch’s demise, the ordered forces are temporally liberated and become unpredictable—a different kind of the “outside” that Charlie experiences as he recognizes the overwhelming infinity of the world. The son’s eventual return to the United States sets the limit of the knowable on this confusion. The novel’s closure, therefore, implies his participation in another order in the “present,” the late 1970s and the coming age of the “‘remasculinization’—a regeneration of the concepts, constructions, and definitions of masculinity.”66 Instead of suggesting the complete obsoleteness of Allie’s program on the one hand or its correspondence with the conservative movement of the coming decade on the other, various clues scattered throughout The Mosquito Coast point to the historical change in the strategy of masculinity: beneath the common discursive practice of traditional manhood, the operation of masculine subjectivization on the body in the “present” becomes indirect and difficult to recognize. With sporadic suggestions, the novel indicates the “becoming” of contemporary masculinity. With the father’s death, the family becomes lost in the coastal area without any plan for the future. In this intermediary state, in which Allie’s system has collapsed and a new organization has yet to be established, the ordered forces break loose, giving rise to a realm of indeterminacy: After Father died, time changed. The days were long and unbroken like a sentence with no commas and we felt lost like this. . . . Once I had believed in Father, and the world had seemed very small and old. He was gone, and now I hardly believed in myself, and the world was limitless.67

It is the realm of potentiality per se, where Charlie cannot define who he is. When the paternal spatiotemporal organization no longer functions, the world emerges as frightening infinity, namely the “outside.” The stabilized progression of time, which has tarried at the year 1832, is now unhinged and becomes “an open-ended and fundamentally active force . . . whose movements and operations have an inherent element of surprise, unpredictability.”68 While Allie’s organization holds a distinct telos of the self-made man, the son is faced with a modality of temporality that has no specific destination. Charlie feels threatened by this vertiginous indeterminacy,

65

66

67 68

Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” trans. Robert Hurley. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994), 354. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1989), 51. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 383. Elizabeth Grosz, “Becoming . . . An Introduction,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999), 4.

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experiencing it as a crisis of his identity.69 However, the family is rescued from this predicament and is on its way to its homeland at the end of the novel. Charlie is finally relieved from the “outside,” and the world, no longer a limitless infinity, regains its familiar face. “The world was all right, no better or worse than we had left it—though after what Father had told us, what we saw was like splendor. It was glorious even here, in this old taxicab, with the radio playing.”70 In spite of this seemingly happy conclusion, the novel indicates a dismal twist. The “glorious” world to which Charlie returns is not so much a promised land free from machismo as another masculine organization, an “evolved” regime of masculinity— the rising neoconservative era. On several occasions, The Mosquito Coast implicitly suggests the characteristics of this new regime. The age of conservatism or the Reagan era is characterized by the discourse of traditional values and the application of new technologies, most notably TV images. “The New Right, for all its apparent archaism, has been far more attuned than the traditional Left to the actual lines of force in late capitalist society.”71 In this era, the ideal of the self-made man is reasserted in harmony with other elements such as the logic of late capitalism and religious faith. From one masculine order to another—this ironic twist is the final destination of Theroux’s novel. In the Spellgood community, Charlie sees a miniature version of this society. The preacher makes his speeches through a Sony video machine, whose screen also features TV and movie programs, including Rocky. The screen image is not simply employed as entertainment but also as a method of governing and organizing local people. This transmission of discourse through the screen is not limited to the religious community. The emphasis on the “hard body,” which Allie stresses and practices in his daily routine of 75 pushups, finds its expressions in the Rambo series, The Terminator, and many other images from the Reagan era. This “rearticulation of masculine strength and power through internal, personal, and family-oriented values”72 on the level of discursive practice constitutes a system of language that retains the archaic characteristics of traditional individualism: “‘[D]iscourses’ are presented which operate to ‘constitute the self ’ of the viewer.”73

69

70 71 72

73

This mode of experience can be likened to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of human being as singularity: “There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality” (The Coming Community, 43). Agamben views this “possibility or potentiality” as something positive, but Charlie is concerned with finding a way out of this realm of vast potential by relying on a definite identity. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 384. Massumi, A User’s Guide, 127. Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994), 13. Mark Poster, “Foucault, the Present and History,” in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Harvester, 1992), 310.

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However, when Emily Spellgood, the preacher’s daughter, boasts to Charlie, “‘Sometimes they only stay when Dad’s on TV! They all want to be baptized now, so they can watch. . . .’”74 her words point to the force of the image itself that captivates the viewer, rather than its linguistic and ideological content of expression. With this attention to visual fascination, the image system shows its crucial difference from Allie’s system. While Allie’s system of the visible masculine body explicitly captures the male body and operates on it, the screen images—“the hard-body iconography,”75 as Susan Jeffords puts it—function as an indirect means of the subjectivization of the viewer.76 The multiplied body images replace the unifying singular body of the leader, as Brian Massumi and Kenneth Dean state: “The physicality of the unifying body disappears, leaving only its image, which is then relayed to infinity, composed, decomposed, re-membered, and dismembered.”77 This does not mean, however, that the images are separated from the body of the individual and henceforth lose their force to operate on it; the images maintain an unapparent relationship with the body, for they constitute a “quasi-corporeal space emanating from bodies and with which bodies can be made to coincide. . . . It lures bodies. It possesses them.”78 The body image sweeps down to the body and possesses it, and consequently produces the masculine identity of the viewer. The regime of 75 pushups is replaced by the system of manly images. It is in this context that Honduras, the novel’s setting, takes on specific significance, for the location also implies another facet of the indirect battleground of American masculinity of the Reagan era—the battle against the communists power in Central America. For Allie, the country is “‘the safest place on earth’”79 outside of civilization, where he can “start over” from scratch, as is in road narratives. However, the region, far from being characterized by mere emptiness, is the scene of a variety of political forces coexisting and colliding with each other, as references to “communists” are inscribed throughout the novel. Among them is Emily’s casual remark that “‘[t]here’s millions of communists around here’”80—this shadow of communists in Honduras has a significant implication for the US politics of the era. As Thomas Carothers indicates, “The United States began to take note of Honduras in the late 1970s when the upsurge in leftist revolutionary movements in Central America . . . provoked the Carter administration to engage itself more actively in the region.”81 Allie’s exodus, despite his “American” vision of Honduras as an empty wilderness, encounters this

74 75 76

77

78 79 80 81

Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 362. Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 22. Referring to this nature of images that “confront the viewer directly, without mediation” (The Cinematic Body, 26), Steven Shaviro points out that images exert their force on the viewer’s body in spite of their immateriality: “Perception is turned back upon the body of the perceiver, so that it affects and alters that body” (ibid., 51). Brian Massumi and Kenneth Dean, “Postmortem on the Presidential Body, or Where the Rest of Him Went,” in Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family, ed. Michael Ryan and Avery Gordon (Boulder: Westview, 1994), 158. Ibid., 167. Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 15. Ibid., 362. Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), 47.

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entanglement of political forces, which develops into a military intervention in the 1980s. However, there is a discontinuity between the interventionist policy in the 1980s and the Vietnam War in the previous decade, which caused a crisis of masculinity. Though the “Reagan administration saw Honduras not only as a potential victim of communist aggression but also a potential base for a U.S. military counterforce in Central America,”82 the direct collision between American soldiers and the local forces is avoided throughout the decade. Instead, proxy forces take on the battle, the most notorious of those being the Nicaraguan Contras. Consequently, an incorporeal battle for American men is created—the war is kept going, without directly injuring the bodies of American soldiers. The war apparatus is reorganized, adapting to the post-Vietnam era. In this system, there is no longer hard labor and pushups that seize the body. The body images and distant conflict are the main components of masculine practices behind the mask of the traditional individual. The existence of the battle itself becomes difficult to discern. In the final analysis, then, the surviving son is faced with the alternative between two modes of masculinity: on the one hand, Allie’s archaic order in Honduras and, on the other, its refined version in the United States. Whichever path he chooses, it certainly leads to the making of a man in the masculine conditions—there is no freedom the sons can enjoy. The novel thus implies a double trap for Charlie. The return to the “glorious” world after the fall of Allie foretells nothing other than a rise of the son as another masculine subject. The infinite potentiality of the “outside” Charlie glimpses after the dethronement of the father is thus reduced to a one-way street or, more precisely, a dead end. Charlie’s journey to the end of the father comes full circle in his return to “the present,” the late 1970s, and the coming age of Reaganism. Rejecting the current American identity, Allie seeks to to revive archaic masculinity in Jeronimo. On the other hand, the family’s return is brought on by the contrary movement, the sons’ effort to escape the system of the self-made man. Since Charlie’s resistance relies on the current mode of life, he is incorporated into a new strategy of masculinity that awaits him on the coast of United States. Eventually, then, these two movements leave the value of “man” itself unquestioned. As an investigation of masculinity, The Mosquito Coast addresses a somber diagnosis of the historical landscape that illuminates the nature of the present. According to Foucault, “The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war,”83 but the roar of the battlefield becomes faint, almost imperceptible to the son. Having gone through the struggle with the father, Charlie returns to the American coast, where he is ready to wear the coat of “man” without realizing its ill-fitting nature, while the subterranean battle silently continues to be waged. Thus Allie’s exodus and Charlie’s roundtrip present the “drawing of what we are and what we are ceasing to be”84 in the land without the simple promise of the outside space. 82 83

84

Ibid., 48. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings & Other Interviews 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marchall, and Kate Soper. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 114. Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif? ” in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Harvester, 1992), 164.

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A traveler himself, Theroux keeps returning to the question of the present state of America. Like the journey of the Foxes, his literary inquiry into American machismo is a long detour through the foreign jungle that finally returns to its starting point. However, this loop is not a futile meandering that is destined to arrive at the same old landscape; after the quest, “the present” reveals another face, making the formerly imperceptible battlefield audible and visible: a different struggle is called for. In this sense, Theroux is far from a pessimistic writer who despairs at the fatal trap of American machismo. He is fundamentally a writer who questions, an inquirer after the possibility of becoming something other than the current form of “man,” outside of the insipid alternative between the two modes of manhood. The Mosquito Coast is a preface to the coming struggle against masculinity itself.

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2

THE American Traveler’s Love and Solitude: The Atlas, or William T. Vollmann’s Pragmatics of the Double

A man on a journey meets a woman and falls in love with her; however, this romance is always doomed to fail, and the traveler leaves her with another disappointing experience added to his itinerary. Such scenes are at the center of “America” as developed in William T. Vollmann’s oeuvre. For Vollmann, “America” is an uncontrollable force deprived of all transcendent value that guides the traveler and leads his romances to ruin; it is an immanent force at work everywhere. Vollmann’s work is devoted to the investigation of this force—for instance, his Seven Dreams series rewrites episodes in North American history with an emphasis on their violent aspect. It is an attempt to redraw the historical map of “America,” wherein the narrating subject finds himself caught. This cartography ultimately concerns the interrogation of the American “I,” the product of this sociohistorical force. Vollmann’s work, in other words, constitutes the subject in the present as the double of “America.” His 1996 book, The Atlas, reflects this relentless inquiry into the relationship between the map and the “I.” The book brings together the numerous fragments of an American traveler’s experiences in the United States, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Thailand, Mexico, Australia, and so on. The fragmentary style is therefore inseparable from the age of globalization; yet the text’s focus is on the constitution of the American subject out of those pieces—each fragment functions as a piece of the American dynamic that produces the “I” as its effect.1 A constant insight running through Vollmann’s work is that this American self is not so much a free individual as a formation in power relationships—the nameless traveler always finds himself in asymmetrical relations with others, typically monetary relations with women in the third world. The text is

1

In this sense, the book’s focus on the specific practice of the American self within each fragment is akin to Michel Foucault’s view on discursive practice, which “refers less to the signifying organization of the text than to the series of events (acts, effects, qualifications) which the discursive practice . . . carries with it: it is a question of the modification of the subject by the very exercise of discourse” (Michel Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” 405). In a similar vein, Vollmann’s use of the fragmentary style points to the pragmatic aspect by which the American self is constituted: The Atlas demands less an interpretation of meaning than a description of how each fragment functions.

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therefore a map of power relations—as J. B. Harley argues, the atlas “cannot escape involvement in the process by which power is deployed.”2 Therefore, the simple notion of the outside space is foreclosed in the Vollmannian map. While Seven Dreams is a vertical exploration into the historical genealogy of American subjectivity, The Atlas undertakes a horizontal analysis, exclusively maintaining its focus on the emergence of the “I” in the contemporary atlas. Though the book assembles fragmentary experience from all over the world, the opening and closing episodes transform this seemingly cosmopolitan quest into an American experience: “Opening the Book” describes the moment in Grand Central Station in New York where the traveler’s journey begins, whereas “Closing the Book” finds the man at a bus terminal in Sacramento. The composition of The Atlas thus retraces the American movement from the East Coast to the West, establishing it as a prototypical American narrative. Yet the linear progression is undermined by the fragmentary style: fragments occupying the in-between space do not follow chronologically. In other words, the text decomposes the linear space-time sequence of his journey, reorganizing disparate events and highlighting the function of each piece in the making of the “I.” In traveling from one fragment to another, the traveler’s self is defined and modified. Each fragment bears a date and a place name, establishing the force that produced it as historically and geographically specific: “Place not as points or areas on maps, but . . . as spatio-temporal events,”3 as Doreen Massey puts it. The main preoccupations of the book, namely violence, death, sexual relationships, and desire, are grasped in their particular forms in the contemporary atlas. In this sense, The Atlas rejects transhistorical explanations of those motifs; the text displays the anatomy of the American “I” produced by the contemporary workings of power relations. Most of the episodes fall between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, which corresponds to the closure of the Cold War and the rise of the “New World Order.” The American self thus involves the whole atlas, the global movement of power—in the age of globalization, his travel becomes the double of “American self-fashioning in the world theater.”4 However, Vollmann’s text does not follow the affirmative logic of US-centered globalism. Rather, The Atlas constructs the American double as an intolerable man, whose existence betrays the dismal aspects of “a powerful US discourse centering on the ‘global’ and the ‘global economy.’”5 The Vollmannian double reveals the unbearable weight of being American, to keep moving without the promise of the outside. 2

3 4

5

J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), 55. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 130. Brian Massumi, “Requiem for Our Prospective Dead: Towards a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power,” in Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in the Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kauffman and Kevin John Heller (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 40. Frederick Buell, “Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American Culture,” American Quarterly 50.3 (1998): 577.

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Into the atlas of power Motion is the keynote of The Atlas. In “Opening the Book,” the narrator sits on a bench in Grand Central Station, watching the crowd that never ceases moving: “no one stayed here, except the souls without homes.”6 Then he gets up and joins the crowd, “obeying the same law that dispersed the others. . . .”7 The moment of stasis is but a brief interval in his journey. From the outset, the “I” is inseparable from the collective movement of dispersion; he begins his quest by joining the American impulse to move. The opening fragment establishes two characteristic elements in his journey. The first is the absence of community. In the station, the crowd is incessantly on the move, but there is no sense of shared destiny: “the people who rushed through this concourse came from the rim of everywhere to be ejaculated everywhere, redistributing themselves without reference to each other.”8 The narrator is faced with a collectivity that has no common identity. The second is a hint of death. When he peers down the tracks, they remind him of death, one of the major preoccupations in the book—“the sunken tunnels where the trains stretched themselves out, gleaming their lights, were the catacombs.”9 From the outset, the traveler is accompanied by the premonition of death, so that his movement vastly differs from the expansion of the American frontier, in which the “utopia of open space . . . plays such an important role in the first phase of American constitutional history.”10 The opening piece carries out the two operations that overturned traditional American motifs: collective movement is deprived of a sense of common destiny, and instead linked to death. Engaged in this dynamic, the traveler’s atlas unfolds. With the leap from New York to Sarajevo, the American movement is no longer limited to domestic coast-to-coast geography: now the global landscape is involved. This move further intensifies the sense of death that accompanies the journey. In Sarajevo, the protagonist travels under the threat of death—“No matter which way I turned, the sniper who was going to kill me kept the back of my head in his sights.”11 Though he is not certain this sniper exists at all, he is in constant fear. The fragments from Sarajevo reveal a significant aspect of the quest: the contemporary atlas is changing. The city under siege testifies that the old atlas of the Cold War is no longer tenable, and that the nation-state is disintegrating into ethnic groups. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, “we have entered the era of minor and internal conflicts.”12 The war also indicates the specificity of death: death is no longer

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

William T. Vollmann, The Atlas (New York: Penguin, 1996), 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), 169. Vollmann, The Atlas, 5. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 189.

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a final void toward which individual lives are carried; it becomes banal, visible in everyday life. In other words, death becomes not so much a personal or psychological matter as a social phenomenon. Conflict or violence cannot be separated from this post-Cold War global landscape: in Michel Wieviorka’s words, “the end of the Cold War on the one hand and the globalization of the economy on the other have brought considerable change in violence by making local conflicts possible or more deadly, by exacerbating cultural fragmentation and the radicalization of social identities.”13 The atlas of violence is changing its configuration, and the journey of the “I” constantly bears witness to its particulars—Los Angeles in the 1992 riot and Somalia in the civil conflict are typical examples. The next episode in Sarajevo introduces the motif of a relationship with the sexual other. In the city, he encounters an unhappy young woman, for whom he feels “a violent tenderness.”14 He tries to encourage her by giving her money, saying,“How much money would you need to be happy?”15 but she refuses it; soon he has to leave the city. Here is a basic idea that the book repeatedly poses: a relationship with the other mediated by money, and therefore doomed to fail. The encounter with the other constitutes the traveler’s self as an American man with cash, free to arrive and depart as he pleases. It is this relation that thwarts the possibility of love—“my guilt about being free to leave has built a silence over time that drowned whatever she actually said.”16 Because of their asymmetrical relationship, there is nothing the two can share: the fragment redefines the problem of community in terms of this failure. Hence the crucial role of whores in the atlas (San Francisco, Berlin, Madagascar, Bangkok, etc.), for money, desire, and the failure of community intersect precisely where traveler and prostitute meet. In his transitory relations with whores, the traveler cannot avoid being identified as American or, more specifically, a white customer. In fact, he is involved in nothing but a power relationship, and Vollmann himself counts prostitution as a form of institutionalized slavery.17 Though he tries to alter this relation by acting as a savior of prostitutes or as their devoted partner, he eventually ends up repeating the familiar relationship, frustrating his yearning for community. Across the atlas, the traveler encounters difference, but that only serves to strengthen his sense of self no matter where he visits—“contrary to the claims of those who operate within a difference paradigm,” Mark Fisher and Rohit Lekhi argue in their analysis of New World Order, “difference actually reinforces rather than undermines the dominance of the (white, Western male) subject.”18 The traveler cannot overcome this dynamic of difference. “Butterfly Stories (I),” which recounts his journey in Phnom Penh in the 13

14 15 16 17

18

Michel Wieviorka, “The New Paradigm of Violence,” in Globalization, the State, and Violence, ed. Jonathan Friedman (Walnut Creek: Altamira, 2003), 117. Vollmann, The Atlas, 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 11. William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (New York: Harper, 2005), 22. Mark Fisher and Rohit Lekhi. “The Fate of Subjectivity in the New World Disorder,” in Sovereignty and Subjectivity, ed. Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Véronique Pin-Fat (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 89.

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early 1990s, presents a similar case. Scars of the Pol Pot genocide are found throughout the episode, extending the undertone of death and destruction. After a long period of absence, he comes back to Cambodia to search for a prostitute he once loved. There is no clue as to her whereabouts, however, and he wanders around the city looking for her in vain. Then a strange woman appears, and he enters into a relationship defined solely by cash—“As long as he could keep dancing with her (and paying to dance), she’d be still his.”19 The possibility of romance is thus replaced by a monetary relation, namely relationships of power, eventually leaving the traveler in a somber mood. The motif of asymmetrical relationships with the other is not confined to the sexual realm. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, he travels with native hunters who are going after walrus, but is faced with a boy’s hostile attitude that reminds him of his awkward position in the whole business: “The boy who hated white people sat sullenly with his back turned toward me and sighted in his rifle. I was only allowed along because I had paid three hundred dollars.”20 In this tour, the money fixes his white-man-with-money identity, which inexorably differentiates him from the native people. Because of this dynamic of difference, a haunting sense of homelessness accompanies him throughout the book. The protagonist cannot find a community where he can enjoy a sense of equality and belonging—he has to continue his travel, witnessing his condition of homelessness, which subsequent pieces further confirm. Journey in the contemporary atlas is therefore inseparable from the idea of the double. This does not suggest, however, that world and self are simply mirrored in the atlas; as in the preceding fragments, the traveler’s subjectivity is formed in his relations with the map—there can be no “free” subject who stays outside it. In “Spare Parts” the man loses his lover in Mexico; then in Rome, Italia, he buys an atlas and speaks to his lost lover: “I’m not asking for you. I’m only asking for a spare you.”21 The atlas opens the domain of the double, in which he seeks solace. Again in Mogadishu, he looks at another old map, in which African countries are still colonies of European nations. He gazes further into the world of the atlas: “he approached Muqdisho, which was spare for Mogadishu.”22 The past name is the double of the present, so that the map ultimately concerns the present—however old the map is, it tells his position in contemporary Somalia, with refugees, the US Embassy, UN Flags, and armed civilian forces signaling American involvement in the confusion. As Catherine Besteman points out, Somalia was a strategic site during the Cold War, and the year 1993 is marked by the unsuccessful US military mission: “The bungled diplomacy and confused military intervention that followed—involving the withdrawal of American troops following the loss of American lives—appear only to have exacerbated local tensions.”23 The obsolete map does not so much represent the past as it partakes in the present practice of the American self. 19 20 21 22 23

Vollmann, The Atlas, 85. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 151 (Italics added). Catherine Besteman, “The Cold War and Chaos in Somalia: A View from the Ground,” in The State, Identity and Violence: Political Disintegration in the Post-Cold War World, ed. R. Brian Ferguson (London: Routledge, 2003), 288.

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The map and the observer, then, are not separated: “Looking up at his giant blinking eye, little girls in red or yellow garbashars stood and tried to sell him packs of cigarettes.”24 To these inhabitants, the American observer is a potential buyer, reestablishing the monetary relationship. In this living atlas, he finds “the spare her.”25 The lives of the doubles are played out, but this spare world is never an ideal utopia; the present is doubled by the map with the emphasis on its dark side. The spare woman recognizes and rebels against the observer—“she threw off her veil and looked upward at him with the deadly dark glide and glitter of a tiger snake. She was one of the doubles. This time he was mesmerized by the approaching bullet.”26 Theorizing space, Massey states that the “dominant form of mapping . . . does position the observer, [himself] unobserved, outside and above the object of the gaze,”27 yet in “Spare Parts” the traveler is caught inside the atlas, where he is also the object of the gaze, monetary aspirations, and hatred of the other. He buys the atlas to fulfill his need for the lost love, to substitute the map for the loss of the real; this starting point follows the notion of the map as a fictive representation designed to ensure the observer’s freedom. However, his expectations are overturned when the map-book reveals the world of doubles, involving the traveler in another “American” experience. In this sense the map is “part of the dramaturgy of the real,”28 and The Atlas redefines itself as a domain of the double that seizes and forms the dismal American self. The space of freedom cannot be found in this map. Not all the fragments, however, function to nail his self onto the dominant power matrix. “Exalted by the Wind,” one of the most imaginative pieces in the book, expresses his hope of escape. The place is Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada, located at the very limit of American space. This Arctic spot is delineated as a space of potential, where everything escapes rigid definition: “I seemed to see nothing but solidified space without a predicate. It was a blank page of all possibilities, not excluding loveliness and terror.”29 While Sarajevo, Phnom Penh, and other places are marked by highly determined power relations with the other, the Arctic space is laden with promises, which defy any predetermined scheme—it is a “very different imagination: instead of space divided-up and bounded here is a vision of space as barrier-less and open.”30 He visits this indefinite space with his friend, and the two set up camp in a blizzard. In the tent, he has a dream. Carried away by the strong wind, he sees “the black silhouette of a woman, with white fur-ruff around her face.”31 Through this encounter with an imaginary woman, the protagonist pursues the possibility of a new, nonmonetary kind of relationship, and in turn his new self is envisioned. When the snow ceases, the traveler and his friend go outside to climb a small snow-covered hill, 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Vollmann, The Atlas, 152. Ibid. Ibid., 155. Massey, For Space, 107. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 160. Vollmann, The Atlas, 120. Massey, For Space, 84. Vollmann, The Atlas, 123.

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but it is his friend, not the traveler, who achieves a relationship with the Arctic woman: “Before he disappeared in a lenticular cloud, I saw that his eyes were closed and he was smiling tenderly and his arms were outstretched as if he were about to embrace someone.”32 Although the opportunity of being exalted into the “outside,” namely an ideal community with the woman eludes the traveler, this imaginative experience in Canada shines as a beacon of hope among his other disappointing encounters.

The weight of memories: “The Atlas” After a series of disappointments, the traveler is on a train to Canada. Numerous memories of encounters and relationships across the world have accumulated to produce and fix the contours of this American “I”: despite his disgust, his existence is inescapably defined by, and confined into, this space of the power relations. The largest section in the middle of the book, “The Atlas” unfolds this dynamic of the self, from which the traveler attempts to escape. The middle section incorporates many fragments from the first half, appearing as the center around which other episodes, like satellites, revolve. However, the narrative itself denies this view: one might hope by now to have established the center of our traveller’s world, but the Earth itself is scarcely a sphere, only an asymmetric rotational spheroid—that is, a pear—and so the reference point . . . is not quite where intuition might lead us to expect.33

“The Atlas” is not a preestablished center but an effect produced by the preceding parts—in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s words, “it is a whole of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.”34 The section does not function as a final telos where all movements cease to reveal a stable meaning; rather, the assortment of micromovements produces yet another journey that maintains the principle of ceaseless dispersion. The beginning of the trip northward is marked by a sense of exhaustion: “He had used up every place now. Everywhere he went, he’d say to himself: There’s nothing for me anymore. No more nowhere nobody.”35 The repetition of power relations forces him to recognize his “American” identity in every location; in his atlas, there is no possibility that some unknown place may give him an opportunity for achieving his authentic self: “Now he understood that nothing would ever happen. It was time to go back to Canada.”36 The opening page of the section indicates that his journey on the train

32 33 34

35

Vollmann, The Atlas, 124. Ibid., 253. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 42. Vollmann, The Atlas, 202 (Italics added).

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begins at Montreal in 1993 and ends at Ellesmere Island in 1988, so that the journey also leads to past memory. His hope of escape lies in the place where, in “Exalted by the Wind,” he once glimpsed possible transformation in his imaginary relationship with the Arctic woman. The traveler began his journey with an innocent goal in mind—“By his own standards,” he reminisces, “he was simply looking for something. He wanted to see the world, that was all. He wanted to know and love the entire atlas.”37 But this movement toward the “outside” space results in constituting the very atlas of power that captures him. To move as far away from his present self as possible—it is in this sense that his journey to the Canadian north is often associated with death: “Traveling, especially early in the morning, is equivalent to dying.”38 Moving to Ellesmere Island, he attempts to exit the grid. Death here is given a new function as a promise of a final release from the atlas. On the train, memories of sexual relationships with women come to him one after another. He wishes to remember his first love, but realizes that “his love was in out up down everywhere everybody. . . . He’d been too promiscuous.”39 With memories weighing down on him, his thoughts lead back to his relations with women—in Budapest, Algeria, then Beograd—and the battles he has witnessed. Memories surface and disappear without conforming to the order of any totality.40 Still, the American traveler tries to fabricate the final destination of his movement. He gets off the train to walk in a no-man’s land, this time alone. Now the woman appears: “Willow Lady grew slowly out of his thoughts, hour by hour in that summer of perpetual chilly light. The wind was her breath and the wind’s voice was her voice.”41 With Inuk eyes and hair of woody strands, Willow Lady is an ensemble of the Arctic earth, namely the double of the region; he tries to attain, through inventing a relation with her, a sense of belonging. The past memory in “Exalted by the Wind” is revised— “Willow Lady rolled on top of him and took him in her arms”42—to enable an ideal 36

37 38 39 40

41

Ibid. The repeated motifs of failure and death in his journey invoke the “personal” history of the protagonist. In Hanover, New Hampshire in 1968, a boy loses his sister when she drowns in the river; 25 years later, in Mauritius, Bangkok, and Rome, he is still searching for her: “Catacomb, honeycomb of the slow bees of souls, the slow crowd in the halls, where do you keep my little sister?” (Vollmann, The Atlas, 109). Yet, though the fragments in “Under the Grass” provide the personal background for the man’s quest for love, they do not come together to form either a privileged core or the origin of his journey; with the reorganization of spatiotemporal order, the emphasis falls on collective movement. “Opening the Book” describes the beginning of his quest in the dispersing crowd, while his personal motives come only after repeated failures. In Vollmann, the collective force of America always precedes the personal: filled with death and frustrations, the contemporary atlas summons the spectral past as its double. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 211. An antipathy to dialectic thinking runs through Vollmann’s oeuvre. His writing flatly rejects the notion of history as a movement toward a destination. Throughout his Seven Dreams novels, American history is conceived as a series of violent acts, which include the foundation of the UnitedStates and the narrative present of the 1980s and 1990s. Thus Vollmann claims, “we need not delude ourselves that ‘history’ has accomplished much in the way of human achievement” (Rising, 22). Vollmann, The Atlas, 261.

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relationship. The most comforting page of his memory-atlas provides him with a refuge, an imagined love: “She rocked him to sleep. No more nowhere nobody. . . . He lay at the center from which the world rotated round and round and round.”43 The traveler apparently achieves a stasis at the center—seemingly nothing can affect their union. However, the maps of the Arctic and the Antarctic, which follow the closure of “The Atlas,” overturn this dream. His final destination in the atlas, Ellesmere Island, is still some ways from the North Pole—its location is “80.00 N, 85.39 W.”44 As a result of this separation from the axis, the “center” of his atlas then spins off in a display of centrifugal force, and the apparent unity of the section gives way to another series of fragments in the second half of the book.45 “The Atlas” eventually forecloses the traveler’s wishful desire to escape into the fabricated past—the journey continues.

Seeing more doubles “The Atlas” is followed by episodes that correspond to those in the first half of the book—the fragments are doubled, and this duplication modifies and rejects the remnants of optimism in the preceding fragments. The double always defies an idealistic gesture: the escapist fantasy in “The Atlas” is immediately replaced by the relentless drama of life in “Red and Blue,” which presents the narrator watching boxing matches in Bangkok, Thailand. The observer perceives the matches in terms of sex— “They locked knees around each other. More than anything else I’d ever seen, it was like some new and terrible way of making love.”46 An analogy is established between the fight and the sexual act, turning the latter into another struggle for power: “no matter who you are or what you do,” the traveler thinks, “life is war.”47 The fragment cancels out the optimistic view of life, and reconfirms its violent character. This gloomy view of life is further intensified in sexual relationships; the romantic dream in “Exalted by the Wind” is subverted by the somber mood of its double, “Disappointed by the Wind.” In gusty Toronto, the traveler at first claims a close relation with the cold wind, as in the preceding episode. “I was in the bedroom of the wind. The wind wanted to play with me, love me and eat me. I married the wind, and rode the wind all night.”48 But soon this ideal love exhausts itself: “Then the wind got tired of me.

42 43 44 45

46 47 48

Ibid., 265. Ibid. (Italics added). Ibid., xxi. This decentering force of the earth itself is inseparable from the modern cosmological view. Vollmann’s book on Coperinicus, Uncentering the Earth, demonstrates the post-Copernican ontological assumption that defines his “uncentered” world-view: “My entirely uncentered sensibility” (William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth, 64), “we uncentered ones” (Ibid., 88), and “our thoroughly uncentered point of view” (Ibid., 130) are among the many expressions through which Vollmann characterizes the contemporary perspective, and The Atlas is no exception. Vollmann, The Atlas, 270. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 337.

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I don’t know why.”49 Disappointed, he is deprived of the fantasy of the wind—now he is left with yet another series of power relationships. In this landscape of violent struggle and disappointment, the text reconsiders and then finally rejects the possible role of death in achieving an exit. “Butterfly Stories (I)” also has its double, “Butterfly Stories (II)” that foregrounds and modifies the death motif. He comes to a Chinese restaurant in Sacramento, where he sees a woman with whom he slept the night before. He asks for her love, saying, “if I paid you right now, would you go to bed with me one more time?”50 Faced with her cold attitude, he realizes his failure; she only responds, “you want to fuck me now? It’s that important to you? Go ahead.”51 When he does so, she reveals the risk of having sex with her: “Both the guys who did me said they had AIDS. So I have AIDS. Take the rubber off and fuck me and get AIDS if that’s what you want.”52 In this situation, the two appear to enter a community: It’s good. Can you feel my death crawling inside you? Oh, it feels so good – You’re thrusting deeper and deeper into my death. My death is in you now. Are you getting ready to come? You look like you are. I love you. This time I really mean it. I love you. I love you because you’re going to die for me.53

This sharing of death provides a glimpse of community. With nothing else in common, death is the sole principle that unites them; disappointed by the wind and faced with the vast gap between the prostitute and himself, he seeks the possibility of a communal moment. It is the only “equality” the American traveler can hope for: a democracy of death. Yet, the fragment also indicates that sexual relations with the two men with AIDS precede the woman’s words: her “I love you” is uttered in the context of monetary relations, so that it is neither the representation of her “authentic” voice nor a promise of ideal love.54 Even the promise of death is caught up in relations of power. As Maurice Blanchot comments on the absence of community in the capitalist age, “the absoluteness of the relationships has been perverted from the onset . . . there is indeed commerce between beings but never a veritable ‘community.’”55 “Butterfly Stories (II)” eventually denies the community of death. 49 50 51 52 53 54

55

Ibid. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 359. Ibid. Ibid., 360. Although the words of women and ethnic others abound in his atlas, the traveler is constantly reminded that their voices are inseparable from the power relationships in which they are situated—when, for instance, a Thai prostitute appears in front of him “dressed in a kimono and [speaking] English like a Japanese” (Vollmann, The Atlas, 30), her appearance and utterance always already presuppose her monetary relations with Japanese and European men. Thus, as Foucault writes, “it is doubtless impossible to ever grasp them again in themselves, as they might have been ‘in a free state’” (Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 161). There is no “authentic” experience outside or beyond the power relations that entangle the traveler. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988), 35–6.

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The exit from the atlas of power is closed, which leads to the reconsideration of the atlas-self relation in “Outside and Inside,” a meta-commentary on The Atlas itself. It examines the presence of power in composing the map-book, continuing the line of thought seen in “Spare Parts”—to carry and make an atlas is inextricable from sexual domination. In this act, the map-book captures and defines the traveler’s masculine self.56 He always finds himself in an in-between zone where he and the atlas enter into a relationship—the clear distinction between outside and inside finally evaporates, leaving only an interactive space where the subject-position of the traveler is continually interrogated. “Outside and Inside” begins with a simple distinction. People turn the pages of picture books inside a bookstore, while, out in the street, two panhandlers quarrel. One of the picture books is already described as an object of male desire in that its paper is “as smooth as a virgin’s thigh.”57 Reading and buying this book is another form of sexual act. When the man buys the book and leaves, the male panhandler smashes the female’s head against the window of the bookstore. The man with the book attempts to rescue her—“He opened his book and invited her in. . . . Spangles of blood struck the pages like a misty rain, becoming words which had never existed before.”58 By smashing the window, the boundary between the inside and the outside is crossed; then the blood flows into the page, transgressing the boundary of the book. Since the picture-book is perceived as a sexual object, the notion of possession accompanies the act of rescuing her inside the book—in inviting her into the book of his desire, he makes her his property. “Now you have loved me, and I will love you forever,”59 she says to him from inside the book; yet the love is inseparable from the owner-owned relationship. Thus incorporated in the book, the woman speaks, “But where are my hands? where are my feet, my breasts?”60 Thus he starts his journey to constitute the double of the woman in the book, which opens an intermediary space. Walking in the city of Hong Kong, he realizes that he is in the zone of in-between—“He was at the nexus . . . the city that was neither outside nor inside.”61 At first he thinks he is inside the atlas, but it is no longer clear: Open the book, she said weakly. It’s open already. Where am I, then? Am I inside or outside? 56

57 58 59 60 61

Vollmann’s work abounds with such practices of the self with the book. In Argall, Captain John Smith carries Machiavelli’s Prince, which he memorizes and keeps consulting in need of advice— “You practice right tunefully to play the melody call’d Michiavell. Trarintra-rarara” (Vollmann, Argall, 92). John Smith’s subjectivity is formed in his relation with the book. As Vollmann himself explains, “a book should be more than a container for the words. Your book is like your body— you’re simply born with it” (“Interview with William Vollmann,” 22). Vollmann, The Atlas, 394. Ibid., 395. Ibid., 395. Ibid. Ibid., 398.

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Outside, America I don’t know, he murmured, suddenly resentful. I don’t know where I am anymore, either. I lost my freedom because of you.62

Deprived of a free position by the book, he sets out to make her complete, searching for her spare parts in the city. When he finishes the work, he says to her, “Now you’re complete in the book,”63 and she says goodbye. This does not suggest, however, that the man finds a final place outside the book; he remains at the nexus. The Hong Kong fragment is followed by another, which tells of his 1992 release from a mental institution in Mexico. He gets on a train, which goes underground to reach the core of the earth, revealing another form of domination: an “atlas on a chain”64 at the very center of the world. The center of the earth is not, as “The Atlas” indicates, a comforting place of mutual affection; it is nothing but an act of subjugation. When he opens the book, the woman’s bones, hair, blood, flesh, etc. fall out. The man buries them with a crystal, and then a brilliant flower grows—“Just before it enveloped the space which he had occupied, it invited him in . . .”65 To the very end, “outside and inside” does not resolve into a clear distinction: in constructing the atlas, the subject cannot maintain an outside position, since the “nexus” disavows any safe place from which a supposedly transparent subject can represent the other. The fragments constitute an intermediary space where the atlas captures both the woman and the traveler. Exhausting every hope of solidarity or reciprocal love, the journey returns to Sarajevo under siege. In a piece called “Last Day at the Bakery,” he visits the final bakery left to provide bread for the city. He is permitted inside because he is American, while other citizens have to wait outside: “I could feel the stares of the waiting people in my back.”66 At the time of his visit, the bakery has already run out of electricity, water, and diesel—“We’ve come to the end,”67 the director tells him. The bakery is closing, and the city will be without a major source of food; the traveler likens the empty room to “the heart of a dying man, still pumping life, but only in negligible quantities and only for a little longer.”68 The director offers him one of the last loaves left in the bakery—as the traveler goes outside, there are about 50 people waiting to get bread. There is no room, on his part, for sympathy with them. The American is given a loaf, while the others still wait empty-handed; death is invading the city, but he cannot share it with them: the traveler’s tears are a testimony to his failure to achieve any solidarity with the other. “Closing the Book” finds the traveler in Sacramento, 1992. The journey from New York has finally reached the other coast, but there is no sense of completion. A relationship with a woman has already collapsed in the beginning of the fragment: “He had left her burning in her tears at the Greyhound station, and now he was about to 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Ibid., 399. Ibid., 401. Ibid., 403. Ibid. Ibid., 445. Ibid., 446. Ibid.

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take the city bus home.”69 This initial passage at first suggests the existence of his home, where his journey comes to an end. Yet, even when he is pretending that he is returning to a woman he loves, the traveler realizes that “[t]here was nowhere to go except home, and home was nowhere anymore.”70 Then the monetary relation reappears and concludes the book. He goes into a coffee shop, where a Chinese waitress works. He leaves seven dollars for the $4.60 bill: Too much! she shrieked. Wearily he pushed it into her hand. T’ank you, t’ank you! Thank you, he said. As he got up he watched her fingers tighten ecstatically around the money.71

Her excitement and words of gratitude are inseparable from the tip: the moment never overcomes the difference between them. Thus the book ends, with the man’s final destination never having been disclosed. As in “Opening the Book,” a ceaseless movement occupies an interval, but the motif of death completely disappears from it. Without hope of either community or exit, the traveler keeps moving; the closing piece turns the American westward movement of expansion into its negative double, a meandering without destination. Vollmann’s atlas is constituted as a battlefield where fragments struggle and battle with each other—the American subject is produced as the double of this battle. Being American in the Vollmannian atlas rejects any promise of the “outside” space of liberal democracy, equality, or freedom. As Hardt and Negri put it in their discussion of globalization, “[d]ifference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves.”72 The overall effect of The Atlas conveys a sense of the intolerable: numerous deaths and scenes of violence, lines of difference run through the map, defining the position of the traveler where, against all idealism, he discovers himself to be an unbearable white man scattering his desire and cash across the globe. In Fisher and Lekhi’s words, he is “the possessive individual for whom the whole world becomes a screen on which to project his own dreary dramas of guilt and redemption.”73 Yet, in Vollmann’s case, the fragments cancel out any possibility of redemption. The hope of exit vanishes, leaving only the unbearable weight of being American. The American dynamic mutates according to a principle of unbearableness—on this map, community, belonging, the hope in the future or past memory, even death expose their incapability of providing the possibility of the ideal self. The politics of the double in Vollmann’s book are what make visible the somber workings of power relationships in the contemporary atlas. In other words, the 69 70 71 72 73

Ibid., 447. Ibid., 453. Ibid., 455. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 156. Fisher and Lehki, “The Fate of Subjectivity,” 93.

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constitution of the double is a strategy to specify the longitude and latitude that nail the American self. In the post-Cold War era of Americanism, Vollmann’s atlas converts any optimistic view of the self into an intolerable presence in the power-map; the weight of the American becomes heavier as his cartography produces more doubles. As with Foucault’s notion of statements, the figure of the double is a “particular, vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals.”74 This idea is not limited to Vollmann’s work; it attracts other contemporary authors in America like a gravitational force. In Paul Auster’s Leviathan, the writer Benjamin Sachs becomes a political activist, the Phantom of Liberty, thus defining himself as the ugly double of the American ideal who moves around in the United States until he blows himself up with his bomb. In a different vein, Sherman Alexie also uses the theme to explore the past-present relationship of Native American history—the experience of a blues rock band in Reservation Blues is expressed as the double of the past. Those contemporary writers constitute an ever-growing atlas of the double; the Vollmannian atlas is but a fragment of this interrogation. The travelers survey the vast American battlefield, far from innocent outside space, where they encounter the sociohistorical forces that shape them—seeing double on the road has become the sober literary cartography of the present.

74

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 95.

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3

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity in Denis Johnson’s Already Dead: A California Gothic

A man who has come to an impasse—this motif keeps reappearing in contemporary writers, testifying to the dead space of American manhood. Among them, Thom Jones’ story, “Rocket Man,” stands out in its use of Nietzschean ideas in describing a power-obsessed man: Billy Prestone, a light-heavyweight boxing champion, visits his boyhood hero and second in the ring, W. L. Moore, in the hospital. In a conversation that allows them to confirm their male bond and display their masculinity to each other—“‘I can hang with anybody,’”1 Prestone insists—the two talk about the champion’s next fight; then Moore reads from The Portable Nietzsche, his favorite book, and encourages the boxer by calling him “‘The Will to Power personified in the body of Billy Prestone!’”2 Of course, the story itself does not affirm this understanding of Nietzsche; instead, by describing two men obsessed with masculinity to the point of self-destruction, Jones ultimately raises the question: are such men the only possible embodiments of Nietzschean philosophy? Denis Johnson’s 1997 novel, Already Dead: A California Gothic—which explores the possibility that Nietzschean concepts function as transformation of masculine subjectivity—can be read as a radical response to this question. Through the tale of a petty crime and its destructive consequences for the nihilistic protagonist, Nelson Fairchild Jr., the novel also pursues a dead end where the hero’s subjectivity, previously defined by a set standard of masculinity, mutates to give way to a different mode of being. The novel is filled with references to two styles in particular: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the crime novel.3 On the one hand, Nietzsche’s constant criticism 1 2 3

Thom Jones, The Pugilist at Rest (New York: Back Bey, 1994), 219. Ibid., 227. In addition, frequent allusions to demons, resurrections of the dead, ghosts, and channeling in the narrative indicate its gothic elements, so evident in the title of the novel. In its motif of the collapse of the Fairchild family, the novel draws on the American gothic convention, which “adapted a gothic imagery to exemplify the destructive power of families” (Davenport-Hines, Gothic, 267). However, those gothic characteristics do not form a view of a supernatural that exceeds human understanding: the demons are Nelson’s past traumas, the ghosts represent the nihilist’s interiority, and channeling suggests the indeterminate character of the self. Such clichés of gothic fiction are deployed methodically in the Nietzschean strategy of the novel.

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of the modern subject and his idea of self-overcoming are turned into a subversion of masculinity; in Johnson, Nietzsche’s imperative that “Man is something that must be overcome”4 functions as a problematization of the masculine.5 On the other hand, the sexist subjectivity of the crime novel, marked by all the clichés of the genre—a male criminal with a murder plot, the bond with another male accomplice, femme fatales, and a detection process—is transformed to give way to a new form of the individual. Following the Nietzschean vision, the narrative accelerates Nelson’s nihilism until it reaches its limit and his identity is destroyed, whereupon a metamorphosis of his subjectivity takes place with profound forgetting of the past. Johnson’s tour de force, instead of a mere critique of manhood, tries to foster the potential to overcome the force of masculine identity and to reach the “outside,” now detached from the spatial dimension.

The birth of tragedy August 8, 1990. While the nation heads toward a war in the Persian Gulf, a man plans to have his wife killed. The criminal, Nelson, is a man of Nietzschean ressentiment in the middle of a crisis—an approaching divorce, a drug-deal gone bad, his father on his deathbed, and a mistress who causes ceaseless fear. In this portrait of a man in despair, Already Dead follows the tradition of the American crime novel, which “tends toward alienation and nihilism.”6 Nelson’s first-person narrative cynically analyzes his own situation, where he finds power relationships with others, especially his father, that corner and nail him against what he sees as the dismal coast of Northern California. Trapped in this web of relationships, Nelson reacts by accusing himself and others for this dead end, which leads to his hatred of the feminine. Nelson displays the typical characteristics—“The imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities, perpetual

4

5

6

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1995), 37. While there have been various arguments on gender issues in Nietzsche’s work, a number of postwar thinkers have attempted to define Nietzsche’s philosophy in terms of resistance to normative subjectivity: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Klossowski, Judith Butler, and William E. Connolly being just a few. Keith Ansell-Pearson summarizes the matter: “Nietzsche’s critique of Christian and liberal notion of the self can certainly be of use to a . . . politics of difference” (Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche, Woman and Political Theory,” 31). Among such attempts, Jeffrey T. Nealon shows a crucial insight in linking the issue of masculinity with the Nietzschean perspective. In his analysis of contemporary American WAM (white, angry male) discourse, Nealon argues that WAM shows “its pedigree . . . precisely in that which Nietzsche set out to analyze in On the Genealogy of Morals and so much of his other work: resentment” (Nealon, “Performing Resentment,” 274). Instead of setting the masculine/feminine dichotomy, Nealon suggests that the Nietzschean perspective can problematize masculinity itself. Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1990), xiii.

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accusation”7—of the nihilistic man. From Nelson’s perspective, California appears as a lifeless land, the American Dream without any more promise of the outside. From the beginning, Nelson’s dismal mood is clearly contrasted with that of his wife, Winona: she enjoys her life in the Golden State, while Nelson is full of pain and resentment against her. Explaining the role that real estate plays in the Fairchild family, Nelson’s words point out his “weak” position in relation to his wife. “She loves our forty acres,” he says. “She’d do anything to keep it—increase it—divorce me? Without a blink. I think she’d shoot me.”8 With a coming divorce in sight, his place completely vanishes from their property, where Winona now lives alone. Nelson refers to another powerful source of his woes when meditating over his current situation: “Right—I know—the world has its horrors, mine among the privileged, American kind. But let my statement stand: I blame my father for myself.”9 This relation with his father has produced the sense of incompetence as a man that has characterized his whole life: Uneducated in the ways of domestic life itself, marooned on the shore of parenthood without any equipment, his manner of teaching us, my brother and me, was to ask mysterious questions as a way of indicating we’d made some mistake or other. . . . But in that case where on this earth should I be, Father? Where do you want me, what should I do? Anything, but only tell me. I don’t know what you want! Speak! A child, I’m miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father’s sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?10

Thus the child turns into a man of ressentiment; his identity has always been defined by his relationship with his father, in which he, as the son, always finds himself dominated. He is guilty a priori—in Gilles Deleuze’s words, “pain is made the consequence of a sin, a fault.”11 Repeatedly uttered and finally internalized, the paternal words that indicate a failure the son cannot clearly grasp become the defining principle of his whole being. As Denise Riley argues: “The tendency of malignant speech is to ingrow like a toenail, embedding itself in its hearer until it’s no longer felt to come ‘from the outside.’”12 Constantly implying the son’s deficiency, the father’s words indicate the lack of ideal masculinity in Nelson’s self; therefore, Nelson’s initial situation is akin to the psychoanalytic notion of the subject, which explains that “there is an inescapable 7

8 9 10 11 12

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), 118. Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 25. Ibid., 26. Ibid. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 129. Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005), 11.

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debt of negativity, an ontological deficit which can never be repaid, or filled up.”13 Thus the son desires that phantasmic wholeness he cannot attain, making his situation an embodiment of one of Zarathustra’s lamentations: “only man is a grave burden for himself!”14 Nelson’s sources of uneasiness are not confined to the familial sphere. His past failure as a drug trafficker has made him a fugitive on the coast of California. Assigned a job by his gang boss Harry Lally, Nelson took money to Italy to smuggle drugs back to California; but, he bitterly remembers, the fear of being discovered by the officials got the better of him, and made him abandon the task. Nelson speaks of his failure and its consequence: “Okay, I don’t need to be flip: I can admit that first by my avarice, and then by a compounding cowardice, I earned myself a mortal enemy. And now I’m in a war.”15 While the government prepares for its biggest war since Vietnam, Nelson finds himself in another war, an asymmetric struggle with Lally’s organization that sends after him “the two hunters, and their dogs—clearly part of Harry Lally’s program for extracting reimbursement.”16 Along with these troubles, Nelson’s affair with Melissa is far from stable. He constantly expresses his fear that she may abandon him: “It’s sad to love a woman who won’t love back,”17 he says, and in fact she is carrying on a sexual relationship with another man. The girl is described as an unfaithful woman who might betray the protagonist at any moment, confirming Joyce Carol Oates’s comments that the “noir tradition, or cliché, has it that women are evil and disgusting if they are sexual beings.”18 His manly integrity is constantly threatened in his relation with her, his femme fatale. Everywhere he looks, Nelson finds the sources of fear that belittle him. At one point, he scornfully analyzes his own current condition, entangled, as he is, in a web of relationships: I sit out here and think convulsively until I’m numbed by dope and confused by my own brain—think about my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region 13

14

15 16

17 18

Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 54. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 193. However, the novel presents the “lack” that constitutes Nelson’s reactive subjectivity as the product of his power relationship with the father, rather than an essential condition of the subject: the father’s words are a force that works on and shapes the son’s subjectivity, while Nelson, lacking the power to overcome the father, has no other choice than to obey. In this view of the self as the product of forces, the novel follows the Nietzschean-Deleuzian view, which holds that “all reality is already quantity of force” (Deleuze, Nietzsche, 40), which also applies to The Mosquito Coast. As the narrative progresses, Already Dead deviates from the psychoanalytic notion of the subject—it explores the possibility that the existing combination of forces can be rearranged to produce a different form of subjectivity. Johnson, Already Dead, 35 (Italics added). Ibid. The two hunters, Falls and Thompson, are eager to display their hard-boiled character; their conversation is filled with clichés of masculine character: “‘I should’ve fucked her’” (Ibid., 369) is a typical example. However, as their pursuit proceeds, the killers begin to show characteristics that defy their initial attitude. There is a hint of homosexual desire—“Falls runs his hand along Tommy’s belly and crotch” (Ibid., 371)—before they break into a Buddhist temple, totally naked. They also miss a number of chances to kill Nelson. Thus they subvert the codes of hard-boiled masculinity. Ibid., 37. Joyce Carol Oates, “The Simple Art of Murder,” The New York Review of Books 42.20 (1995): 36.

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and my region’s demands and allowances. My idiot brother. My ugly father. Free will? Personal decisions? It’s not that simple, not at all. What am I but the knot, the gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands?19

He condemns the power relationships that leave him no room for autonomy. Nelson has become a reactive force within this web, full of resentment against himself and others: “resentment is always based on or in some notion of failure, absence, or lack.”20 His sense of incompleteness as a man thus defines his view of the world, which leads him to accuse the sexual other, the feminine. Nelson tries to trace his origins to explain his current situation, which leads him to the masculine/feminine dualism: “the strong British male is dominating, that he’s going to do the horrible things made necessary by the woman inside, the crazy Italian female part of me who’s disarranged my life.”21 In this Manichean explanation of his being, the female part is always responsible for his misery, while the Anglo half of the paternal is left blameless.22 The sense of incompleteness and the consequent negation of otherness define Nelson’s masculine subjectivity. For him, then, California reveals its dark face as “a land of interminable rains, baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick, cloying fog banks. For twenty-one successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like . . . like the American Dream plowed up against the freezing sea.”23 The dream has reached its limits, where the quest for the outside space is blocked by the sea: it points to the speaker’s inner reality. In this sense, Nelson is a typical protagonist from American crime fiction who infects the landscape with “desire and doom.”24 In this world, Nelson aspires to a kind of transcendence: “In order to get on in this underworld,” he says, “you’ve got to practice bushido, the warrior’s way, the samurai’s inner art, the art of being already dead. Bury yourself and go to war.”25 The world is conceived as an underworld, and he seeks the way out by waging a war of revenge—his murder plot is activated when the perfect accomplice, Carl Van Ness, arrives on the scene.

The killer inside me “Everything I am is shit,” Nelson says, condemning himself. “Everything to do with me. Everything I’ve made.”26 The past of failures imprisons him in what Pierre Klossowski 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

Johnson, Already Dead, 44. Nealon, “Performing Resentment,” 277. Johnson, Already Dead, 97. This binary explanation of self recalls the Polish-German dichotomy of origin by which Nietzsche tries to explain himself in his unpublished final draft of Ecce Homo. According to Jean Graybeal, who analyzes the final revision made by Nietzsche, the writer “rejects and represses maternal inheritance, and distances himself from the negative complex of German attributes with which he associates his mother” (Graybeal, “Ecce Homo,” 156), while identifying with his Polish father, who represents noble character. Johnson, Already Dead, 24. Hilfer, The Crime Novel, 31. Johnson, Already Dead, 45. Ibid., 134.

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explains as the Nietzschean idea of ressentiment: “the will cannot reverse the flow of time—the nonwilled that time established as an accomplished fact. This produces, in the will, the spirit of revenge against the unchangeable.”27 Nelson, a man full of pain, seeks revenge on others; then he encounters Van Ness, who attempts to kill himself out of despair. Accidentally saving his life, Nelson draws Van Ness into his scheme: if the would-be suicide kills Winona and then perishes as he wishes, Nelson can safely receive the life insurance on his wife, and thereby repay the debt to Lally’s organization. The coast will be clear for him to start a new life with Melissa. However, Van Ness, once launched as the incarnation of Nelson’s spirit of revenge, increasingly deviates from the plan; instead he carries out a counterplot to eliminate the Fairchild line. Thus Nelson’s reactive will turns back on himself. On the night when Nelson witnesses Van Ness going into the water to kill himself, he is struck with the man’s total abandonment: “For him, the planet, and its ponds and such, didn’t count.”28 Nelson yearns to be like Van Ness, to transcend all worldly affairs. It is a typical male bond in the noir genre, as Oates observes: “Such males understand one another instinctively; when they meet, their bonding is immediate and unquestioned.”29 Talking with Van Ness after saving him, Nelson offers him a deal: “‘You do this murder. Maybe you should kill everybody who troubles me! Anyway you do this murder. Then . . . you go somewhere. And finish committing suicide.’”30 As for Van Ness, he does not hesitate to take on this task. “‘I will kill this person for you’”31 is his answer to Nelson, and the course of the plot is irreversibly set. “‘A dangerous chemistry develops between us,’”32 Nelson says to Van Ness, considering his sudden arrival as an opportunity to solve all his problems. As Tony Hilfer characterizes this type of character in the crime novel, “The figure emerging from darkness and absence may be the protagonist’s savior.”33 Yet, the relation is only an alliance between two forces of nihilism. Nelson wishes for the death of others, and Van Ness tries to annihilate himself—both are life-negating nihilists. The reactive force of Nelson attracts another nihilistic force and both grow even stronger; the promise of their alliance is nothing but an aggravated version of the reactive being. As Jeffrey T. Nealon points out, “resentment preeminently produces more reified, effective, and pernicious versions of resentment.”34 For Nelson, Van Ness points toward the possibility of an ideal world of invincible masculinity where he can enjoy completeness. Van Ness dies, and comes back to life; the suicide returns, but in a different universe where, in his view, he has become immortal: “He’d done it. He’d killed himself. And here he was. He was probably dead in that universe, but in this one right next door he persisted; his consciousness had simply 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Athlone, 1997), 52. Johnson, Already Dead, 58. Oates, “The Simple Art of Murder,” 36. Johnson, Already Dead, 74. Ibid., 76. Ibid. Hilfer, The Crime Novel, 37. Nealon, “Performing Resentment,” 276.

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moved over into this other, potential world in which he did not die.”35 It is Van Ness’s return that leads Nelson to unveil his own creed of eternal return: Imagine a slight revision of Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return . . . that it starts again and again with one infinitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule— every time, and an endless number of times . . . the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a late one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch.36

In this version, each return of difference works in such a way that it strengthens him, until he becomes invincible. “If this were true,” dreams Nelson, “the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman.”37 The difference each return brings is finally subjugated to an idealized masculine identity. The Superman is, in Nelson’s version, the name of the hypermasculine, an ideal to which he continues to conform. He is still trapped in the transcendent value that Zarathustra criticizes—“You still want to create the world before which you can kneel.”38 However, Nelson’s plot goes astray. As planned, Nelson comes to Winona’s house where her dead body lies, being already regretful. “I would do anything to undo this,”39 he says, realizing that he cannot will time backwards. Immobilized by a sense of incapacity, he is startled when the telephone rings, and Winona moves to take it: “she answers. Turns over. Reclaims her outflung arm. Fumbles with the telephone. Clears the death from her throat with a rasping sound.”40 Winona comes back to life as if nothing happened. Over the phone, his brother Bill tells Nelson that their father is dead—possibly murdered by Van Ness. “The dead woman was alive again,”41 and from then on, the situation is beyond the schemer’s control. Van Ness and Winona form a new alliance, and the killer redirects his powers of destruction toward the Fairchild family. When Nelson accidentally comes across his former accomplice on the road, Van Ness speaks of his own revised version of the Nietzschean chain of transformations: “Once you become a lion, a spirit acting from will and making its freedoms, that’s the end of it.”42 While Thus Spoke Zarathustra presents the spirit-camel-lion-child metamorphosis, Van Ness rules out the child from the original vision, so that the destructive lion occupies the final stage; there is nothing beyond its violence. Thus speaks Van Ness, and he carries out his plan. After the death and return of Winona and the funeral of the father, Van Ness goes into the woods to kill Nelson’s brother. He shoots Bill dead, then plays Russian roulette to test his strength: “He put it 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Johnson, Already Dead, 68. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 113. Johnson, Already Dead, 133. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 201.

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to his own head. One. Two. Three. The pin smacked the cap. The cartridge whispered irresolutely.”43 The murderer again proves himself immortal. His triumph in the murder and the subsequent trial constitute another return; thus he moves on, “in yet another universe, laughing.”44 The killer returns to a new universe in which Bill Fairchild is dead and he is not. Eventually, the former partners confront one another on the California shore. “A fight to death,” Van Ness, a metal pipe in his hand, declares to Nelson. “One of us dispatches the other one to another realm.”45 Hit in the head, Nelson falls into the sea, and Van Ness triumphs: he takes Nelson’s place and erases the existence of the father, Bill, and Nelson, all of whom are springboards for his return to yet another universe. Nelson comes out of the water alive, but falls deeper into despair and ressentiment. He withdraws to a hotel room and starts writing a letter to Van Ness and Winona. Aware that they have launched a counterplot against him, Nelson finds himself in deep emptiness—“Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That’s what you created.”46 Tracing the beginning of the whole plot, Nelson begins to analyze his own hardened subjectivity in the letter: “A man decides to kill his wife. What’s so unusual? . . . ‘I want her dead; therefore I am.’”47 This modified Cartesian statement testifies to the force of negation at the heart of his being; instead of the “I think” as the basis of rational subjectivity, Nelson posits the spirit of destruction, which defines him as a man of ressentiment. Then the two hunters from Lally’s organization, Falls and Thompson, spot him; they shoot Nelson, but he escapes from their manhunt and hides on the Lost Coast. When the wounded protagonist reaches School Marm’s Cove, Nelson encounters two ghosts, his dead father and a headless woman, the former being dominant at this stage. The father, incorporated into the son’s self, still works on him as the force of interpellation in the Althusserian sense, which defines the son’s self, manifesting Riley’s observation that “the afterlife of malignant speech is vigorously spectral.”48 The paternal shadow outlives the father to haunt the son: “The dead father, the father’s shadow . . . became the sign of the meaning of life, its value.”49 Nelson prepares to sleep, as his father suggests. Under the paternal shadow, his reactive self does not change but further deepens itself, bringing him to the nihilistic void: “He renounced control over his train of thought, he said farewell to concerns, to any capacity at all for concern, he let his will fall into a bottomless pit of passivity and nihilism. . . .”50 Yet this extreme will to nothingness leads him to a different realm. Taken to its limits, Nelson’s reactive being clashes with itself—here the novel corresponds with Deleuze’s explanation that “nihilism is defeated, but defeated by itself.”51 When the force of destruction folds back upon itself, he has a glimpse of the “first messages of a 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., 240. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 316. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 284. Riley, Impersonal Passion, 23. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 135. Johnson, Already Dead, 417 (Italics added). Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 172.

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new world—hypnagogic phenomena. He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed.”52 It is the destruction of his own nihilistic subjectivity that leads him to another kind of “outside,” a new mode of being.

Metamorphosis The next day witnesses a transformation of Nelson’s self: “On the day of his death Nelson Fairchild received numerous grants of peace and grief, proofs of the beauty of the world, clarifications, deep consolations, and happiness.”53 At this extreme point, Nelson discovers another dimension of his existence that extends beyond the paternal realm: the nihilist metamorphoses into a woman. Already Dead thus presents a redefinition of the idea of the Superman, echoing Deleuze: “The overman . . . is a different subject from man.”54 It is not so much a hypermasculine figure as a transformative force within the self that defies the normative subjectivity. Wounded and faint, he is in the process of dying—“I am dying in Wheeler, California,” he writes in his letter, “a village by the Pacific around forty miles straight up the coast from Fort Bragg.”55 Nelson tries to summon the force of the father, namely the form of his familiar self—but the paternal shadow has disappeared: “He called ‘Father?’ but his throat let out only a breath shaped like Father. The Old Man wouldn’t show, no phantasms visited him other than the schoolmarm passing headless by.”56 The nihilistic force of his subjectivity has destroyed itself; there remains only the ghost of the headless schoolmarm who had been, according to Nelson, the victim of the extreme violence of a priest and a Moorish boatman. Nelson relates her story in his letter—running out of ink, he continues to write using his own blood. The word/thing or body/language dichotomy breaks down: there are no clear boundaries between his life and the story of the schoolmarm. His act of writing thus works directly on his self, with his lifeblood itself as the material. Thus he practices an intensive mode of writing of the sort that Nietzsche praises: “Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood.”57 The letter becomes the transmuted life of the dying man. Thus a breakdown of the previous form of the self takes place; the paternal voice vanishes, giving way to his writing of the schoolmarm as his sole practice of subjectivity. This is where a crucial change is attained. Nelson suddenly finds that he is the woman he has been witnessing and writing: “Oh, but he understood now: I am the schoolmarm of School Marm’s Cove.”58 The ghost of the headless schoolmarm ceases to be an other in front of him and becomes himself, or more specifically, he becomes her. 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Johnson, Already Dead, 417–18. Ibid., 418. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 163. Johnson, Already Dead, 419. Ibid., 421. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 40. Johnson, Already Dead, 422.

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It is a fundamental metamorphosis of selfhood accidentally attained, dissolving the opposition between masculinity and femininity.59 With the dissolution of his former self, there is no practice of subjectivity other than the act of writing, and the life-blood relates the story of the schoolmarm; the self assumes the style of the woman. Writing here functions as a force of counterinterpellation that redefines Nelson’s existence. As Foucault argues: “The letter one writes acts, through the very action of writing, upon the one who addresses it.”60 In this metamorphosis, Nelson, now referred to as a “she,” releases the memory of childhood from her body: The demons roiled in her belly and exited through her heart as sobs and sighs. Worst were the slow stirrings of frozen emotions waking up, astonishingly delayed responses, the putrid dregs of childhood traumas, old griefs clawing their way up out of her, bursting from her throat, nothing connected with any memories at all, only the feelings themselves.61

Now that the self defined by the paternal shadow has dissolved, the haunting memory the father inscribed on Nelson’s existence loses its hold. In this state of forgetfulness, Nelson is opened to another mode of temporality, “the anamnestic now,” in which “‘I’ remembers its multiplicity, its being outside ‘I,’ and forgets itself and becomes open to the radical alterity of unrealized possibilities.”62 Here, the hunters and their dogs, who have been chasing Nelson, are affirmed as having provided him with an opportunity to destruct his masculine-bound subjectivity: The dogs. The dogs. She heard them baying. Saw them come like leaves blown down the hill among the trees. Then again, lower down the hill. Their music was the song of dogs, full of joy, tamped down and flowing over. And offshore the seals, some yipping like pups and others saying, Heart? Heart heart? Heart? When she saw the men she felt explosive incommunicable gratitude.63

From ressentiment to joy, the composition of the self has been altered. Before this mutation, his subjectivity was constituted by the relations with his overwhelming father, his failure in business, his strong wife and whimsical mistress—now all these forces cease to capture and define the protagonist. Nelson becomes a different 59

60

61 62

63

In her analysis of the figure of women in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Tamsin Lorraine argues that Life, whom Zarathustra represents as a woman, is a force of futurity that allows for self-overcoming: “She it is who cannot be pinned down, who always requires new words, new songs, new ways of being. To win her, one must always be trying something unprecedented, and letting the old perish in the attempt” (Lorraine, “Nietzsche and Feminism,” 125). This idea is close to the state Nelson finally reaches; with his past self broken down and his words in blood, the man activates the force of life, through the figure of the schoolmarm, that triggers his metamorphosis. Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994), 214. Johnson, Already Dead, 422. Petar Ramadanovic, “From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche’s Active Forgetting and Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster,” Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001): para. 30. Johnson, Already Dead, 422.

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combination of those forces that occupy the space of School Marm’s Cove: the act of writing, the animal voices, the memory that lets go of the childhood trauma, and the approaching men.64 When the nihilist reaches this transmutability of the self, he detaches himself from the masculine norm; thus Nelson reaches what Nealon calls “a certain kind of Nietzschean productivity within subjectivity.”65 Nelson’s self-overcoming is achieved by actively mutating the past self; he finds an “outside” of masculinity by invoking the force of difference that lies immanent to his being the moment before death. If there is an idea of Overman or Superman in Johnson’s novel, it is the potential for self-mutation, which lies outside the normative identity of “man.”

End of investigation October 31, 1991. The “clean war” in the Persian Gulf has ended, announcing the advent of the New World Order, in which American strength occupies a central place. On the other hand, Nelson has been missing, only leaving his letter, a record of war of another kind. Others continue their lives as if nothing happened: the dogs and the assassins have died, Van Ness and Winona are about to marry, while John Navarro, the county officer, is unable to solve the riddle of Nelson’s disappearance. However, Nelson’s letter to Winona and Van Ness, now in Navarro’s hands, produces an effect that carries the officer beyond the dimension of traditional detective genre. The principle of metamorphosis is at work here, too: the novel mutates the style of crime fiction, taking the detective hero to the “outside” of his subjectivity. As an officer, Navarro personifies the typical masculine detective novel hero. Divorced three times, he enjoys his relationship with a waitress in town, while playing the game of seduction with another woman—“how comfortable it made him feel to be seduced by a woman of the elevated, arty type.”66 When the affair with the waitress is over, he simply blames it on femininity, preserving his masculine self: “One day he’d

64

65 66

In its description of the release of the childhood memory, the novel demands a careful distinction from a solipsistic affirmation of the masculine self. The frequent references to the Gulf War in the narrative function as a counterexample against such a risk, by pointing to the radical difference between the national amnesia and Nelson’s memory mutation. The war in Iraq, at the end of which “Americans greeted the Feb. 28 cease-fire with relief and pride—relief at miraculously few U.S. casualties and pride in the brilliant performance of the allied forces” (“Gulf War, and Peace, Revisted,” editorial, New York Times August 2, 1991, late edn: A28), succeeded to some extent in clearing away the trauma of the Vietnam War, which kept haunting American masculinity. The victory offers an integral opportunity to affirm the collective manhood of the state: it is the antimasculine memory that becomes the object of forgetting. Nelson’s joy, on the other hand, lies elsewhere: while the national narrative erases its “bad” memory in order to affirm its manly integrity, Nelson opens a line of becoming-other by forgetting the masculine mode of existence; there is a huge gap between the two movements of memory. Nealon, “Performing Resentment,” 288. Johnson, Already Dead, 349.

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seen clearly she wouldn’t go to bed with him anymore. Women, in general. . . .”67 Then he continues his game of seduction. On the other hand, his policing job keeps frustrating him. As the investigator of the death of Nelson’s father, he suspects the possibility of murder—the window was open in the room where the body was found, indicating that someone might have broken in from outside. However, with no further evidence to verify this hypothesis, the case is closed. The death of Bill Fairchild is also ruled as self-inflicted, refusing further inquiry. Thus a clear division between good and evil cannot be drawn by this guardian of law—“he no longer knew what evil was. It rarely got arrested.”68 In the end, he decides to quit his job and prepares a letter of resignation, when Nelson’s letter begins to occupy his mind. “What was needed,” the officer thinks, “was a letter like the one he’d been reading the last few days.”69 The remnant of Nelson’s detachment from masculinity is about to trigger another mutation, this time Navarro’s movement out of the world of law and order. Nelson’s letter, now held by the officer, ends abruptly, failing to describe the details of his transformation. Moreover, in spite of the officer’s effort, it enigmatically refuses to form a comprehensible order—“For days he’d been combing through these unnumbered sheets, but he couldn’t quite get them into a sensible sequence.”70 Navarro thus fails as a detective hero who is the “knowledgeable and autonomous subject, restoring order to society through his clear-sightedness at the narrative end.”71 The letter subverts his masculine subjectivity; it remains incomprehensible as the mystery of the Fairchild family remains unsolved, with a “gigantic silence at the center of everything.”72 Yet the letter does not designate the mere meaninglessness of the signs. Just as Nelson finally escapes his nihilistic subjectivity haunted by the paternal imperative, his letter, instead of being reduced to the law of symbolic signification, points to the “outside” of language. In Jane Bennett’s words, “language is not only a matter of significations and failures of signification (‘indeterminacy’), it is also about sound, noise, and differential intensities or affects.”73 When Navarro reads and rereads the letter written in blood, he feels it as a kind of music: He thought he could make out the first words of the bloody entry, but the rest were completely illegible. The blood hadn’t behaved like ink, had worked a microscopic dispersion through the fibers and had averaged out into blots, mainly, with occasional stems, so that it looked as if for his last words Nelson Fairchild had composed a piece of musical notation, a song, a melody, an air.74 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

74

Ibid., 428. Ibid., 430. Ibid., 427. Ibid., 142. Peter Messent, “Introduction: From Private Eye to Police Procedural—The Logic of Contemporary Crime Fiction,” in Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel, ed. Peter Messent (London: Pluto, 1997): 7. Johnson, Already Dead, 280. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), 153. Johnson, Already Dead, 435.

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The officer tries to decipher the words, but he no longer seeks the meaning of the letter. The blood that Nelson inscribes into the sheet appears as “music,” that is, something irreducible to the realm of linguistic signification: “Maybe he’d take it to a musician. Maybe it was, in fact, a bit of music. But he wouldn’t take it anywhere. He really didn’t want to give it up, give it away. It was his. It spoke the language.”75 The language of the “outside” attracts Navarro, who is ready to leave his law-oriented job, so that he experiences the double detachment from the domain of law. Navarro has set out to illuminate the past event of Nelson’s disappearance: its specific date, place, and the person responsible. This effort to replicate the classical whodunit collapses when the event eludes the officer’s grasp and befalls his own self. A dead letter from nowhere—the sender vanishes, and the addressees no longer care about it. Still the letter returns, finding its new reader. The Nietzschean quest intersects with the detective style, producing a chain of transformations that mutate the current form of masculine subjectivity. Tracking down Nelson’s crime and punishment, Already Dead presents masculinity as a form of nihilism. Yet, the novel does not stand for the recuperation of a “healthy” manhood that would satisfy the protagonist’s thirst. Instead, it tests the limits of a nihilistic movement where Nelson glimpses and experiences health in a different form, that is, health as the overcoming of masculine subjectivity. Johnson’s narrative thus performs one of the “tentative explorations of the outer edges of the current regime of subjectivity.”76 Given the triumph in the Gulf War, the present state of the nation is marked by the reconfirmation of its strength. However, another “Now” of mutation is attained through Nelson’s journey, which is irreducible to the national quest for masculine strength. This divergence of the nihilist’s transformation from the triumph of the state can be seen as the incompatibility between the state and the Overman as stated in Nietzsche: “Where the state ends—look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?”77 The overcoming of manhood is fundamentally a micropolitics of the “outside” that is not integrated into any mass-scale political map. Confronting the limit of Nelson’s masculinity at the edge of California, namely the limit of the westward national expansion, Already Dead also belongs to those American novels that critically examine the impasse of American ideas of self and space. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Johnson’s first novel, Angels, starts with a woman’s eastward bus ride from Oakland; the writer’s career begins with the resistance to the national myth of the westward road. Yet Already Dead does not simply negate the American grand narrative of outside space. Just as the schoolmarm emerges from Nelson the 75

76 77

Ibid., 435. This view of language follows Deleuze and Guattari, whose concept of “a purely intensive usage of language” is opposed to “all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19). Therefore, the workings of Nelson’s letter differ from Butler’s notion of “a radical resignification of the symbolic domain” (Butler, Bodies That Matter, 22), as well as from the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic. Unlike this signification-based attempt, Nelson’s writing in blood points to the nonsignifying force of language. “Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 23). Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 146. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 51.

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nihilist, the novel mutates the American myth to invent a new idea of the “outside” as the force of difference within the self, which entails the mutation of past-present relationship. Therefore, the nature of inquiry is fundamentally transformed; on the coast of California, where external space no longer exists, the novel reveals the internal, self-differing potential in the temporal dimension as the “outside.” One must begin with the end of the Dream—it is at land’s end where a new quest begins.

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4

Where the Tide Rises and Ebbs: Power, Becoming, and “America” in Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach

Denis Johnson’s Already Dead gives a new aspect of potentiality of transformation within the self to the idea of the “outside,” which involves reconfiguration of temporality. There is another writer whose work is dedicated to such a notion of exteriority: Steve Erickson. Los Angeles, the city at the edge, coherently offers the settings of the writer’s literary quest for “America,” which reveals a spatiotemporal dimension in which the distinctions between dream and reality, life and death, and the boundaries of space and time dissolve into the vast continuum. His characters leave ordered space-time to enter this fluid landscape to find that the subterranean dynamics of power—a struggle between forces of capture and escape—drives America. The “outside” as the nonhistorical temporality emerges out of this quest, and Erickson’s second novel, Rubicon Beach, offers seminal expressions of this attempt. The novel consists of three parts that intertwine with one another, mapping the characters’ quests for “America,” which necessarily lead to the question of power and subjectivity. Each quest becomes an incessant tug-of-war between a power relationship and efforts to escape from it. Power as an apparatus of capture operates everywhere—in Rubicon Beach, the subject and its identity are the means of power relations, “the two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individuating ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity.”1 The act of naming and the machinery of face make them visible as individuals. The characters, in turn, continually try to reject the identities given to them and become clandestine: Cale becomes a flow, approaching the beach where he will be decapitated; Catherine struggles to escape from the tyranny of the face and Llewellyn hauls himself into the movement of writing; Lake is drawn into the realm of impersonal music. In short, “America,” beyond the simple idea of the spatial outside, emerges as a spatiotemporal zone of “in-between” where power relations strive to seize the characters who nevertheless attempt “to pass to the other side”2 that lies in themselves. For the male American characters, passion unlocks the passage to “the 1 2

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 105–6. Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” trans. Robert Hurley. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994): 161.

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point of no return”—a quest that leads to a landscape that the space-time continuum of “America” infolds in itself.

Feeling myself disintegrate—Cale The novel begins when Cale, the first-person narrator, is released from prison and starts to work in a library tower in Los Angeles. Set in the futuristic city, this part presents the basic principle of the novel, the interwoven struggle between the operation of power and the movement that keeps escaping from it. The city-space is in a continual state of collapse, and in this site Cale is caught in a power relationship with the police. Power collides with him by the act of naming, assigning to him an identity or a “side,” to which Cale displays an explicit antipathy. He gradually becomes aware of an unknown realm of flow, in which he begins an escape from power and its order. Still, the sense of guilt is the crucial knot of his individuation, a thorn in his flesh, which is evoked in a haunting image of a man decapitated by a girl. In search of the girl, however, Cale is told that the headless man is himself, a fact that accelerates his movement into the zone of impersonality. His name, “Cale,” works as a sign that constitutes his identity in his relationship with Wade, a detective in Los Angeles: “someone in a brown suit walked up to me and said, Are you Cale?”3 The narrator’s identity as “Cale” begins with this address from the other. This “interpellation” by the police is repeated throughout the first part of the novel. The act of naming renders the protagonist the subject—“The act of recognition becomes an act of constitution: the address animates the subject into existence.”4 In other words, with Wade’s utterance of the name, the man is constituted as “Cale.” The protagonist’s identity, in this sense, is the product of his power relationship with the police. However, movement or flow always points to a realm of intermediacy, where the operation of power loosens its grip—while it operates by the function of fixation, the city on the land’s edge appears as the site of chaotic disorientation, in the middle of the process of a slow collapse. The sea causes this disintegration, making “music” ring on the streets: I noticed that music was everywhere. . . . It came out of the buildings, a distinct and different melody out of each one. . . . The sea, the sound was the sea, seeping in under the city and forming subterranean wells and rivers. The rivers made a sound that came up through the empty buildings, and the echoes of the buildings made a music that came out into the streets.5

The city in movement is not a solid space on the beach but in an incessant process of breakdown. The undercurrent increasingly erodes the city at the spatial limit of the 3 4 5

Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach (Lodon: Quartet, 1986), 10. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 25. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 13.

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continent, causing a melody that designates the disintegration. The beach, the territory governed by power, is now becoming-flow. The fundamental imagery of water is significant in this regard. In the world of flow, the clear-cut definitions of reality no longer hold. Cale is no exception in this movement: instead of adhering to his solid identity, he begins to liquidize himself. He gradually becomes aware of the indefinite aspect of himself that escapes the constitution by power relationships. This sense of flow is intensified in his obsession with the blood-flow. “I once supposed I was bleeding in order to bleed myself dry; now I wonder if it was the flow I loved. Now I wonder if it was the spilling itself that held me speechless.”6 Instead of establishing himself as dry and therefore solid, Cale feels an attachment to the flow itself. As the logic of identity is maintained “through the attempted expulsion of the improper, the disarranging,”7 the abjection of the indeterminate flow constitutes the boundary of the individual. Cale, inversely attracted to become the flow itself, rejects the notion of identity and border. From a fixed identity to an indeterminate flow: this shift inevitably resists the category of belonging. “I had never been one of anything,” Cale says. “I distrusted being one of something; I knew it wasn’t real, I knew the only oneness that was real was my own, being one of me.”8 The idea of belonging to some category or identity is refuted in favor of his singularity that cannot be defined by other terms. This attitude causes a political problem, for power is preoccupied with deciding to which side Cale belongs.9 The duality of “America One” and “America Two” appearing in this context, in which Wade questions Cale “‘Where were you born, Cale?’ ‘America.’ ‘As I thought. America One or America Two?’”10 Cale answers “‘I never could get straight on that. I think it must have been somewhere in between’”11—therefore subverting the duality.12 In the city that becomes a gigantic flow, the authority machine seeks to operate by deciding sides, thus fixing the state of things by the logic of identity. Resisting this 6 7

8 9

10 11 12

Ibid., 59 (Italics added). Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1994), 201. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 40. The police also prohibit Cale from carrying a radio. “‘If I know you had a radio,’” Wade tells him, “‘I’d have to take you in’” (Ibid., 17). More than just a machine for amusement, the radio appears as potentially subversive. Wade continues, “‘In a town where music is the topographical map, radios are compasses of anarchy’” (Ibid., 18). The music of the flowing ground and the radio are correlated with one another—both are ungrounded, without the solid origin, and therefore it is unable to track down the identifiable origin. For the political apparatus that is concerned with mapping the social field with the definite coordinates of the city, the floating nature of the radio is a political problem. Ibid., 28–9. Ibid., 29 (Italics added). The assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 is alluded to throughout Rubicon Beach. As Cale says, “The murdered man had been born in America One” (ibid., 32), the idealism Kennedy embodied points to a certain duality of ideal and reality. With Kennedy’s death in Los Angeles, on the beach where the frontier ends, the duality vanishes: the “New Frontier” or a “newer world” ceases to imply the outward movement; the dream is inflected inward, into “America” where all the clear-cut boundaries break down. Cale modifies his conception of the Kennedys according to this vision, saying, “A whole family of murdered men. . . . Not America One or America Two. . . . Just America. They were born in America” (ibid., 74).

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logic, Cale positions himself “in between.” In this sense, he is in a constant negotiation with power, and still escapes its mooring line. “The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.”13 To identify himself with a flow assumes, therefore, a politically subversive attitude. The machinery of power tries to fix him to his identity, to constitute his identity as “Cale.” Cale, in his turn, increasingly escapes the effect of power by becoming-flow. In the process of mutation, his guilt of the past is nevertheless evoked, which defies his transformation. In prison, Cale struggles with authority over the identity of Ben Jarry, the leader of a political movement. “In the questioning I did not identify Ben Jarry,”14 he says. As long as Cale refuses to identify him, power cannot decide who Jarry is: “They knew Jarry was their man but they couldn’t pin him down.”15 However, by his unconscious providing of the crucial clue, Jarry is recognized and hanged immediately, while Cale is released. The fact that Cale has benefited the manhunt, despite his antipathy toward it, in turn designates him on the side of authority. Even though he resists the classification, the sense of guilt continues to haunt him with the resultant individuality—the past imprisons him into one side. Therefore, “he must rescue himself from being the victim of his memories, his guilt.”16 Thus the image of a man beheaded by a girl, which is repeated throughout the first part, becomes dominant. Walking near the canal, Cale sees the image on the beach ahead: “I saw it in her hand, the source of the flash, a two-foot-long blade that had . . . very efficiently separated the head she held in her hand from the rest of the man’s body.”17 The second time the image comes to him, even though Cale tries to deny its reality, it leaves blood on the floor of the library. Then he seeks to identify the murdered man—“‘His name is Ben Jarry,’ I said.”18 The image of a headless man for him represents his own guilt of betrayal. The scene hauntingly points to his identity as Cale-the-betrayer. For him, the image functions as an interpellation, by which he is named as the guilty subject. After the third murder that leaves a headless body, however, Wade tells Cale that the dead man is Cale himself: The prints and the blood, we went over it and over it. Didn’t that corpse look just a little familiar? All those times you got a look at it? You decided it was the object of your guilt, but you know it is a little more familiar than that. Because it’s your body.19

Thus a paradoxical situation arises: Cale is already dead, but still alive. The murder has taken place three times, and at the same time it is yet to come. This is the absolute state 13

14 15 16

17 18 19

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), 277. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 41. Ibid. Paul Kincaid, “Defying Rational Chronology: Time and Identity in the Work of Steve Erickson,” The Review of Science Fiction 58 (1993): 33. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 22. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 85.

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of “in-between,” where he is neither on the side of the living nor the dead. The linear progression of time is twisted, leaving him in “a zone of indistinction.”20 Death and life cannot be separated but intermingle with each other, desubjectifying him into the state of indeterminacy. “I had this ridiculous sense of being in control of everything”21—this illusion of autonomy is replaced by the feeling of nausea and weakness. Neither the subject nor mere absence of life, Cale becomes an anonymous life that is unmoored from his identity. “Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death.”22 It is at this point that authority desperately tries to nail him onto a definite place— Cale is put under house arrest. The zone of indistinction in which Cale finds himself is a kind of threshold: this is where the effort of the police to organize a spatial category that defines him as a recognizable subject, and, at the same time, the process of becoming-flow manifests itself intensively. Where the clear-cut space gives way to the new zone of unhinged time, he commences his movement, plunging himself further into the flow: I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guilt, to live where I once died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own grave. . . . By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.23

It is by escaping from the past sense of guilt that subjects Cale—“the decapitation of my own guilt”—and instead placing himself in the zone of indistinction—“to live where I once died”—that he tries to reach the girl, through the flow, in order to be decapitated, “to get free of oneself,”24 by reaching a state where his identity cannot hold. The movement does not lie outside his existence. Cale discovers he is always already in the tide, despite the relationships of power that attempt to anchor his identity. “The other side” or the outside is to be found within himself. Cale’s becoming-flow involves the girl, who points to a realm of invisibility within “America.” Recollecting the second murder, Cale realizes that the girl with the knife has been present at the scene of the murder: “She was there all along, right in front of us. . . . I thought, How could we have not seen her? Cops all over the room and she was right there in the corner; how could we have not seen her?”25 Cale, who is in the process of desubjectification, becomes aware of “the invisible in the visible.”26 The girl escapes the recognition of the police in spite of her undeniable existence. Relations 20

21 22

23 24 25 26

Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Rozen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000), 255. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 76. Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life . . .,” trans. Anne Boyman. In Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone, 2001), 28. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 89–90. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), 8. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 57–8. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995), 134.

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of power construct a real, whereas the girl exists in a world of intermediary among the real, where power becomes inoperative—“The multiplicity of the possible is here, it is now. It is intermediary between the phenomenon, it rustles in the midst of the forms.”27 At the end of the first part, the girl and the blind people on the boat repeatedly appear: they haunt the city, always moving, like a black hole in the real. This is why “The town was terrorized by her. America was terrorized by her, by the mere fact of her being.”28 Confronted with this omnipresent exteriority within ordered space, “America” becomes silent in terror, while the disintegrating city goes “crazy with sound.”29 As Cale discovers the flow within himself, “America” includes the nameless exteriority of space and time that escapes the trap of power.

The girl imperceptible—Catherine and Llewellyn In Rubicon Beach, the girl’s quest that is finally confronted with contemporary “America” as the apparatus of capture displays an inverted image of other characters’ voyages. Along with the act of naming, the face is presented as the main machinery of power that animates the function of the individual and the subject. Catherine, the girl who is “unconscious of its existence,”30 is nevertheless individuated by her face with the arrival of a sailor from the outer world. In Los Angeles, where she comes to live in the house of Llewellyn Edgar, her face has a double effect: it causes Llewellyn’s becoming-flow, and at the same time she is trapped by the individuating function of the face. The voyage of Cale also reiterates this antinomy of passion. Her struggle reveals “America” as the place of collisions between the forces of capture and escape, which manifests itself everywhere in the “country of face-worship.”31 The act of naming appears in the beginning of the second part, in which her name “Catherine” is mentioned: “Actually her name was not Catherine. She would be given the name of Catherine later, in America.”32 Her original name, instead, indicates a multiplicity—“Her actual name was an impossible sound, a mutation of Spanish, Portuguese and an Indian dialect”33—which is not reduced to a coherent identity. This plurality makes a sharp contrast with “Catherine,” which represents a single role or function in Llewellyn’s household, and the girl is individualized by that function. As in Cale’s relationship with the police, the name works as interpellation that constitutes the girl’s identity. This contrast is seen in the motif of the face. In her life with the Crowd in South America, the girl’s face is presented as independent of her being: “for the first time, she 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1995), 24. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 87–8. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 95. Ibid.

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saw her own face. She thought that it was a strange and marvelous watercreature.”34 Others in the Crowd also understand her face as an aggregation that disperses into every direction: They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of the river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or perhaps their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a bough and her hair to be the night when there was no moon.35

The face, in other words, does not constitute her as a coherent individual. It forms a multiplicity with heterogeneous elements—“instead of the facial unity of the whole being the dominant mode, . . . in this case the separate and multiple parts of the face taken on a life of their own.”36 However, “a light coming from elsewhere”37 in the figure of a European sailor, Coba, arrives. He brings the notion of value into the Crowd: a different power relation sets in. The girl is individualized by her face, plucked out of the Crowd, and given a new identity. In this sense, the face is indeed a traitor to her.38 After she outlives the struggle with Coba, the girl begins her northward journey to America, where she comes to live in Llewellyn’s house. When she reaches the City of Angels, the encounter triggers a twofold effect: Llewellyn is uprooted from his identity by the passion she stirs, while the girl is named, individualized, and caught in the machinery of identity. Even though he continues to turn away from her face—“I’m like a man who can’t bring himself to love her.”39 However, he is caught in the passion that makes him abandon his identity as a screenwriter and try to become a poet. “‘I have this poem in my head,” he insists “. . . Not the last poem but the poem after the last poem: I keep trying to find it.’”40 The “last poem” does not finish the writing. Rather, writing appears as a movement toward “the poem of no return”41—it is a blind dive into the flow of passion, the “outside” of his given identity. As he continues on writing, his house also goes through a strange mutation—“Llewellyn Edgar’s house . . . with several walls missing, two new doors six feet off the ground, and a window erected out by the curb.”42

34 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 98. Richard Rushton, “What Can a Face Do?: On Deleuze and Faces,” Cultural Critique 51 (2002): 230. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 161. When Cale meets her, the face-betrayal-subject connection is made explicit: “His eyes said, . . . I never thought treachery was like a face. I never thought it was something one wore whether he knew it or not” (Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 222, Italics added). As Cale is subjected by his identity as the consequence of his act of betrayal, the girl is also constituted as an individual by the face, from which she seeks to escape throughout the novel. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 191. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 220.

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His transformation nevertheless exercises the power of the face inasmuch as the poems are “about a face that was ignorant of its own image.”43 Instead of subverting the face machine, Llewellyn continues to concentrate his passion on the face. In this sense, Llewellyn’s flow, anchored to the girl, is a restricted one.44 Catherine, on the other hand, goes through the individuation by her face that aims to capture her entire being: In the days and nights that followed, her face became more. Her eyes became more and her mouth became more. Her hair became more. Her beauty blossomed like the flower of a nightmare. . . . I’m caught in America, thought Catherine, where people knew their faces and wear them as though they own them.45

To liberate herself from this power of faciality: it is the struggle the girl sets out in America. After she leaves Llewellyn, she achieves the state of sheer invisibility. The local police receive the calls that claim “a girl with black hair was staring through someone’s window,”46 but when they arrive at the site, “There was no one at all. What they had taken to be her eyes were simply the large fiery insects that buzzed among the bushes . . .”47 The girl does not leave “America” but remains inside its space, and eludes perception of the police apparatus: “to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine.”48 The face is perceived, only to be scattered into a multiplicity. Her movement of escape, a becoming-clandestine, is again arrested by the force of individuation. The catastrophic fire in the hotel occurs when the apparatus of capture forcibly tries to appropriate her. “Two men came up on each side of her and grasped her arms. She flinched and they held her firmly.”49 The following calamity is caused by a spark of the conflict between the two opposed forces of capture and flight. The case demonstrates that, in the apparatus of the face, the event is finally attributed to the responsible subject as the cause. The girl is arrested, confined, named as “a Jane Doe,”50 charged with the crime, and investigated by Lieutenant Lowery. Thus she is surrounded by several layers of capture that strive to make her visible as the guilty subject. Still, holes of escape are worn in the middle of these strata of power. Lowery dozes off beside her, and is called back to wakefulness—“‘Lieutenant?’”51—by another officer. But Lowery falls asleep again and wakes up to find the girl gone. “He went to the open 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., 197. Cale, whose movement is more intensive than the poet’s, reads his pieces in the library and takes up composing “the next poem, the one that was to be written next” (ibid., 79). The movement of writing is a transpersonal flow that exceeds the individuality of the writer: “to write is to renounce being in command of oneself or having any proper name” (Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, 121). Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 183. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 204. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 171. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 212. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 222.

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window. . . . After a moment his eyes narrowed. ‘There’s someone out there,’ he said.”52 The two phrases—“‘Lieutenant?’” and “‘There’s someone out there’”—are the effort of the apparatus that tries to block the flow of flight. Lowery is called back from the dream, but the girl escapes from the cell and reaches the beach. In front of her appears Cale, who has sailed away from his power relationship with the police in the first part of the novel. Thus a new journey begins, toward “the world of speeds and slownesses without form, without subject, without a face.”53 Cale’s journey with the girl and the forest reveals the deadly aspect of passion, which can turn into an apparatus of capture at any moment. When Cale meets the girl on the beach, on “the other side,” the murder does not happen: “I looked at her and she finally said in her bad funny English, ‘It is you, but it is not you.’ I said, ‘It’s me but it isn’t me.’”54 In this exchange, they remain in the zone of impersonality. By both affirming and negating the address at once, the girl and Cale do not constitute themselves as individuals. The decapitation, in this sense, has already occurred in another form, in which the logic of interpellation—“It is you”—is replaced by a zone of indistinction: “It’s you, but it is not you.” The power of the name is suspended. It is in this state of indeterminacy that they start their escape from the police. Gradually they enter the realm where the distinction of memory and dream vanishes, where only difference returns, nullifying the logic of identity: “Every morning when I woke up, we were somewhere else.”55 This journey is not only a spatial one—now they move through a temporal zone of indistinction. The other beach Cale reaches to find the girl is not a finality where the quest is halted. Rather, through this threshold, a different voyage beyond the realm of the individual begins. However, the double effect of passion finally eliminates the journey. As is seen in Llewellyn’s passion, it causes the flow to begin the movement within the man’s being; on the other hand, the girl is named as the object of his attraction. The men in love are sailors in this sense: they approach the girl by the becoming-flow. For the girl, each of them is equally a light coming from elsewhere inasmuch as they try to capture her—“My life,” she thinks resentfully, “it’s nothing but sailors.”56 Passion, insofar as it is focused on the individual and the face, works as an apparatus of capture that threatens her faceless movement. This relation comes into existence in the journey of Cale and the girl. “I was in love with her. I had fallen in love with her long before, though I’m not sure when,”57 Cale recollects. As this attraction becomes obvious, his dream ends: The closest we got was on one afternoon when I came back from exploring the landscape and there she was, out on a limb, looking into the water at the reflection 52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 223. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 283. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 266. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 270.

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Outside, America of her face, as though she and that reflection were bound too. . . . And she looked at me sadly, and I turned and climbed to my place to sleep.58

His desire individualizes her: when passion induces the power relationship of capture into the multiplicity, when Cale, like Coba, becomes another sailor who desires to extract her from the forest, the girl disappears. “The next thing I knew, the cold sand was beneath me and I felt as though every bone were broken inside, as if I’d been thrown somewhere hard.”59 Thus Cale returns to “this side”—sailing out of the futuristic LA, he moves beyond the spatiotemporal borders to the beach of the Old World in 1923. “America” in the novel does not designate a specific regime, but appears as a multiplicity with two poles. On one hand, it is a land of the face, where power operates by subjection, individuation, and the logic of identity. On the other hand, as Cale witnesses the disintegration of the entire city, and as Lowery falls into a dream in the course of investigation, “America” also implies numerous forces that escape the solidified form of reality.60 The two inclinations continually entangle and collide with each other, without dividing into such duality as America One/America Two: “there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight.”61 In the beginning of the last part emerges a continuum, which embraces the clash between the operation of power and the flight from it without any synthesis of space and time: It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.62

One and the same land—“America.” In the course of this, the narrative gradually emphasizes the temporal aspect of “the other side” with its repetitive style. 58 59 60

61

62

Ibid., 270–1. Ibid., 271. It is in this sense that signs are “lost” in the novel (this is Shingo Nagaoka’s idea). However, the lost signs, free from their referents, do not point to the emptiness. In the world that becomes a gigantic movement, language loses its static solidity and is plunged into the becoming-flow. The sign of “America” does not lack its referent but instead contains a movement that is beyond the boundary of the identical state of things. Thus the power of naming in the novel is unstable, ceaselessly overturned by itself. This is the task of Rubicon Beach—to create the flow within language. In the novel, statements or phrases often travel beyond the spatiotemporal limits: “‘Nothing swims in the dust’” (ibid., 94), first uttered by the girl on the beach of South America, comes to lake in North America before he is faced with the music at the riverside. “The night was cold and, pushing the palms of his hands into the sand, he shook his head slowly to the sound, rousing himself and saying, or perhaps someone said it to him, Nothing swims in the dust” (ibid., 247). The statement moves, like a radio voice, beyond a specific speaker or context. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” trans. Leslie Sawyer. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994), 346. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 227.

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Journey into the end of dream—Lake and the girl The last part of Rubicon Beach delineates the quest of John Lake, from his birth, in 1913, to 1968. This part introduces number as another logic of power: just as the name and the face act as individuation, numbers divide the world into a definite, bounded space. A genius in mathematics, Lake becomes aware of the realm of intermediacy, The Number, in the order of given numbers. “It was there between nine and ten. Not nine and a half or nine and nine-tenths, not the steroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself.”63 This zone of in-between finds its expression in “the music” and passion, both of which are connected to The Number. The music of The Number implies the event that the occurrence of “America” inevitably carries within itself: the clash between the two worlds, which repeats itself as the encounter between the sailor and the girl on the beach where “this side” and “the other side” become indistinguishable. At the point of the encounter called “America,” passion becomes the force of release and imprisonment at once—the voyage of Lake finally runs into the girl. “There is a number for everything. There is a number for justice. There is a number for desire.”64 In this numbered view of the world, even the abstract notions of justice and desire are distributed into definite places. However, when passion enters this sectionalized world, the whole landscape suddenly changes. In his relationship with Leigh, Lake experiences the zone of indistinction—“What I felt for her was the new place beyond nine; when I entered her I was on a far journey into what I was capable of being. I was the anarchist of passion in an age when passion was a country.”65 He thus becomes aware of the intermediacy that escapes the grasp of numbers. Lake goes through this realm as the flow after Leigh leaves him: “To the tracks below, to the country beyond them, he called her name, and the hardness burst beneath him, the wet white of him rivering off into the beyond country; and he called her again.”66 When his act of addressing or interpellation fails to seize her, passion begins to flow into the territory—the outside—that surpasses the border of the numbered individual. “The beyond country” of passion is also the realm of the music, which Lake begins to hear in his childhood. After Leigh is killed in her political activity, and his mother disappears, Lake ceases to hear the music. When he hears it again, the music looms as the state of in-between of time-space. In 1937, riding on a train, Lake comes to a river and dozes off on the beach. When he wakes up, he finds himself in the scene of the shipwreck, which is the earliest memory of Catherine in South America—“To the corpse at her feet the small child explained, Nothing swims in the dust.”67 Lake hears 63 64 65 66 67

Ibid., 238. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 240. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 94.

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the girl’s voice, as if he were the corpse, and falls asleep again. He wakes up again and follows the girl’s steps to the river, where the music sings to him: I heard it again, the music I’d never heard before. . . . It was right there, coming from the other side of the river. . . . It occurred to me that this particular music was the music of The Number, the number and music of the black distant part of me beyond desire, beyond justice.68

All boundaries dissolve into the music: dream and reality, life and death, and spatiotemporal divisions.69 “Music . . . makes audible the irreducibility of in-between spaces, polyphonic hybridization.”70 In this in-between where the borders of numbers break down, Lake finds that The Number and its music is not the unreachable outside but the furthest interiority, the “black distant part” of himself. However, unlike Cale who willingly enters into this zone of indistinction, Lake cowers and flees from it. Convinced as he is of the existence of the realm of The Number, it is denied from the perspective of order. In a secret organization in which Lake works during wartime, he reports The Number to his director, who simply tells him that “Of course there is no such number, Mr. Lake. We have all the numbers already.”71 By Lake’s response—“If that’s so, . . . then tell me why the Old World came to the New”72—the vision of beaches and the intermediacy is extended to the encounter between the two continents across the gigantic flow of the Atlantic that launched the history of America. In the figure of Lake, the two worlds intermingle with each other: he bears the paternal name that leads back to the Old World, while his mother’s name, Rae, is a substitute for “a Potawatomi name for which there was no English sounds.”73 The music—“beyond the river that stunned the fathers and uncles of America into incommunicable silence”74—indicates the point at which the two worlds violently collide with each other. For the sailors from the Old World, the music from “the other side” lures them into the unknown, into a further westward movement; for the native inhabitants, the movement is a wave of destruction that befalls them. Thus life and death run against each other in the time of the land. The duality of the two worlds melts into Lake, the son of the encounter between the two worlds.75 However, after his father dies, Lake goes to the Old World in 68 69

70

71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., 248. This notion of America as noise is Erickson’s consistent preoccupation. These Dreams of You, his 2012 novel, in describing an Ethiopian girl adopted by an American family in Los Angeles, finally reaches the essence of the country—“more than ever it’s a country of many songs all of them noisy, without a single melody that anyone cares about carrying. The country is a babel of not just melodies that no one shares but memory” (Erickson, These Dreams of You, 300). Rosi Braidotti. Metamorphosis Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), 157. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 250. Ibid., 250–1. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 249. “In the sense that she was the last to hear the music, [Lake] thought one day, my mother was the last American. In the sense that he must now survive never having heard the music at all, . . . the last American was my father” (ibid., 249). As an American after the last, his being is itself a movement, the site of the collision between the machinery of name and the impersonal zone of the music.

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1951, as if to follow the paternal line away from the music and passion. In Penzance, “on the far southwestern tip of England,”76 he meets the old Cale, who has returned from his journey. In a far-off lighthouse located at the land’s end and exposed to the outside, Cale and Lake find the girl—“She had a face like none he’d seen.”77 Thus passion for the girl also affects Lake. With the death of the old man, she vanishes away.78 Lake, after 15 years of fruitless attempts to disprove the existence of “The Number of No Return,”79 comes back to his native land. “I’m going back. . . . I don’t pretend to have the passion my dreams once had. I don’t pretend I’ll hear the music I once heard or that I’ll even reach the place where I heard it.”80 Nevertheless, after he has failed to disavow the existence of the music, the quest into the heart of “America” gradually approaches the huge river that exists apart from actual space-time of the land. Angeloak, a tree turned into a station he reaches by the train, stands alone in the river as the enormous center where his movement is temporarily blocked. The train leaves him in the tree, forcing Lake to stay for months. In 1968, he resumes his movement on foot toward the other beach, following the track until he reaches the girl. Through this movement toward the outside, he steps into the zone of indistinction. They make love, and it is not so much “the fulfillment for both of them”81 as a fatal collision between Lake’s passion and the girl, repeating the encounter that marks “America.” Lake’s passion is revived, but it is accomplished by possessing the girl: she arranges her silent revolt against the sailor whose light captures and individualizes her. Then comes the moment when Lake loses sight of her: “she wasn’t there . . . as though she had slipped through the tracks into the black river far below, even as I felt her in my hands.”82 It is the sparkle of her knife that reflects his own light of passion and makes him turn away. At this moment, when his desire that captures her seems to open itself to the world, as if Lake drained himself into the country beyond—“I emptied myself in her; and maybe, for just a moment, I fell asleep”83—the music comes to him again: And then there’s the sound, the sound I followed out onto these tracks: it’s huge, the sound I can’t bear to hear or disregard, . . . I realize the light’s in her hand, loud and white and sharp, in her hand as though to sear her fingers with it, as though to extinguish it: and then almost faster than I can see it, it comes to me.84 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84

Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 253. Ibid., 277. At the moment of Cale’s death, the indiscernible zone between life and death reemerges to confront Lake. “‘You made a mistake once,’ he croaked to the young American. . . . ‘Should have crossed that river,’ the old man said. . . . lake cried desperately, ‘That beach was as far as I could go.’ ‘No,’ the dead man said, ‘there is one farther.’” (ibid., 280, Italics added). The twisted temporality reemerges, suggesting that the other beach lies beyond the dichotomy of life and death. Ibid., 284. Ibid., 285. Kincaid, “Defying Rational Chronology,” 35. Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 299. Ibid. Ibid., 300.

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The decapitation approaches. In the very act of seizure by passion, when the flow and the imminent death void the subject, the music reappears. This zone is therefore the intermingling of power and escape: voices from the apparatus of capture break into this process of becoming-flow—“‘Lieutenant. Lieutenant?’” and “‘There’s someone out there’”85—which are uttered by Lowery and his fellow officer. Thus the voices of power and the music of the flow are interwoven with each other, all in one and the same land called “America,” which repeats the struggle over time. To cross the Rubicon: Rubicon Beach is an attempt to infuse the unceasing movement or multiplicity of forces into a name—“Cale,” “Catherine,” “Lake,” and above all, “America.” Each name implies conflicts between forces beyond it, so that the novel is not so much a representation of “America” as an expression of those battlefields. It does not advocate a future utopia nor a lost ideal of the past as “the other side.” Rather, the novel opens up a continuum in which each part communicates with every other, obliterating the distinction of past, present, and future. “Memories, dreams, even worlds are only apparent relative circuits which depend on the variations of this Whole.”86 Escape and capture presuppose each other, which inversely implies that every effect of power, the solid territory of the real or the individual, is always already inhabited by a flow. Passion leads the “American” characters to the point of no return, the beach that yields the subject of appropriation and the dominated object. Everything exists on this beach called “America” where the tide rises and ebbs—the music, the sound of the city in collapse, the girl’s voice as well as the voices of capture. The beach is not confined to a particular place or date: as the encounter between the sailor and the girl, it is an event without beginning or end, repeating itself in every American. “The essence is always of an encounter; it is an event; it is neither stable nor transcendental nor eternal; it is immanent to the dynamic process it expresses and has only an abyssal present infinitely fractured into past and future.”87 Erickson’s oeuvre revolves around this event: Rubicon Beach is itself a threshold, anticipating further mutations in the subsequent attempts at exploring the history of “America.” History carries its immanent exteriority, namely numerous collisions that have slipped away from its ordered realm. In Leap Year and Arc d’X, passion plays the fatal game of liberation and captivity beneath the recorded name—“Thomas Jefferson.” Succeeding these motifs and incorporating the opening passages of Rubicon Beach, Our Ecstatic Days displays the futuristic vision of the reversed ruler-ruled relations of power, which is inserted into the story of a mother’s quest for her lost son beyond the course of history. These texts, among others, gather unhistorical forces of “America” that move around the solid temporality. “Always already past and eternally yet to come,”88 the silent clamor of the event roars in each text, inviting further attempts to describe “America” and the question of subjectivity in ahistorical temporality: to cast the die. 85 86

87

88

Ibid. Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989), 81. Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 18. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 189.

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Part Two

Time Will Tell

As seen in the preceding chapters, the quest for the “outside” encounters the question of time. Steve Erickson’s description of the fluid city, which induces the twisted or unhinged mode of time, suggests that a struggle against the current subjectivity involves an interrogation of a linear temporality as well as a stable sense of space. This complicity between space and time is clearly seen, again, in road natrratives; the ideal future for the traveler lies ahead, spatially and temporally, only to be reached and grabbed. The westward movement thus presupposes the teleological idea of time progressing toward the ideal. Hence the importance of Los Angeles, where the end of the road bears witness to the limit of current subjectivity, and the march of historical time necessarily begins to question itself. Richard Powers’s Operation Wandering Soul begins with this connection, or disconnection, between Los Angeles and the time of the road. As a part of the writer’s early preoccupation with the nature of America itself, Operation Wandering Soul also explores the nature of the country through relying on and overturning the idea of the road in its temporal aspect. The dynamics of progressive history reveal their dismal side in the city and suggest that different modes of time have to be envisioned. The main parts of the narrative are set in a pediatrics ward in the East Los Angeles hospital, where Richard Kraft, a doctor, works in a temporary public service. The novel’s focus on the temporal aspect of the “road” genre is made explicit in its opening section, in which Kraft drives on the Los Angeles freeway to the hospital: Time (in this country of ever-expanding unusable free time) for an experiment: infinitesimal easing up on the throttle produces a gap between his grille and the nether parts of the Marquis in front of him. The instant this following distance exceeds a car length, the two vehicles on either side both try to slither in. . . . Fills the otherwise-idle nanosecond. A way to absorb extraneous frontier spirit.1 1

Richard Powers, Operation Wandering Soul (New York: Perennial, 1993), 6.

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On this freeway, the linear and progressive sense of time, inherent in the road narrative, is overturned; “frontier spirit,” now paired with “extraneous,” is no longer a movement toward the promise of the great future, but an act of making a useless nanosecond. Consequently, the freeway offers an experience of time quite opposite to the American ideal: “Aim High in Steering”2 is a parodic slogan of this freeway culture.3 The driver, then, is not an autonomous individual but a mere player in this “total driving environment,”4 which appears as a self-sufficient world in itself. It is therefore inevitable that the following narrative is haunted by a sense of exhaustion instead of youthful vigor. Kraft arrives at his workplace, with an old song going around in his mind, which he is “too fatigued to remember.”5 Moreover, describing the freeway with its everyday car accidents, Powers’s narrative always hints at the motifs of death and disaster. According to the novel, the basic concept of the freeway originated in Nazi Germany; the same section also refers to “Crystal Night,”6 “postholocaust décor,”7 and “death camps,”8 which describe a dystopian space-time on the edge of the North American continent. “The national trope,” the narrative suggests, “the Route 66 wayfarer’s picaresque, here looks out over the vertical cliffs marking its premature dead drop.”9 Powers’s novel goes further, identifying the “road” with the straight movement of history and undermining both of them in the description of the Los Angeles freeway; history is nothing but a repetition of violence with the hospital being located at the end of its path: Pediatrics—the next generation, wave of the future, America’s hope for, etc.— provides the quintessential, unexpurgated view of just where Western Civ’s whole project is really headed in its third thousand years. By clinic’s third hour, the traffic of juvenile misery drifting through his office begins to mirror the freeway’s aimless lane change. It’s as if Kraft’s still on his commune here . . .10 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10

Ibid., 7. Reyner Banham, in his seminal analysis of the urban ecology of Los Angeles, points out that driving on the freeways demands “an open but decisive attitude to the placing of the car on the road-surface, a constant stream of decision that . . . would be better to regard simply as a higher form of pragmatism” (Banham, Los Angeles, 199). This attitude is born out of the movement without the realization of promise: Los Angeles has long been considered as a city without the Dream. Powers, Operation Wandering Soul, 6. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13 Ibid., 25. Ibid., 11. The sense of repetition thus counters the promise of the road. In Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, the Los Angeles freeway also provides this idea, together with the repetitive style, that signals the protagonist’s despair: “In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway” (Didion, Play It As It Lays, 23). The American Dream is replaced by a repetition of purposeless movement at the continent’s edge. Powers, Operation Wandering Soul, 22.

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The hospital where the victims of urban life are brought day and night is the ultimate destination of the freeway and, furthermore, the history of America and Western civilization; they are now grasped as part of a gigantic system of death and disaster that repeats itself over time. Therefore, the refusal of the road in the narrative is always accompanied by the criticism of the concept of history itself. Los Angeles offers a perfect background to this reversal of the national belief in the road-time. Kraft begins another day in the hospital, witnessing time and again the most notable victim of this system: children. This sense of repetition runs through every episode of the novel: in describing the Pied Piper of Hameln, for instance, one of the townspeople asks himself, “This has all happened already. When have I seen this before?”11 The chapters on Children’s Crusade and Anne Frank, together with the pediatrics and the freeway in Los Angeles, exemplify that the “progress” of history has always claimed the lives of children. While typical road narratives tell the fable of a youth who moves into the open space-time,12 Powers’s novel, beginning on the freeway, focuses on boys and girls as the prey of history, thereby overthrowing the teleology of the road. The novel further questions the idea of the narrative act itself, in that it often reproduces the dynamics of history: “You are going somewhere. You are going somewhere. . . . the shape of the storied curve—beginning, development, complications, end.”13 In an ironic allusion to Peter Pan, the “idea of a progressing history,”14 which also requires a closure, is criticized as something sadistic. This is why the following chapter witnesses Kraft, still sleeping, who misperceives his girlfriend’s nasal noise as “a child stands screaming at the history’s downward, disintegrating spiral.”15 The “historicized” narrative mode only repeats the violent gesture of history. Los Angeles, then, is the limit of this history-narrative progression. As the novel refers to the City of Angels as “capital of the Land of the Free,”16 the city in Powers symbolizes the nation itself, now a gigantic hospital-freeway, characterized by the sense of growing old. “Freeways, like rivers, age and meander”17—the sense of aging, seen in this early passage, is intensified by the appearance of a patient, Nicolino, who suffers from premature aging due to Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. This sense of aging goes beyond a single character to touch on the city and America at large. It is most explicitly expressed in the following line: “Yet this [LA] seemed the most ancient place he had ever seen.”18 Just like the boy Nicolino, Los Angeles and America, while pretending as if they had nothing to do with death, appear as the fast-aging community at the dead end of history. 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

Ibid., 233. Brian Ireland, “American Highways: Recurring Images and Themes of the Road Genre,” The Journal of American Culture 26 (2003): 477. Powers, Operation Wandering Soul, 79. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 254.

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Therefore, the idea of the “outside” in the freeway country takes on a different function: an escape from the set course of history. The novel, stating that children “were born knowing it isn’t home.”19 suggests that the Western history, the very framework of their lives, is not a place to be. Kraft, facing this fact, seeks a way out of this impasse, in order to leave hope for the children in the hospital. “Something wants to insist that there is still a route out, a path, perpendicular to every other, that they might still take.”20 This typically American impulse is now detached from the spatial dimension to raise a different question—if the path of Western history has arrived at its dead end at the edge of the continent, is there any possibility of an exit? As it approaches the end, the novel borrows from the convention of fantasy tales. Kraft takes the children to the top of the hospital, where they set “a new direction . . . now revealing itself as perpendicular to everything.”21 Kraft assumes the role of the Pied Piper, trying to invent a new way out; the group of children begin to fly and track “the freeway for a while along a hidden frontage”22 to mock the road myth, then soaring skyward, perpendicular to any other road and finally leaving the planet. This undisguised unreality reveals the impossibility of a horizontal road toward the space of freedom. The whole of history provides the framework of this unbearable weight of being American; therefore, a way out must be explored in another dimension—time. Operation Wandering Soul does not provide a decisive idea of such a temporality of the “outside.” The novel is primarily a set of questions to be explored: the limit of space, violence of progressing time of history, temporal aspect of the narrative act, and the “outside” as an idea of freedom distinguished from the flat denial of reality. The quest of time begins anew at the city on the edge.

19 20 21 22

Ibid., 242. Ibid., 246 (Italics added). Ibid., 345. Ibid., 345.

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5

A Man with a Green Memory: War, Cinema, and Freedom in Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green

The world as cinema:1 in American postmodernist fiction, this idea is indicated in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which Tyron Slothrop appears as a “conditioned” man in World War II. In the Zone, where the “War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image,”2 Slothrop’s subjectivity is inseparably connected to the plot of the war; inexorably reacting to the rocket, he is deprived of any inner space of autonomy. Hence allusions to cinema throughout the novel—the whole Zone is conceived as a gigantic film-set, where the characters are cast to play their roles. “‘My “function” is to observe you,’” one of the characters tells Slothrop. “‘That’s my function. You like my function? You like it? Your “function” . . . is, learn the rocket, inch by inch.’”3 The individual is reduced to a “function” or role, which is determined in the script of the war; the whole world becomes indistinguishable from cinema. This cinematic view of the world does not allow autonomy of Slothrop, who instead appears as a mere product or “construct” embedded in the apparatus of the war. Thus this notion comes close to the Foucauldian view of the individual—“power produces; it produces reality. . . . The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.”4 Therefore, the idea of cinema-world immediately raises the question of freedom: “How is freedom possible for human beings whose very existence is linked inseparably to a matrix of anonymous forces . . . which seems to 1 2 3 4

I owe this idea to Takashi Nibuya’s thought on Deleuze, Foucault, and cinema. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973), 261. Ibid., 219. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 194. Gilles Deleuze implies the cinematic aspect of Michel Foucault’s philosophy; according to Deleuze, Foucault’s point is that the workings of power range over the domain of the visible as well as that of discourse—“every mechanism is a mushy mixture of the visible and the articulable” (Deleuze, Foucault, 38). The subject is a being constituted by the visual-discursive formations of power relationships. Hence the motif of cinema: the place of the subject is close to a character in a film, who is deprived of a transcendent position to become a product of the film, namely the mixture of visual and linguistic media. This view is also shared by the arguments of “cultural construction,” with their emphasis being on the domain of discourse.

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dictate our every move, our every thought?”5 As Slothrop’s quest in the Zone ends up in his fragmentation, the cinema-world, without any promise of the outside space, fundamentally rejects the integrity of the free individual. Among contemporary American novelists who confront this conundrum in the framework of the cinematic world, Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green presents a singular notion of freedom. Following Pynchon, Wright’s 1983 novel describes Vietnam as a cinematic space in which the workings of the army define the ontological framework of every soldier. Narrated by a veteran, James Griffin, the novel explores the possibility of freedom within this condition—it is found in the internal transmutability of his self. The narrative does not appeal to the traditional notion of the autonomous subject who holds a transcendental or outside position; rather, freedom is opened inside the cinematic world, in the act of rearranging his subjectivity through a new practice of temporality. Instead of relying on the idea of the free individual, the novel carries out a rearrangement of past-present relationship to produce the potential of self-mutation. Griffin’s memory of the war is reshaped into a memory of resistance that affects his present situation; his meditations are an attempt to subvert the current constitution of his self, which is haunted by the lingering effects of the war. “It is not a freedom for individuality, but from it.”6 Resisting the trauma that threatens to seize him in the shape of an individual soldier, Griffin’s narrative is an act of “counter-memory” in the Foucauldian sense: through the lens of meditations in green, the veteran desperately tries to transform himself.7

The cinema-planet in the jungle: The military-cliché complex “I, your genial storyteller, wreathed in a beard of smoke, look into the light and recite strange tales from the war back in the long ago time”8—thus begins Griffin’s narrative. Introducing a number of characters, it provides a glimpse of the workings of the army in Vietnam: as an apparatus of power, it sets the conditions of the emergence of the masculine soldier as the subject of military activity. Its operations range over the 5

6 7

8

Michael Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault: Savage Identities (London: Routledge, 2001), 132. Ibid., 136. Past discussions on the novel have tended to highlight the gesture of resignation and meaninglessness, which is often associated with postmodernism. Most recently, Lucas Carpenter identifies a typical postmodern attitude in the novel, arguing that all Griffin learns is a “dizzying, de-centering, and ultimately paralyzing relativism” (Carpenter, “‘It Don’t Mean Nothin’’,” 40–1). Christopher Metress, despite his important discussion of the novel’s utilization of the American movie tradition, finally agrees with Carpenter: “Wright seems to suggest that even the horror film analogy must ultimately prove futile, must ultimately find itself spinning round and round projecting not a new meaning but only emptiness” (Metress, “‘Hopeless Tatters’,” 120). Discussing the entropic vision of the novel, Pilar Marin also concludes that Griffin’s attempt only results in destruction (Marin, “Entropy in Meditations in Green,” 147). The only exception comes from Philip D. Beidler, who points out a “new imaginative possibility” by which the novel presents the “promise of new life” (Beidler, “Re-Writing America,” 8–9). Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green (New York: Vintage, 1983), 8.

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dimensions of the visible, the discursive, and temporality—the army organizes these domains so as to produce a certain type of man, soldier, as the end-of-chain product. “Power organizes the horizons of seeing and the limits of saying.”9 It is in this sense that cinema, a hybrid expression of image and language, comes to the fore in the description of the military life. Griffin’s first introduction to the army is accompanied by a film that juxtaposes Ho Chi Minh and Adolf Hitler: “jack-booted Fuehrer, grinning peasants, rubber sandaled Ho, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh. . . .”10 The image of the Vietnamese leader assumes a figure of the enemy of democracy in its relation with that of the German fascist. However, the use of cinema does not stop here. Much more than an instrument in military education, Vietnam itself is described as a huge cinematic space, where the soldiers are cast to play their roles—Griffin finds himself in “an entirely cinematic vision of the world.”11 In Vietnam, Griffin is surrounded by a number of clichés typical of military life. The daily life of the soldiers is punctuated by various discourses of the army, which constitute the linguistic dimension in Vietnam. Radio communication, the military slogans everywhere, fragments of conversation between soldiers, the clerks of the First Sergeant who types “Rosters, directions, memoranda, orders,”12 a soldier’s letters, a tattoo of a soldier that reads “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR”13—these scattered statements float throughout the army. They are presented as the “anonymous clichés, which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world.”14 Marked by the logic of war and masculinity, they constitute the utterers’ identity as soldiers. This discursive realm works together with the space of visibility: along with the linguistic domain, the gaze of the soldiers is also caught in the apparatus. “Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes,”15 Foucault observes the importance of this dimension of the visible. The space of the soldier’s daily activity is arranged to facilitate the military function—“From the air the compound of the 1069th Intelligence Group was a triumph of military design”16—so that the environment, like a film set, is already prepared in such ways that the men, as the bearers of the gaze, perceive the outer word through the military lens. The space is divided, the positions distributed. “We therefore normally perceive only clichés.”17 Far from a neutral perception, their gaze is marked by the masculine color: “The trees stood straight up thick as phalluses and 9

10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17

R. N. Rodowick, “The Memory of Resistance,” in A Deleuzian Century? ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999), 41. Wright, Meditations in Green, 11. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 66. Wright, Meditations in Green, 49. Ibid., 64. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 208. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202. Wright, Meditations in Green, 40. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 20.

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cautiously they picked their way among them like blind explorers.”18 This vision, in which the jungle is experienced metaphorically as a projection of the men’s masculine interiority, is an effect of the army apparatus. “Visibility is a trap,” as Foucault suggests.19 As an image interpreter, Griffin’s role in the war is to analyze aerial photographs of the jungle to find signs of the enemy: “Trees, trees, trees, trees. Wherever he put circles on the film there the air force would make holes in the ground.”20 As a vital function of the search-and-destroy mission, his eyes are also integrated into the complex war apparatus. Griffin is thus connected to the army organization, “being himself a cliché among others in the world which surrounds him.”21 The soldier is the product of the twofold system, the bearer of both the cliché-discourse and vision. In sum, with its systems of vision and language, Vietnam appears as a huge cinematic field where the clichés of military statements and visibility cover the whole region, under the determined progression of the military calendar: At this level there existed a universe in which Vietnam actually was a planet, an entire globe, curious, resourceful, technologically advanced, a confident and impatient world launching missiles in all directions, bombarding the stars, opening frontiers, establishing distant colonies, angry little people with blistered skin and black pajamas roving long ago through the tall grass of Griffin’s boyhood and now passing outward, long marching columns, into the city of his future.22

Griffin’s life is squeezed in this single sentence: not only the whole spatial territory of Vietnam but his past and future are contained in it. The spatiotemporal coordinates are caught in the army apparatus, and human relationships are no exception on this planet. Once Griffin tries to prove his “humanity,” which is supposed to be outside and therefore impervious to the war, through having sex with a Vietnamese cleaning woman, thinking, “At least one Oriental woman today was going to experience his capacity for tenderness and understanding.”23 In other words, he tries to prove the existence of his “free” self that remains immune to his military life. However, the interaction does not reach beyond the fixed relationship between an American soldier and a native woman; in the end, the sexual encounter makes him recognize his given position, so that he eventually falls back into a cliché, describing the affair as “‘Best I ever had. . . . And you know, she never once asked me to take her to America.’”24 Including all the milieu, from soldiers, buildings, the jungle to the intersubjective relationships, the army that simultaneously produces and distributes the soldiers and the object of their activity, the apparatus, as its effect, makes Vietnam a closed system; it is a film-set, in which Griffin’s function is already determined—in Gilles Deleuze’s words, “it is the 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Wright, Meditations in Green, 76 (Italics added). Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. Wright, Meditations in Green, 43. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 208–9. Wright, Meditations in Green, 58. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 176.

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world which looks to us like a bad film.”25 In this cinematic globe, Griffin feels as if his existence were completely absorbed into the spectacle of war without any external reality. “The war was real; he was not.”26 Then Wendell Payne, a film director, comes to the camp. At first, he tries to shoot scenes in accordance with the aesthetics of traditional action movies. “‘Okay, listen up!’ Wendell shouted through a battery-powered loudspeaker. ‘I want all Americans over here on the side of the bunker . . . and all you VC out there in the field.’”27 His direction is order-oriented, drawing a clear division in the battle scene. “He wanted grace and beauty of the movement, he wanted to see a spring flower open and quietly close.”28 In this sense, his point of view is close to that of the commander, Major Martin Holly, who demands neatness and order in the 1069th Intelligence Group, so that the film in this phase is called “The War in Vietnam: Leadership in Action.”29 Wendell’s film-making starts as a world of orderly emotions and movements, controlled by the commander-director. “As the colonel’s official photographer he occupied a cozy position warmed by the artificial light of bureaucratic power.”30 In this film within the film-world, everything is under his control, allowing no room for the actors’ freedom. Wendell’s first film thus reproduces the movies produced and directed by the army apparatus.

Seed of resistance: The Bush “To be a survivor is to remain both actor and spectator of a living cinema.”31 The soldier is nothing more than a role that the bad film called Vietnam provides. Since the entire region is grasped as a film, an outside or transcendental position is impossible; there is no outside or an immune space where the men are free from the operation of the army.32 However, this does not rule out the possibility of resistance: as long as the soldiers, in their practices of cliché-utterances and perception, are involved in the constitution of 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989), 171. Wright, Meditations in Green, 193. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 163. Virilio, War and Cinema, 48. The same principle applies to other characters in the novel. The commander of the intelligence group, Major Holly, is preoccupied with his appearance, which is an important part in the administration. “Holly himself was blessed with The Look. . . . Appearance. In the military you couldn’t ever forget. Burnished surfaces were mandatory” (Wright, Meditations in Green, 93). The commander’s management includes being the object of the soldiers’ gaze as the ideal standard of the unit, instead of seeing without being seen from a privileged position. The filmmaker Wendell Payne is another example. As a director, he finally appears in his own film, when he gets injured and hands the camera to Griffin, directing, “Focus on my head and begin, slow pan down my body . . .” (Ibid., 334). The commander is seen, the director gets shot: there is no outside or transcendent position.

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their very selves, there are always possibilities of resistance inside the film-world. “By entering into the activity of shaping our own subjectivity, each of us can potentially thwart, challenge, or at least question the ways in which we have been made,” John S. Ransom formulates the Foucauldian notion of resistance.33 The narrative explores this possibility, suggesting unexpected potentiality for a different vision within the realm of the army. There is an excess that is irreducible to the given meaning and perception in the everyday life of war—the jungle. In the second section of his narrative, Griffin describes the use of drugs in his unit. There is a deviation of perception—“Griffin pointed solemnly to the floor. ‘Has anyone ever noticed that that knothole there looks exactly like a profile of Richard Nixon?’”34—and, along with it, the men’s complaint against the war. “‘It’s all a grotesque hoax,’ declared Trips, ‘concocted for economic purposes.’”35 Yet the narrative does not present these conducts of the men as an indication of their freedom; they do not give rise to effective resistance to the function of the army apparatus. The plank that resembles Nixon and the grumbles about the war do not leave the domain of clichés; insofar as their subjectivity, formed by those clichés, is left unquestioned, the soldiers remain caught in the workings of the army. The problem is reduced to the degree of smoothness of the military operation, over which the tug-of-war between the bureaucratic administration and the soldiers is fought. The new commander, Major Holly, strives to keep the organization from slipping into disorder: “No doubt the 1069th Military Intelligence Group had its problems too, but here he would be in charge, he would correct them.”36 For him, the soldiers’ clandestine practices are nothing more than correctable deficiencies. “The superior leader understood that his ability to command in periods of stress was a function of his talent in the creative management of boredom.”37 He reinstitutes the physical training and abolishes the private partition of soldiers’ quarters—in short, he reintroduces military discipline, which is meant to sustain the “normal” perception of the soldiers. “Let’s keep our vision unobstructed, yours, mine, working as a team.”38 he addresses the soldiers. This statement works literally, as well as metaphorically, for the “clear” vision of the soldiers is an integral part of the war. In the second month of his command, he receives an anonymous threat. From then on, the tension between Major’s rigid coding of the unit and the soldier’s antipathy against it continues—which is a banal plot of the war-cinema, another cliché among others. Nonetheless, a different path is hinted in the midst of this cinema. One soldier, Kraft, appears to introduce another possibility of vision that dissociates itself from the operation of the army. For him, the jungle is something more than a mere representation 33

34 35 36 37 38

John S. Ransom, Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997), 152. Wright, Meditations in Green, 29. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 97.

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of masculine subjectivity. He calls it “the Bush,” which is irreducible to any illusion or projection of interiority: The Bush was a professional secret. . . . The Bush had a taste and a touch, a scent and a bite. It moved. It made sounds. It was real. Moving through it, conscious of it, you were conscious of yourself. Irrevocably itself, a presence distinct and unyielding, it offered opportunities for definition.39

The tropical forest is conceived as something other than representative of his inner image or a threatening obstacle that conceals the presence of the enemy. In this view of the forest, Kraft makes a sharp contrast to other soldiers of the unit—Herschel, hit in the chest in a battle, asks Doc, “‘My balls, are my balls okay?’”40 before he dies; entering a village, another corporal murmurs, “‘Shit . . . these bitches is too ugly to rape.’”41 While the other soldiers remain in the domain of a stereotypical view of Vietnam and its people, the Bush points to another visual dimension in the battlefield, kept unperceived by the clichés but waiting for an opportunity to sprout. “Wendell’s camera began to stray.”42 As the shooting proceeds, his direction no longer follows the view of the commander but picks up various fragments—“Wendell photographed indiscriminately, confident that form, like invisible writing exposed to a flame, would reveal itself beneath the heat of his talent.”43 Though still believing in his faculty of command, he begins his quest for another way of perception. Gradually, his camera deviates from the order-oriented viewpoint, and the image becomes more fluid. “Under Wendell’s eccentric direction the thick light flowed like a blob of mercury over the scene, coating rubble and spectators in a momentarily brilliance, unable apparently to choose or to find an object suitable for focusing.”44 Then another version, “The War in Vietnam: Philistines At Large”45 comes up. On seeing the film, Griffin complains to the director, “‘there’s no beginning, no middle, no end. There’s no coherence.’”46 In these practices of film-making, Wendell breaks with the harmonious viewpoint or the hierarchical composition that previously marked his direction, in search of other possible images. The unforeseen quality of the image is attained—his film is now directed toward the resistance to cliché-images.

A close encounter with the jungle The mutation of Griffin’s perception, which leads him to a deviation from the army, is triggered by the actual encounter with the jungle, the object of his everyday gaze and 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 266. Ibid.

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discourse. When the plants exert an uncontainable force on the soldier, it disturbs his composition of subjectivity into disequilibrium. After the event, Griffin begins to veer from the determined function in the army. His perception is distorted so drastically that he becomes unable to perform his duty as the image interpreter; his body, heretofore captured by the military machinery, begins to mutate, and the cinematic world of Vietnam reveals an unexpected landscape. Griffin detaches himself from the war, but this movement is not based on any transcendental position; rather, his viewpoint, along with his whole self, is moved within the film-world. The inauguration of this shift, the encounter, does not derive from Griffin’s subjective intention; after the affect of the jungle, he magnifies the intensity of the deviant perception to the nth degree, so that his rearranged self cannot be recaptured by the army. His freedom lies in this act of self-mutation, which makes him a different character in the film. Before Griffin, Claypool experiences the mutation of the self on his first mission in the jungle, which drives him into the unknown: “the plants, the plants were all wrong. No movie had ever been made in here. Claypool recognized nothing.”47 Instead of the act of recognition that “finds its correlate in the ideal of common sense, which is defined by . . . the supposed identity of the subject,”48 Claypool undergoes an encounter with the unrecognizable force which brings his sensibility to its limits. The jungle is an uncontainable excess over Claypool’s cognitive schema that grounds his identity. Coming back from the mission, Claypool rarely talks with others, and eventually abandons the effort of communication entirely. “Then Claypool abruptly disappeared.”49 Apart from the domain of the military discourse, he is momentarily detached from his own identity: “He took off his shirt to study the letters stenciled above the right pocket: CLAYPOOL. Whose clothes were these? . . . He had abandoned that name and the life clinging to it like dead meat.”50 However, Claypool’s movement of deviation remains a limited one, for he still regards himself as a spy, therefore a member of the army. “He watched and wrote in dirt upon the wall notes for his superiors of what he saw.”51 Severing his verbal relation with the army, his gaze is still caught within the apparatus: his detachment remains incomplete. Kraft discovers him, and Sergeant Mars takes over the task of readjusting Claypool to the army calendar. Shower, dinner, then sleep—Mars commands him that “if he Claypool were not up and ready to work by 0800 the next morning he would be treated to further on-the-job training.”52 Thus he is recast into the spatiotemporal script of the army. 47 48

49 50 51 52

Ibid., 157 (Italics added). Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (London: Blackwell, 1996), 30. Wright, Meditations in Green, 233. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 236.

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Griffin also experiences the encounter that affects his capacity of perception. When joining a ground mission, he comes into direct contact with the jungle for the first time: As he moved in deeper and deeper, he had the eerie sense of vegetation thrusting itself at him for inspection and comment. . . . On the ground, crawling like a bug through the bed of those deceptive film images, he sensed a force the camera could never record, a chemical hardly subdue. Getting out alive was the major priority now.53

The former distance between Griffin and the plant vanishes, and the perceived forest assaults his body with an unrecognizable force. He is faced with “the whole image without metaphor”:54 his perception is not mediated by film-images nor is it understood metaphorically. A new relation comes into being between Griffin and the forest: the jungle directly confronts him and touches his body with its unmediated force. As Steven Shaviro puts it, “Perception is turned back upon the body of the perceiver, so that it affects and alters that body, instead of merely constituting a series of representations for the spectator to recognize.”55 There manifests a totally different landscape from the films with which he has dealt in his duty as the image interpreter; his capacity to process the image in such a way that secures his position as the solider-subject is no longer effective. Griffin’s body, formerly captured within the army apparatus, is affected by the unknown force within Vietnam. As a result, Griffin’s self is thrown into disequilibrium. The event of the encounter commences his movement of metamorphosis, which is more intense than Claypool’s. “It dissolves the contours of the ego and transgresses the requirements of coherence and closure that govern ‘normal’ experience.”56 Accordingly, the use of drugs changes its function: no longer a harmless respite from the everyday routine, it becomes, for Griffin, a means to accelerate the mutation of perception. “His eyes and the world shattered simultaneously. It was like staring into a cracked kaleidoscope at bright pieces of color that no longer resolved themselves into any unified pattern.”57 There is no recognizable form, such as the profile of Nixon; instead, the trip leads him away from the military service, making his eyes useless for military operation. “A quiet uncomplaining Griffin spent hours at the office, patiently sharpening pencils and with stoned devotion shading in his wall map with tinted squares and rectangles of orange and blue and white.”58 Then the progression of time is altered. The determined and linear time of the military calendar is replaced by another rhythm: “Once the days had gone squeeeak, 53 54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 276–7. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 20. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 51. Ibid., 54. Wright, Meditations in Green, 292. Ibid., 294.

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now they went zip.”59 Riding on this new pulse of time, Griffin enters into the unknown realm, in which he eludes the grasp of the military schedule. “He was zipping too fast to be plotted and charted.”60 He finds himself in an “outside” zone where the ordered form of time that grounds the identity of soldiers is no longer effective: “Griffin realized it didn’t matter whether he was on this airfield or back on the block, RVN or USA, here, there, space was so insignificant once you had truly learned how to occupy an interval of time.”61 Instead of escaping from Vietnam, Griffin enters a space-time of interval where his self undergoes a series of mutations. When posted in night watch, his body begins to catch previously imperceptible sounds and forces, which communicate with him and transform him further: At night Griffin sat naked and alone on top of the bunker, listening to the rats and centipedes who lived in the wire. . . . He could feel the jungle, huge and silent, move right up to the wire and lean its warm dark presence against his skin. A spider’s web broke delicately across his face. The night flowed in and out of his body. He wanted to walk out into it, float away through the black and green tide. Something scurried in the weeds. He masturbated on a sandbag.62

His body can no longer be cut off from the jungle; there is no subject-object relationship between Griffin and the environment around him, and his sexuality, which previously resulted in a mere repetition of his privileged position as a man-soldier in the relation with a Vietnamese woman, is sucked into the milieu. His body thus ceases to be an integrated part of the army apparatus and finds connections to the other forces found within the cinema-planet. His perception and sexuality transgress the limits of the man-soldier, and the form of the self is transfigured under his uniform. Griffin becomes an ineffective body in the army by finding a different order of corporeality; his conducts now aim, in Foucault’s words, “to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance.”63 A totally different scene of the battlefield is thus opened up. Affected by the force of the jungle, his identity as a vehicle of war is actively mutated—it is a struggle against the program of the army installed in his own self. After going through the change of perception, Griffin quits going to work altogether: “Griffin’s war was over, processed and distributed.”64 Griffin’s self, previously constituted in the power relations in the army apparatus, finds another mode of existence: his former self as the man-soldier is turned into a mutant who is disconnected from the war. He still remains inside the cinema-world of Vietnam, but he sees a different landscape and inhabits another mode 59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 290. Ibid., 295. Ibid., 296 (Italics added). Ibid., 297–8. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 157. Wright, Meditations in Green, 299.

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of time: for him, the battlefield becomes a “foreign planet.”65 In other words, he attains the perception of an alien. The narrative presents Griffin’s freedom as this shift of perspective, which is accompanied by a change in the mode of the self. The constituent elements of the scene are the same—the army, the soldiers, and the jungle—but the war movie turns into a science fiction. Freedom lies in the practice that rearranges the relationships that constitute the subjectivity from within. Griffin is free, not in his individuality but in his practice to become a mutant in a remade film.66 The opportunity for Wendell’s best film comes when the soldiers gather to watch a zombie movie. Though one of the soldiers claims that “‘This is the grossest movie I’ve ever seen,’”67 the introduction of the zombie film tries to establish a certain analogy between the world of military destruction and that of the struggle with the living dead. When the incoming siren blares during the show, “Vietnam reality and horror film reality are indistinguishable.”68 In the battlefield, Wendell finds that the boundaries between the living dead and the human completely vanish. “Wendell couldn’t believe his luck: Captain Raleigh and a genuine VC in black shorts locked in a lover’s clench on the gravel outside the O club and stabbing one another at intervals with long knives.”69 The War In Vietnam: The Final Hours. In this final chapter of Wendell’s filmography, the director himself not outside the battle, but a part of the battlefield landscape. “The next instant Wendell was slammed to the ground.”70 An explosion hits him; unable to move, injured, he nominates Griffin-the-mutant as the honorary cinematographer: “‘Shoot, you cocksucker, shoot me, shoot them, shoot the whole fucking compound,’”71 the director exclaims. Filming the landscape in confusion, Griffin notices that the director is dead. “Yes, those were still Wendell’s eyes, that was Wendell’s face, but Wendell was gone. Something else occupied his space suit.”72 When the eye-camera ceases to receive the light, the film is over. Death: another way to get out of the real. “What had Wendell seen at that instant? What was he seeing now?”73—but Griffin does not share the perception of the dead; his exit lies in a different direction, within the realm of life, the discovery of an unforeseen perspective in the cinema-planet. Then he, too, is injured and sent back to his homeland. 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Ibid., 333. Naturally, for all its cinematic associations and emphasis on vision, the novel ultimately belongs to the realm of language. This does not mean, however, that the defiance against the normative vision is futile, or everything is reduced to the matter of discourse; Meditations in Green disturbs the correlation between vision and discourse through describing the mutation of the perception, thereby subverting the functioning of the army. It anticipates a new subjectivity as the bearer of the new gaze and discourse that is no longer captured by the apparatus. Wright, Meditations in Green, 323. Metress, “Hopeless Tatters,” 118. Wright, Meditations in Green, 332. Ibid. Ibid., 333. Ibid., 334. Ibid., 335.

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Germination year zero Griffin’s narrative of the war is not a neutral recollection: it fundamentally works on his own self in the present. In the beginning of his narration, Griffin’s present life in the United States is marked by a sense of instability. He is under a doctor’s care, and suffers from a traumatic vision of the battlefield. “This is not a settled life,”74 he admits. Griffin is still caught in the effects of the war; his physical injury, trauma, a psychiatrist, a fellow soldier, and drugs surround and punctuate his life. The war continues to seize his current self, and his inquiry into the past in Vietnam serves to explore the potential for the self-transformation as a counteraction. The fragmentary style of the narrative is crucial here. The post-Vietnam days in the United States do not occupy an external position in relation to the war: the fragments of his present life and the past event are woven together in his narrative. Griffin’s postwar life thus forms a coextensive continuum with the past, and the status of the present is altered in its relation with the memory of the past event. The entanglement of the fragments of the past and the present is not so much an act of representation as “the reinterpretation of one’s past in order to reinvent oneself as if one were the product of a new past.”75 Whereas the logic of representation assumes that “any subject will also be given through representation; the subject who represents is a transcendental condition,”76 Griffin’s narrative signals another direction. His act of rearranging the memories of the war is carried out within the constraints that define the framework of his present self. His narrative is a specific action that constitutes his self: as Foucault argues, “meditations are a practice of the self.”77 His present is not immune to the threat of falling into the clichés of familiar identity— the angry and maladjusted veteran, PTSD, or the drug-addict. In its relation with the new memory of mutation, his present self is rearranged to produce a future-oriented movement. His meditations in green are a Foucauldian act of countermemory that “introduces discontinuity into [his] very being.”78 Trips, one of his fellow soldiers, frequently visits Griffin’s apartment. Trips is completely dominated by his memories of Vietnam—his obsession with the war makes him seek revenge on his superior. “Since Sergeant Anstin’s rumored retirement more than half a decade ago, Trips had claimed to have spotted either him or a 74 75

76 77

78

Ibid., 8. Jon Simons, Foucault & the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), 20. Though Matthew Stewart identifies the novel’s significance at “an almost metaphorical level” (Stewart, “Stephen Wright’s Style in Mediations in Green,” 132), from the perspective of the relational character of the past and the present, the style of the novel works quite differently. The fragments of the past are narrated in the third person, while those of the present in the first person. Thus there is a certain gap between the two modes of time. However, this does not point to the totally separated status of the past; rather, there arises a certain space of relation between them. The fragmentary style does not indicate Griffin’s shattered self but demands a relinkage that constitutes his new self. Claire Colebrook, “Questioning Representation,” SubStance 92 (2000): 52. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 278. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, trans. Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 380.

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cleverly disguised double in almost every quarter of the city.”79 His vision is tied to his subjectivity as a soldier. A reactive memory, or the birth of prison: his present, defined by a reactive mode of relation with the past, is immobilized with resentment against the Sarge. “You’re gonna help me kill the bastard,”80 Trips says to Griffin. Griffin’s present, on the contrary, is characterized by his ongoing experiments with the plant. After he has a traumatic dream of the war, he goes to the botanical garden in the city, where he attempts bodily communication with the garden: “My spine began transmitting coded messages into the mud, the mud relaying secret signals back. The leaves sighed. I could feel myself slowly emptying.”81 It is not an act of identification with the plant or nihilistic abandonment of the self; he searches for an internal realm that is not sucked into the spirit of revenge against the past. Later, he carries soil into his apartment to grow plants there. Even in the homeland, his vision is infected with the vegetative force. His perception is caught in the disequilibrium, which displays the force of the plant in his room: “On the wall above Trips’s right shoulder was a faint dark spot . . . I realized I had been staring at for some time when it erupted into blossom, unfolding moist petals of unbelievable color, a liquid-quick stern plunging to the floorboard, extending curly tendrils and acid green leaves.”82 His perception goes beyond the domain of his subjective control and develops on its own accord: “The imagery has become self-generating. The mind’s gone organic. There’s no control.”83 When placed among the Vietnam fragments, this seemingly tragic lack of stable or “normal” vision takes on a different color. Juxtaposed with the past encounter with the jungle, his unstable perception points to his capacity to mutate, which lies beyond his “personal” realm governed by the residue of the soldier-subject. Far from a lament over the lost stability of identity, the perception in flux becomes a means to escape from the script of the war. The jungle, the botanical garden, drugs, and the hothouse in his room: all these plants constitute an experiment by which Griffin seeks a nonsubjective sphere in his body.84 Trips finally takes action. He spots the man he wants and, like two soldiers on a mission, he and Griffin secretly get closer to him. With the narrator in the position to cover him, Trips approaches the man. “‘Hi Sarge, remember me?’ There was something in Trips’s hand.”85 Realizing the man is a stranger mistaken for Sarge, Griffin hits his partner with a trash can and stops him: “‘Stop it!’ I screamed. ‘Stop! It’s not him, you hear me, it’s not even him!’”86 The reactive memory of the past hovers over Trips’s 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

Wright, Meditations in Green, 114–15. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 143–4. Ibid., 145. In the novel, the use of drugs follows and intensifies Griffin’s mutation, so that they are complementary to the exploration of other possibilities of perception. As long as the drug serves to enhance the movement of perceptual transmutation, it can be part of the practice against the fixation of the gaze. Addiction still remains a fatal trap—when the drug takes itself as the sole end, this strategy would no longer be effective as the resistance to the apparatus. Wright, Meditations in Green, 317. Ibid., 318.

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perception in the present: while Griffin’s vision is directed toward self-mutation, Trips’s gaze is connected to the will to destruction. The memory of the war can be fatal—faced with this danger Trips poses, Griffin chooses a different path, namely the narrative as a countermemory, which is intended to transform the past-present relation in a nonlinear fashion. “Counter-memory counters, or suspends, the power of identity.”87 In Griffin’s version, the present is grasped in its movement that differs from the identity as a soldier. “Who has a question for Mr. Memory?”88—this question suggests more than a desperate escape from the past; the narrator challenges the personalized memory that, as Trips is imprisoned by his past, tries to nail him onto his individuality. It is this act of countermemory that Griffin practices to attain a movement toward the future. The narrated encounter with the jungle and the subsequent mutation, whether they are actual incidents or not, imply the transmutability of his self, in which lies the room for the exercise of freedom. “I think my thumb has always been green”89—this passage in the novel’s last section, creating a memory that affirms his inseparability from the plant, is a springboard for his leap into the unknown: “In the spring I’ll wander national highways, leather breeches around my legs, pot on my head, sowing seeds from the burlap bag across my shoulder, resting in the afternoon shade of a laurel tree.”90 To remake the past, so that it becomes a reservoir of freedom in the present: though there is no guarantee of success in this process, Griffin strives to grow over the fence of the war with his meditations in green. “Freedom, in Foucault’s sense, is . . . not a private right or a public unity, but an ongoing practice, a way of thinking, and a space of activity”91—this Foucauldian notion of freedom is embodied by the narrator who attempts to present a counternarrative of the war that mutates himself from within. In 1984, Ronald Reagan, with his Hollywood background, gave an address for the burial of an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War. As Paul D. Erickson puts it, “By speaking of the burial as a homecoming, Reagan ritualistically reconciled post-Vietnam America with those impulses that the country rejected during and after the war.”92 Through the lens of Meditations in Green, this postwar ritual is nothing more than another episode in a movie—the exactor president presents the dead soldier as a “perfect American hero,”93 who is worthy to be given credit in the gigantic film-world called “America.” Thus the apparatus of power keeps operating through the making of the public memory, “a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.”94 Griffin always finds himself in this collective cinema produced by power. 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94

Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault, 135. Wright, Meditations in Green, 340. Ibid., 341 (Italics added). Ibid., 341. Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault, 132. Paul D. Erickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth (New York: New York UP, 1985), 57. Erickson, Reagan Speaks, 59. John Bodner, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 15.

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The world as cinema: this idea rules out the possibility of an outside position. In Wright’s novel, however, this despairing gesture is mutated into the new form of the “outside.” The site of freedom is in the concrete plot in which Griffin is situated; remaking this cinema from within, he seeks to subvert the current composition of the self. In other words, he attempt to open a “space of concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation.”95 In the long shot, it seems as if nothing happened; like the filmed data being processed, soldiers are organized and “charted” in such a way that the collective apparatuses continue to operate. In the close-up, however, there are always “uncounted” particles that move unceasingly in the internal space, escaping the workings of the apparatuses that try to capture them into the recognizable chart. Dedicated to “the graphed, the charted, the data processed and to all the uncounted,”96 the novel maps the micromovement of James Griffin, who discovers the cinematic freedom in his resistance against his current self: his remade memory transforms the figure of an American hero into a mutant. To activate an “outside” within the long-run film called “America”—the film continues, but the hero is becoming something else.

95

96

Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, trans. Jeremy Harding, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 450. Wright, Meditations in Green, n.p.

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6

Time and Again: The Outside and the Narrative Pragmatics in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist

A narrative, once started, activates a mode of time. The opening paragraph of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist foregrounds this aspect of the narrative act: “Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay . . . and the world comes into being, irreversibly.”1 These sentences are not so much a description as a composition of a spatiotemporal experience; it introduces an ordered sense of space and time, which ensures self-identity within that frame—“You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness.”2 As it progresses, the novel calls into question this stable sense of subjectivity of the protagonist, Lauren Hartke, through exploring the idea of the “outside” suggested by a mysterious man, Tuttle, who is “outside the easy sway of either/or”3 and leads Lauren to interrogate the inside/outside framework that defines her self.4 The basic plot of the novel seems simple enough: Lauren, a body performer, is faced with the sudden death of her husband, loses her grip on reality because of the ensuing grief and encounters or imagines the strange man, but then finally accepts the loss and “the world as it is.”5 In this reading, the structure of the novel is circular, with its telos being the reclamation of her identity. Yet, much more than a temporary distraction before the desired “return” to the normative identity, her encounter with Tuttle works 1 2 3 4

5

Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001), 9. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 71. Cornel Bonca suggests that the main motif of the novel is an ontological question, but in his effort to discover the Heideggerian idea of Dasein, Bonca runs the risk of reducing the idea of the outside to another linear model of time, “Time as a teleological leaning toward death” (Bonca, “Being, Time, and Death in DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” 65). Laura Di Prete also focuses on the subject of temporality, but according to Di Prete, the time of death does not change throughout the novel: “Lauren reproduces traumatic temporality in all intensity and urgency” (Di Prete, “Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” 507). The same tendency is found in Rachel Smith’s and Peter Boxall’s argument, where they only analyze the temporality of grief, thereby failing to notice the interaction between the two temporalities in the narrative. Joseph Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2006), 138.

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as a profound reconfiguration of her view of reality. “‘I try to analyze and redesign’”6— this pragmatic principle, which Lauren mentions in explaining her body performance, is at work everywhere in the novel. Language, body, time, and the “outside”—all are inseparable from how they function in the narrative; a profound pragmatism runs through the novel, which is always based on the logic of mutation. The progression of the narrative, through repeating former scenes with alterations, ultimately constitutes a loop, which alters the nature of Lauren’s present characterized by grief.7 Undermining “a narrative of subjectivity that holds to a model of linear time,”8 The Body Artist itself constitutes a time-space of metamorphosis in which Lauren’s conception of self is redefined.

The break in the present: Death and babble From its beginning, the novel is inseparable from the idea of repetition: it begins with an ordinary morning, just like any other, with Lauren and Rey preparing the breakfast and talking to each other. Though Rey speaks of the “‘terror of another ordinary day,’”9 a sign of despair, Lauren dismisses it as insignificant. Then Rey commits suicide—an inserted newspaper article, which summarizes his career as a film director and mentions Lauren as his third wife, visibly interrupts the narrative progression, introducing a sudden break in the progression of her everyday life. Lauren completely immerses herself in the obituary, as she often experiences with the newspaper stories.10 Having incorporated the habits of the previous days, she cannot cope with the current situation: “When she was downstairs she felt him in the rooms on the second floor.”11 Whereas others try to make her come to terms with Rey’s death, Lauren does not accept the present defined by the loss, which causes a past-present disparity: “She climbed the stairs, hearing the sound a person makes who is climbing stairs.”12 Death effectuates a splitting of her self between “she” and “a person,” between the past and the present tenses. Her basic assumption of temporality is already evident in this situation: 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

DeLillo, The Body Artist, 107. David Cowart introduces an important insight when he claims that, in DeLillo’s work, “language reveals itself as a system defiant of systems, a system whose complexity is at least as vast and inexhaustible as that of the world it constructs or attempt to represent” (Cowart, Don DeLillo, 6). It is this dimension of signs in relation to spatiotemporal experience that the narrative explores through the hypothetical man, Tuttle, whose linguistic system is different from Lauren’s. Thus the novel assumes a plurality of systems—Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the prevailing view of language as the system of the signifier-signified relation be seen as “only one regime of signs among others. . . . Hence the necessity to a return to pragmatics” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 111). Tuttle’s practice of signs is understood in terms of how it works. Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007), 120. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 17. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35.

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time is a linear movement, making a return to the past impossible, which causes her desire to abandon her body in the present—“She wanted to disappear in Rey’s smoke, be dead, be him.”13 She begins to watch a webcam image of Kotka, Finland, in her effort to “organize time until she could live again.”14 Yearning for a stable sense of identity, she is intrigued with the clear-cut spatiotemporal frame of the screen: “It was the sense of organization, a place contained in an unyielding frame . . . with a reading of local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen.”15 The image of Kotka functions as part of her effort to negate her bodily presence and connect with this foreign, organized space-time. It is part of the “fantasy of disembodiment. . . . The illusion of being able to leave the body at will and reappear elsewhere.”16 Lauren becomes fascinated with the Euclidean experience of Kotka as a flight from her current self. All this changes when she finds a strange man in the house, whose words seem totally fractured. Contrary to the “pragmatic deficiency”17 or a “failure of language,”18 the man she names Tuttle shows a peculiar use of language which, with its suspension of the communicative and signifying functions, defies Lauren’s linguistic assumptions. The question is not what language is but what effect Tuttle’s use of language, a linguistic “outside,” generates in relation to Lauren’s—the two linguistic modes or “regimes of signs”19 encounter and collide with each other.20 In their conversation, Lauren repeatedly pins herself down to her identity in the present, specifying her current position in her effort to decipher who the man is—“‘I am here because of Rey, who was my husband, who is dead. I don’t know why I’m telling you this because it is surely unnecessary. But I need to live here alone for a time.’”21 Thus her position moves from negation to affirmation of the present identity. Her linguistic system always sets up “I” in the present; it works as an anchoring point, in relation to which every utterance is measured and defined. On the contrary, none of 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Grosz, Architecture from Outside, 83. Osteen, Mark. “Echo Chamber: Undertaking The Body Artist,” Studies in the Novel 37.1 (2005): 71. Nel, Philip, “Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist,” Contemporary Literature 43.4 (2002): 744. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 119. In The Body Artist, the voice is not the ground of presence; on the contrary, it is thoroughly an impersonal event, an indicator of its “primary desire to be persistently away from presence” (McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 162). As Tuttle reproduces Rey and Lauren’s voice, the voice in the novel is often unmoored from the body and floats freely. The nature of voice as impersonal entity appears in the initial scene of the breakfast, when Lauren takes up Rey’s voice: “She . . . was only echoing Rey, identifyingly, groaning his groan, but in a manner so seamless and deep it was her discomfort too” (DeLillo, The Body Artist, 11). Here, the voice belongs neither to Rey nor Lauren, but appears as an incorporeal event taken up by any body. A similar conception is found later, when Lauren, in her conversation with Mariella Chapman, abruptly “switches to another voice” (ibid., 111) of a man. “I can almost believe,” Mariella writes, “she is equipped with male genitals” (ibid.). Those moments illustrate the fluid nature of bodily subjectivity. Ibid., 49.

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Tuttle’s utterances refers back to the speaking “I.” He speaks of the coming rain in the past tense, and reproduces the past utterances of Rey and Lauren like a passive recorder. In his case, personal identity in the present does not function as a stable ground of being. Even when he utters the word “I,” it does not fix him in the center—“‘I said this what I said,’”22 or “‘I am doing. This yes that. Say some words,’”23 for instance. In these sentences, the privileged position of the linguistic subject collapses as the predicates contradict each other; as Yve Lomax holds, “the verb-predicate is not attributable to the subject of a proposition.”24 Repetition is another notable characteristic in his speech. “‘The word for moonlight is moonlight’”25 is one among such repetitive phrases. This self-referring phrase reveals the sheer existence of the word moonlight itself, its nonsignifying aspect. “It was logically complex,” Lauren feels, “and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true.”26 These utterances are more than simple reproduction: the repetition of the same word or two words of similar meaning implodes the signifying function while engendering a different working likened to music—“it was song, it was chant.”27 Bereft of any communicating possibility, Tuttle does not function as the “You” in a dialogue, which designates “the person one is addressing, but more importantly, a point of subjectification on the basis of which each of us is constituted as a subject.”28 By bringing Lauren into contact with this man, the narrative begins to question the composition of her subjectivity.

Into the outside Spending her days with Tuttle, Lauren is faced with the “outside.” This leads her to question her spatiotemporal experience that, together with her linguistic practices, grounds her “inside,” namely her identity in the present. To Lauren, initially, the outside is simply defined as external space that does not belong to her personal territory. In the description of the breakfast, everything in and around the house is divided according to the logic of personal property, while she notices a hair in her mouth with disgust— “The phone was his. The birds were hers, the sparrows pecking at sunflower seeds. The hair was somebody else’s.”29 The hair is an intruder from outside, a foreign body to be expelled from her system. “Our perception,” Elizabeth Grosz notes, “carves up the world, and divides it into things.”30 Yet, the narrative gradually exposes her interiority 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 64. Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 142. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 84. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 76. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 130. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 22. Grosz, Architecture from Outside, 135.

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to a different idea of the “outside”—“In place of an imagination of a world of bounded space we are now presented with a world of flows.”31 Lauren assumes that a system of language presupposes a specific spatiotemporal experience that the body inhabits. Hence the different “reality” that Tuttle signals to her: “There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings.”32 Following Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that “the regime of bodies and the regime of signs . . . are still in reciprocal presupposition,”33 Tuttle’s language points to a corporeal mode totally different from hers: Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.34

This world, a continuum in which the past and the future coexist without any anchoring point, is totally foreign to Lauren’s experience. Thus the mode of temporality Tuttle inhabits is at first considered nonnarratable—“She thought maybe he lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality.”35 For Lauren, the “human” experience of time is tied to the linear flow of narrative, which is moored to “what we call the Now.”36 In other words, the linear temporality is the succession of the present that grounds identity. On the contrary, Tuttle suggests an outside to this stable world of identity. At this stage, the narrative introduces this idea of exteriority as an imminent yet threatening topos: “There was something raw in the moment, open-wounded. It bared her to things that were outside her experience but desperately central, somehow, at the same time.”37 Tuttle drifts helplessly in the torrent of this continuum, which passes through him at random. This is why Lauren imagines that Tuttle has “no protective surface,”38 the boundary that secures the human identity. Her linguistic habits—“The future comes into being,” and “Time unfolds into the seams of being,”39 for example—consolidate the surface of her bounded self. In such expressions, the “into” composes the contours of the interior realm through which time passes. In a straight current of time, the future and the past stay outside the present: “Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it. But not for him.”40 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Massey, For Space, 81. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 101. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 108. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 66–7. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 64–5. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 94.

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Her grief presupposes this temporality: death and grief always come into being with the linear movement of narrative-time, which also guarantees that those moments will pass out of the present. Tuttle defies this promise of time. Whereas “the human” experience presupposes the principle of self-identity based on the linear understanding of time, this formula is not applicable to him. It is in this sense that she feels that he “violates the limits of the human.”41 Lauren tries to reject such an idea, but the narrative irreversibly entices her toward a limit-point where exterior and interior meet: The words ran on, sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to follow her out of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement. And some terror at the edge, or fear of believing, some displacement of self, but this is the point, this is the wedge into ecstasy.42

This is the point, the edge or limit where her subjectivity touches upon the exteriority Tuttle suggests—it is here that she reaches a threshold. The narrative itself practices the idea of threshold: as Mark Osteen notes, the anonymous narrative voice slides “in and out of Lauren’s idiom,”43 and later it takes up one of Tuttle’s phrases, “Being here has come to me”44 as its own. Therefore, it constantly moves into and out of Lauren’s perspective, which is made clear by the use of the second-person “you.” As Osteen relates the second person to “the very pronominal signifier of self-division and permeability,”45 the appearance of the “you” functions as an indicator of the narrative fluctuation; it appears when Lauren reflectively addresses herself—“Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you”46—and also when the narrative addresses her objectively, as is seen in the opening paragraphs of chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7. The “you” speaks from Lauren’s interiority yet at the same time it often distances itself from her; instead of establishing the speaking “I,” this oscillating movement makes the narrative voice an interface.47 Where the protective surface meets the outside—the novel pursues this idea, and presents corporeality itself as an ontological interface.

The art of membrane Tuttle suddenly disappears, leaving Lauren in the thoughts of the outside—“Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can’t remember it, can’t concede 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid., 102. Ibid., 77 (Italics added). Osteen, “Echo Chamber,” 66. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 123. Osteen, “Echo Chamber,” 66. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 118. The political nature of The Body Artist lies in this profound redesign of subjectivity. Its affirmation of the body as the site of mutation undermines the assumption of corporeal stability that supports the state-model: “the body can never be completely incorporated within the semantics of the nation-state and its body-politic” (Manning, Politics of Touch, 65). The resistance to the normative body carried out through the narrative concerns ontological difference, rather than discursive parody.

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the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.”48 This sliding into “another reality” is distinguished from Lauren’s initial experience of injecting herself into newspaper stories and the Kotka image. Contrary to those feelings of disembodiment, the idea of the outside demands a profound redefinition of the present-time body as a threshold, where interiority constantly interacts with its exterior: the bodily surface is “the hinge-plane not only between senses, tenses, and dimensions of space and time, but between matter and mindedness.”49 The surface is not a wall but a membrane. The notion of the “outside” involves both spatial and temporal dimensions. Tuttle reproduces not only Lauren and Rey’s past remarks but also their gestures—his body, characterized by “fragility or even utter insubstantiality,”50 is a passive receptor for those external events. The narrative distinguishes between this man’s access to the past-future continuum and the workings of Lauren’s memory: “It did not seem an act of memory. It was Rey’s voice all right . . . but she didn’t think the man was remembering.”51 In contrast to Tuttle’s media-like repetition,52 the narrative emphasizes the opposite nature of memory inseparable from the body, describing the “you” who hears the sound of a dropped paperclip—“Now that you know you dropped it, you remember how it happened, or half-remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else.”53 Shortly afterward, the narrative discloses that the paperclip is not there. Rather than a misperception or the word/thing dichotomy that can only lead to an idea of “the desert that stretches the sound and the retrieval of the sound,”54 it attests to the mutational nature of remembrance, which goes through the body-membrane: the external sound caught (the past) is repeated and transformed into the memory-image of the paperclip (the present), and there is a point of mutation between them (membrane). The body as the receptor of the sound is located at this intermediary “fold in experience.”55 Corporeality, the medium of exterior and interior, actively repeats and transfigures the past to express its present. Instances of such “misperception” abound in the novel: the sound of birds,56 the smell of soya,57 and so on. More than indicators of human error or failure of representational language—“the process of difference,” Gilles Deleuze argues, “. . . is primary in relation to that of the negative and opposition”58—these moments reveal the existence of the sensing body as a differentiator that keeps perceiving and converting the external events to different ones in its present. 48 49

50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58

DeLillo, The Body Artist, 116. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002), 190. Mikko Keskinen, “Posthumous Voice and Residual Presence in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, ed. Alain Philippe Durand and Naomi Mandel (London: Continuum, 2006), 38. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 89. Keskinen, “Posthumous Voice,” 35. Katsuaki Watanabe also offers a more detailed analysis of this characteristic in the novel. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 91. Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (London: Routledge, 2006), 219. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 182. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 19. Ibid., 17–18. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 207.

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It is this membrane function that crucially distinguishes Lauren from Tuttle. Past-future events pass through Tuttle, who remains totally passive against them. He is unable to induce any change in the outside events because he lacks a body-as-threshold to regulate the outside/inside interaction. To have an active body in the present is to activate the transformative membrane that opens itself to the continuum of the already-past and the yet-to-come and keeps mutating the “outside” to form an interior realm. Her performance called Body Time unfolds through this corporeality. Body Time is an exploration into the threshold-dimension; it enacts the production of difference through Lauren’s body. Her performance, which evokes the past memories and presents them anew, is not a reproduction of her past experience but its reorganization; instead, it focuses on the transformative aspect of the membrane. Like Rey’s suicide, Lauren’s performance is explained in an inserted text—an article written by Mariella Chapman—suggesting a gap between the narrative voice and the article. If Body Time is understood from the reporter’s perspective, critics are right in relating Lauren’s performance to Judith Butler’s notion of parody.59 By distinguishing itself from the article, however, the narrative adds the mutational dynamism of the body to this view. Rey once told Lauren that “you are making your own little totalitarian society . . . where you are the dictator.”60 In fact, the first aim of her bodywork is to keep her corporeality under her subjective control, expelling the foreign out of her body. Yet her art now throws light on the body’s exposure to the “outside.” Corporeality ceases to be a stable ground of her identity, and reveals itself as an impersonal site through which different states pass. In Lomax’s words, it is a “performance without a performing subject; or, at least, the subject performing was not the one that was already made before the performance.”61 Lauren’s art foregrounds the body as the interface that expresses the past in mutated forms. On the back wall, the video image of Kotka is projected: this organized space-time forms the background against which she enacts and makes visible a different temporality. “Hartke’s piece begins with an ancient Japanese woman on a bare stage, gesturing in the stylizedmanner of Noh drama,” Mariella recounts, “and it ends seventy-five minutes later with a naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately to tell us something.”62 What the writer fails to notice here is that these figures are based on her past encounters with a Japanese woman and Tuttle, and that both of them are expressed differently by her body that incorporates those outside events. Thus the notion of futurity is implicated in this bodily dynamism, which opens the present to the potential for the future production of difference: “The inside condenses the past . . . in ways that are not at all continuous but instead confront it with a future that comes from outside, exchange it and re-create it.”63 The distance between the narrative and 59

60 61 62 63

Anne Longmuir, “Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” Modern Fiction Studies 53.3 (2007): 59. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 59. Lomax, Sounding the Event, 22. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 107. Deleuze, Foucault, 98.

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the article highlights the workings of the body as a membrane that enacts a loop, not a straight line, and that alters the outside to move toward the future.

Narrative loop The post-performance narrative leads Lauren back to the time of grief, but it does not suggest a simple “return” to the past; once the outside in her performance has been explored, that exteriority is infused into the narrative, so that the landscape of grief undergoes a significant change. The final chapter repeats the past scenes that described Lauren just after Rey’s suicide, but it also weaves into itself the expressions that appeared in her days with Tuttle. In this sense, the narrative itself constitutes a circle, but it is “rhythmically re-fused, in a way that always brings something new and unexpected into the loop.”64 Undermining Lauren’s assumption of narrative as a succession of the Now, the decentered loop produces a forward-moving temporality. The conclusion of the novel, Lauren’s acceptance of her corporeality, is unthinkable without this narrative dynamic. Lauren is back in her house after the performance, keeping her old routines and watching the image of Kotka. The narrative lures her back into grief, saying, “Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?”65 Thus the narrative repeats Lauren’s initial reluctance to accept her loss, but at the same time, as critics note, it refuses to specify which “he”—Rey or Tuttle—it speaks of. This con-fusion produces the mixture of two temporalities: the narrative moves Lauren into the linear conception of time, which regards the past as forever lost (“Why shouldn’t the death of a person you loved bring you into lurid ruin?”),66 while at the same time making her face the idea of the outside that imperceptibly subsists (“Is the thing that’s happening so far outside experience that you’re forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty credentials of some misperception?”).67 Therefore, when she walks down the hall “into his time,”68 its equivocal nature signals the confluence of the two modes of time. The narrative affirms this mutation of temporality when it repeats one of Tuttle’s enigmatic phrases, “Being here has come to me,”69 as a crucial expression of Lauren’s self. In this statement, “I am here” no longer assumes its primacy; instead an anonymous event of “being here” precedes her subjective “I.” The narrative voice then unfolds the same idea in a different tense—“She’d return to the house and mount the stairs . . . and walk along the hall on the second floor, in chanted motion, fitting herself to a body in the process of becoming hers.”70 This passage resonates with an earlier scene that takes place after Rey’s death, when she moves in the house hearing the “sound a person makes.”71 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 191. DeLillo, The Body Artist, 118. Ibid. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 123 (Italics added). Ibid., 35.

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Both refer to her indoor movement, but the distinction between “a person” and “a body” points to a profound difference in the two moments. Whereas “a person” works as the splitting of Lauren’s self in the time of mourning, “a body” effectuates a doubling of the self, expressing the impersonal dimension as an integral part of “her body”—as the tense of the sentence suggests, “a body” is a future event that serves to expand her corporeality. Moreover, the “chanted motion” echoes Tuttle’s nonsubjective speech that enchanted her, so that when the narrative mentions that “His time was here,”72 this merged expression enfolds the outside in the reality of grief. By these expressions, the narrative intervenes in the grieving present and opens it to the outside, which now forms a continuum with Lauren’s physical present. Nevertheless, Lauren has to overcome her hope that the whole past is preserved in the present in its corporeality—“They are two real bodies in a room. This is how she feels them”73—which is emphasized by the shift of the narrative to the present tense. Confronting the empty bed, she realizes the past does not subsist as a corporeal entity: “She’d known it was empty all along but was only catching up.”74 The past is the incorporeal event that her body in the present can only express in mutated form, as is evident in Body Time. Although the narrative subsequently refers to “who she was,” this phrase no longer functions to ensure Lauren’s identity after her exploration of the “outside”: She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She threw the window open. She didn’t know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.75

This conclusion recalls one of the first passages of the narrative, “You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day,”76 but with a crucial difference. In contrast to the self-awareness of identity at the beginning of the narrative, it is time in her body that defines her in the end—“Time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside.”77 Though “she” appears as the subject of every sentence in the concluding paragraph, the narrative has already constituted her bodily existence as an interface, always open to the process of difference, which Lauren reaffirms by opening the room to the outside. It is a gesture that declares her detachment from the linear temporality. The style of The Body Artist practices a mutational temporality. The narrative loop revisits the past in order to renew it, and to extract from it a future-oriented movement that overcomes Lauren’s grief. The past is doubled by the repetition, but this dynamic is not so much an expansion of identity as a break from it. Unlike Smith’s argument that the novel “succumbs to the narrative temporal requirements of the novel form,”78 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Ibid., 123. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 9. Deleuze, Foucault, 89. Rachel Smith, “Grief Time: The Crisis of Narrative in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist,” Polygraph 18 (2006): 102.

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the narrative constitutes the time in which everything recommences in a new mode. Thus the novel reaches an idea of beginning in its end; it is located at the point where the looping narrative intersects with the line of the past and produces a movement of mutation—the flow of time in the body makes the world happen again, irreversibly. Thus The Body Artist enacts the unhistorical temporality, itself an interface between the investigation of postwar American history in DeLillo’s preceding novel, Underworld, and a later exploration of time in the desert in Point Omega. While history presupposes a linear mode of time—“what is there to history but contexts falling progressively into order?”79—the time of the body-membrane in The Body Artist is irreducible to such temporality. The narrative of beginning constitutes a break from history: the narrative, once started, activates a temporality that produces the new.

79

Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 218.

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7

WWDD (What Would Disney Do)?: Cinematic Field and Narrative Act in Richard Powers’s Prisoner’s Dilemma

The narrative design of Richard Powers’s second novel, Prisoner’s Dilemma, set in a small American town in the Cold War era, centers on the dilemma in game theory. As the 1988 novel unfolds, it touches on various aspects of the twentieth-century American social landscape—the 1939 World Fair, World War II, Walt Disney and his films, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the Cold War society. The key concept connecting all those elements is the idea of “cinematic world,” as is seen in Wright. Powers’s novel, throughout its several narrative layers, describes the nation as a film, in which American citizens can exist only as “actors” who perform predetermined roles in the shared condition of mutual distrust: hence the dilemma. There is no outside room or position that escapes this collective framework; everyone is caught inside this national cinema. The photography-history relationship explored in Powers’s first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, now expands to a cinema-history connection. The 1988 novel starts as a typical American family drama. “Somewhere,” the narrator begins in an idyllic tone, “my father is teaching us the names of the constellations.”1 In 1978, the Hobson family—the father, the mother, and four grown-up children, the 18-year-old son being the youngest—come together on Thanksgiving holiday in De Kalb, Illinois. Then the father, Eddie Hobson Sr., faints, and has to be helped to bed. The family problem demands a solution; according to the cliché of American culture, the restoration of the ideal familial order always awaits in the end: the family members cooperate and overcome the crisis, and they all live happily ever after. Yet, Powers’s novel defects from this expected plot, for the father’s illness reveals a deeper problem: the family, as well as the entire American society, is caught in the dilemma, so that every member is a prisoner in the cinematic field. Then, the question arises, where is the possibility of freedom or the “outside”?

1

Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Harper, 1988).

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According to the game theory of “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” there are two strategies available to both players: cooperation or defection. Four possible combinations of strategies are available, but all presuppose the overriding importance of the individual self-interest; in Robert Axelrod’s words, it is “an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest.”2 Simply put, the options given do not solve the paradox itself: they are strategies only available within the framework of the dilemma. The prisoner-player is still caught within the walls—that the “individuals remain fixed in their locations”3 remains an unquestionable condition. Individual freedom in the cinematic field thus seems like a paradox—as one of the favorite sayings repeated by the Hobsons goes: “Tell me how free I am.”4 This is where the idea of the narrative act enters the picture: in Powers’s novel, the act questions and overcomes the fundamental presupposition in the dilemma, the self/ other distinction. Several characters appear as narrators in the novel, and each act of renarrating the past cancels the boundaries of the individual; instead the narrator triggers the mutation of self. In his story of Hobstown, the father fictively recomposes the portrait of Walt Disney and blends his own past in the story, thereby calling the very condition of his self in the cinematic world into question; then, the children recount their memory of the father, as well as their past, in their effort to mobilize their own subjectivity. For Eddie Sr. and the Hobson children, the narrative is a break or defection from the “present” of their predetermined roles. In the vocabulary of game theory, the idea of narrative act in Powers is a strategy of cooperative defection; through narrating, they defect from their given locations in the postwar cinematic world, and cooperate to form a new collectivity, thereby undermining the framework of the prisoner’s dilemma.

The cinema-cliché world of the Hobsons Throughout its several narrative layers, the novel explores the cinematic nature of the setting in which the family drama unfolds. It likens the family’s hometown to a film-set: when Lily, one of the two daughters, strolls into the town, De Kalb looks “more movie-proppish than ever” to her eyes.5 The stage of their lives, the house identical to dozens of others, is a reality studio. However, this analogy to cinema does not stop at the level of the small town. In the “Hobstown” story narrated by the father, the whole nation is conceived as a gigantic movie-set; each individual is situated in this cinematic field. 2

3 4 5

Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2006), 6. The ideas of cooperation or defection in discussions of the dilemma revolve around the question of how the players can secure their maximum benefit in the given condition, leaving the boundaries of the individual or the self/other distinction unquestioned. Powers’s novel, on the other hand, tries to undermine the very basis of the dilemma. Ibid., 159. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 153, 251, 312, 348. Ibid., 52.

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The novel also explores the predetermined nature of the characters. The main character in this set, Eddie Sr., is a man of cliché, who speaks to the family “only in favorite sayings.”6 To the children’s eyes, Pop is a cynic who has abandoned his hope in the world and instead utters paradoxical maxims. “‘We sometimes need coaxing to act on our own,’”7 “‘Suppose the world were already lost.’ Suppose it is, because it is”8—those clichés, all of which cancel out voluntary individual action, abound in the children’s words as well. Such “overused maxims”9 constitute their subjectivity devoid of the capacity to act; it is “the reign of clichés internally as well as externally”10 in Gilles Deleuze’s words. Hence the family’s reaction to the father’s illness: the father’s fit has a long history, and has already become another cliché or “old refrain”11 in the family. The children, having witnessed the father’s illness from their childhood, just wait and see, which is a typical attitude handed down in the family: “the hope that everything would still come clean if you only sit still, understate everything, and make yourself as small a target as possible.”12 Discussing the father’s reluctance to see a doctor, Artie, the elder son, and Lily also repeat the paternal gesture of resignation. They unknowingly situate themselves in the familiar/familial plot. “This,” Joseph Dewey argues, “. . . is the Hobson clan—each casketed like Snow White, each self-imprisoned, each a solo nation.”13 The story of Hobstown, which the father has dictated into a tape recorder since the 1950s, is significant in this regard, for it reveals the ontological condition of characters in a cinematic world. Unable to know the exact details of the father’s narrative, the children regard Hobstown as another cliché, a utopian project. Thus the reality-fantasy distinction is established—“Her father had lost hold on Here”14—which only highlights his despair over reality. It is in the fictitious place, the children assume, that Pop can achieve a sense of meaning. Nevertheless, juxtaposed with the life of the Hobsons, the father’s story gradually questions the stage of their lives itself. Eddie Hobson’s narrative begins in 1939, when 13-year-old Bud Middleton is overwhelmed by the spectacle of the World Fair in New York. The narrator further reveals that Bud is not exactly a visitor from outside but a role produced by the Fair itself. This fictitious American boy completely belongs to the Westinghouse set—his situation is no different from a character in a film. The father’s description of Bud raises an ontological question; the boy does not exist outside the fair, being unable to question his world: “‘Who built this place? What put us here? And how to get out again?’ Bud has no answer, being just thirteen and himself a creation of that same fair. He has 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

Ibid., 153. Ibid. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 153. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 209. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 19. Ibid., 19. John Dewey, Understanding Richard Powers (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2002), 41. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 51.

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just the degree of insight the fair gives him and no more.”15 A cinematic character, Bud is forever bound to play his part in the Fair. In the father’s recorded story, this condition also applies to another boy of 13 who visits the 1939 Fair, the father himself in New Jersey. This time, Eddie the boy is a visitor from outside, but the same principle applies to him: he is also “only as insightful as the world that made him.”16 The Fair defines Eddie’s perspective on the outer world, so that he is another “pure product of this year’s World’s Fair.”17 In Hobstown, the spectacle-reality distinction is blurred. When the narrative of Hobstown introduces another significant character, Walt Disney, it becomes clear that the escapist spectacle is in fact closely connected to war; in Paul Virilio’s words, “War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle.”18 Once the United States is involved in World War II, the initial distance between war and cinema vanishes: movies are now part of “the battle already called the Home Front.”19 Disney and his Burbank studios participate in the sweeping tide of war; Eddie Sr. the narrator describes Disney’s conversation with Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, in which the filmmaker promises “to turn his studio into one of the most powerful weapons for winning the home front.”20 A series of propaganda films follow: “In 1943,” as Thomas Doherty points out, “94 percent of Disney’s Work was war-related.”21 Eddie Sr. further elaborates on the war-cinema continuum: though his films win acclaim, Disney worries cartoons alone may not be enough to win the war, and plans a tour de force that shows “just where they are in Time, just how urgent, critical, real, and present the present is, just how central each of them is to the large picture.”22 In other words, the film-image would make spectators recognize their roles in the times of war: “the military-industrial cinema took up this heap of signs and information to compound not only the unity of the nation but the personality profile of each new citizen.”23 Therefore, the reality-image opposition is totally untenable: Disney films are part of the enterprise that turns the whole wartime society into a cinematic space. The paternal narrative touches on the value of the individual in this space of cliché: before the massive social dynamic, a single person stands totally powerless, as in the Foucauldian view of the subject—“this individual is . . . a fabrication by an anonymous technology that turns individuality into an instrument of domination and subjection.”24 Hence the repeated question: “How much can one vote count?”25 Father’s apparent 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 46–7. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 5. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 102. Ibid., 133. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 68. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 135. Virilio, War and Cinema, 40. Michael Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault: Savage Identities (London: Routledge, 2001), 6. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 100.

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cynical attitude toward this issue is demonstrated in “the Voting Fallacy” he introduces to the children: “No matter which candidate I like, the fallacy goes, my vote itself will not alter the outcome. . . . So why should I swelter for a virtuous but impotent ideal?”26 Inaction becomes his personality in his children’s eyes. Faith in the importance of the individual and active engagement are simply negated.

Why we fight versus You Are the War The morning after the father’s breakdown, while the rest of the family discusses and ponders what to do, Eddie Sr. suddenly refers to “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” the paradox of game theory, in the following terms: two men are summoned to Senetor McCarthy who tells them, “‘Fellas, we know that you are both Reds. . . . Let’s make a deal. If either of you comes forward with the dope on the other, the man who talks will go free and the other will fry. If neither of you spills the goods on the other, you’ll still suffer public humiliation at the very least.’”27 For each, the way to freedom lies in betraying the other man; on the other hand, should both choose to defect, they would suffer a penalty heavier than the one shared silence would bring them. What to do, then? Defect or cooperate?—this is the question the father asks the family. The other Hobsons offer their own solutions to the father’s question. “‘The two men simply have to trust each other,’” his wife insists, “‘not be intimidated, and realize that they’re in the same boat.’”28 Cooperation is her answer, which Lily challenges, saying, “‘But they can’t be sure the other can be trusted.’”29 Later, when Eddie Jr. proposes the idea of Tit for Tat, the most successful strategy, which “cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move,”30 the game theory touches on the very question of war. To the younger son the father points out the possibility of perpetual revenge: they defect, so we defect, which triggers further defection . . . “Still another problem with TIT FOR TAT is that it is subject to ‘echo’ effects.”31 The story of Hobstown then explores the dismal aspect of game theory in World War II—the most effective strategy in the theory led to concentration camps. The theory and its effective strategy are actually grounded in wartime reality. The story of Hobstown recaptures this dynamics, and then tries to mutate it. As the war against Japan begins, the father’s narrative continues, a massive reorganization of American society occurs—“War now spread not just territorially but 26 27 28 29 30 31

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 20. William Poundsrtone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and The Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Anchor, 1992), 243.

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to the whole of reality.”32 In reacting to the defection of the Japanese force, the whole society is charged with enthusiasm for the war: Two months after the sneak attack, it seems as if we were itching for it, daring the enemy to do it. Now we set out on a global enterprise, ebullient, charged with energy. . . . The war is about righting wrong with unprecedented industrial production. Tit for Tat.33

The logic of game theory pervades this wartime society: the construction of the cinematic world of war proceeds on the principle of Tit for Tat. Everyone plays his or her part, however small, in the gigantic film called World War II, in which Hollywood is just another cog. The interment of the AJAs or the Americans of Japanese Ancestry belongs to this enterprise: as the narrator points out, “The mass imprisonment is one small and mostly overlooked step in the largest and finest mobilization the world has ever seen.”34 The war reshapes the visible world of the nation by driving their internal “enemy” into the invisibility of inland camps. The strategy of defection is adopted inside American society. Here the Hobstown story takes an unexpected turn. As the father’s story progresses, the story of Disney deviates from the historical facts: the filmmaker is of Japanese descent, and when he finds his Japanese staff gone, the animator realizes his world is involved in the domestic practice of Tit for Tat. Yet he plans to act upon this situation without resorting to the same strategy. Disney as narrated by Eddie resists the plot of Tit for Tat, trying to defect from the dynamics of war. The filmmaker visits the secretary of war and proposes his idea for “the feature-length, revolutionary motion picture You Are the War.”35 In his negotiation with the secretary, the fabricated Disney uses the political nature of his identity as an AJA: “He informs Stimson that if he can’t get the ten thousand bodies out, he will publicly demand to be arrested.”36 As a result, he is able to free 10,000 Japanese Americans from the camp as the staff of his tour de force. The set called World World is secretly built inland, where the production begins; the wartime film combines the animation character Mickey with a real central actor to be named. The introductory version of You Are the War presents Fairy Dust, which has the power to “bleed goodwill across their condensed country’s borders,”37 so that the film, confronting the logic of war, deviates from its expected role as propaganda. The film resists the cooperation/defection alternative by combining both options: Disney and his staff cooperate to defect from the war. When the boy Eddie Hobson is singled out to star in You Are the War, the animator explains his task to the boy: “to set free as many as possible, to coax them to act on their 32 33 34 35 36 37

Virilio, War and Cinema, 57. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 130. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 214.

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own.”38 Here one of the cynical father’s favorite paradoxes, “Sometimes we need to be coaxed to act on our own,” changes its function: no longer a nihilistic impasse, it becomes a principle of Disney’s resistance to the war. From propaganda to You Are the War Disney now aims to mutate the wartime cinema cliché. In World War II, it is the internal other who is forced to become prisoner, but Disney in the Hobstown story foresees an expansion of this logic in the postwar era. The principle of imprisonment will penetrate every aspect of the world, as Disney explains to the boy. We have reached the point where we imprison ourselves by the hundred thousand, commonly agreed to be in the best collective interest. . . . The world is now so treacherous and immense that the private citizen in the postwar world will lock himself up rather than face the prospect of prison.39

Self-imprisonment—everyone locks him/herself inside the film of fear—would be the basis of individual freedom in the postwar era. As in Giorgio Agamben’s Foucault-inspired argument, “Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.”40 The father’s story thus touches on the very foundation of the Hobsons’ lives.

The war—To be continued In De Kalb, to everyone’s surprise, Eddie Sr. agrees to go to the hospital, pointing the family crisis toward what seems a desired ending. Yet, intertwined with the story of Hobstown, another problem reveals itself for the Hobsons: their lives are based on the continued wartime logic of war, which subsists as the generalized feeling of fear. As Brian Massumi maintains in his discussion of the founding role of fear in contemporary American society, “What society looks toward is no longer a return to the promised land but a general disaster that is already upon us, woven into the fabric of day-to-day life.”41 Every life participates in this fear and mutual distrust, which breeds and nurtures the postwar obsession with security, as is evident in Lily’s letter to her neighbor, Mrs. Swallow. Lily describes her neighbor’s fear-driven routine—checking and rechecking the door is locked—and concludes, “You could not live without this routine. It orders your remaining days, lends them a motive they would be pointless without.”42 Without 38 39 40

41

42

Ibid., 264. Ibid., 265. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998), 181. Brian Massumi, “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 11. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 205.

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any concrete basis, the fear grows and maintains itself; the interlude of peace only doubles fear. As long as society is mobilized in the system of war, the father’s story goes on, the period of actual warfare is but a part of it; it hits Disney that the war is “the first round of a permanent People’s War.”43 Everyday life is the site where the war is fought. As Eric Alliez and Antonio Negri claim, “everything happens as if peace and war were so tightly enmeshed that they no longer form anything but the two faces of a single membrane.”44 World War II passes into the Cold War, and the social mobilization continues. The secretary of war, Stimson, demands that Disney’s film be repeatable in future wars: Film it for the future, so that a national switch in enemies will make no difference. . . . Don’t be too concerned with this little scrap we’re having with the Germans. Or even the Japanese, for that matter. They are only today’s enemies. This too will pass.45

The cinema of war maintains itself, changing its foil: Japan will be replaced by the communist forces, ad infinitum. Stimson himself realizes its lasting nature—“We have given birth to the world of the permanent threat”46—putting the whole nation in the prisoner’s dilemma, endlessly engendering the distrust of the other and obsession with “national security,” which “is not separable from budding hatred.”47 The culture of security is saturated with Tit for Tat. In You Are the War, the story within the father’s story, Eddie as an innocent American boy foresees this situation, in which people “surrender all event, all involvement in the common project of being alive.”48 The only principle of community is self-interest, underwritten by constant fear of the other. In such a society, the individual only exists in self-imprisonment: the traditionally assumed space of freedom has evaporated. Disney’s resistance thus necessarily raises the question of freedom. Every individual is cast in the Big Picture of war—where, then, is the exit? One of the film staff, Ralph Sato, questions Disney’s project, insisting another “exit” from the camp: “‘You said it was either the concentration camps or this,’” he tells his boss. “‘But there’s a third place. Another way out.’”49 Sato chooses to join the war, to play a part in the national film of destruction: “Enlistment: the draft board’s offer of freedom.”50 One escapes the camp, only to be cast in the gigantic cinema of war. Doherty notices that the “formation of Japanese-American combat units in 1943 and their sterling performance under fire in Italy and Germany the next year were chronicled with 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 217. Eric Alliez and Antonio Negri, “Peace and War,” trans. Alberto Toscano, Theory, Culture & Society 20.2 (2003): 110. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 178. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 310. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 273.

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appreciation and wonderment in press and newsreel reports.”51 They become actors in the national cinema, failing to reach the outside of the cinematic world. Two of the Hobsons, Artie and Rachel, also encounter the question of resistance and freedom. Their complaints, when they are caught and fined by a policeman for exceeding the speed limit, reflect the American tradition of individual resistance; Artie throws the ticket away, saying, “‘that’s just civil disobedience act number one.’”52 He begins to list his future acts of resistance, including the refusal of TV ads and Muzak, the latter of which gains Rachel’s agreement. As they admit to themselves, it is not an act of resistance but complaint, another cliché of modern life: “‘Our only common culture is complaint. Antisocial small talk. Complaint is the last tool society leaves us for feeling we belong.’”53 The attitude of inaction runs through them, which they attribute to the cynical father: the children repeat the father’s “‘[d]iscontent as an art form.’”54 The children remain caught in “a cinema based on the automation of the state (clichés of history and action),”55 still playing the role of harmlessly frustrated citizens.

The defecting father: Narrative repetition At this point, suddenly, the father disappears from the Chicago hospital, thereby escaping from his expected role—“There was more to him than anybody suspected.”56 This familiar cliché reveals an unforeseen aspect in the father’s character. The father’s defection, far from inducing the act of Tit for Tat of the remaining family, leads to the crucial transformation of the Hobsons. The children discover the father’s narrative project, which triggers their own act of narrating the memory of Eddie Sr.—the children cooperate with the father’s project of defecting from the dilemma, repeating the paternal gesture. In the process, all the clichés in the family change their functions: they no longer constitute cynical self in the cinematic field, but are now employed in the production of a new subjectivity. The defection from the cliché-cinema is attempted by the narrative act that works on the given contours of the family and the individual. On the road, Eddie Sr. phones the family from near St. Louis, then from Amarillo, Texas. The children at home try to figure out his destination.57 To them, the question 51 52 53 54 55

56 57

Doherty, Projections of War, 146–7. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 168. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 171. Gregg Lambert, “Cinema and the Outside,” in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), 270. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 276. This route follows the lyrics of “Route 66,” in which the road stretches from Chicago to Los Angeles. In contrast to the optimistic appraisal of the westward movement, the father’s travels come to a halt in New Mexico, at the test site of the first atomic bomb. The reversal of road narrative is at work here too.

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is how to restore the familiar/familial plot—their initial goal is to make the father cooperate with the cliché: “Pop was on the loose; what could we do to reverse the situation?”58 Yet, without an appropriate plan, they can only wait, until the youngest Hobson, Eddie Jr., decides to find the father. Inspired by the father, the son rents a car and goes on the road. The former cliché, “We sometimes need coaxing to act on our own,”59 changes its function, now effecting an action. Waiting at home, Artie discovers the tape recording of Hobstown and notices the event in the father’s life that decisively transformed the eager youth into a cynic. Transferred to an inland desert at the end of the war, the father had witnessed the crucial event of modern history, the explosion of the first atomic bomb: “Too fast, too sharply, too bright, it grows into a light more luminous than noon. The desert blooms.”60 His long illness was caused by the exposure to this first glimpse of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction—“Dad’s sickness, from day one, came from his being the last man in the Northern Hemisphere who refused to think of the past as over.”61 The past continues in the present: the father’s suffering body is a testimony to this simple fact. It is now made clear that their father’s narrative has persistently explored the past-present relation through which his existence has been conditioned. The history of war and fear is not so much a detached legacy as the ground of the present—“We are the present’s war”62—of which the children have been unaware. The internment of Japanese-Americans is a historical fact, Artie learns, whereas Disney’s involvement is a figment. The son is faced with the transformative nature of the story; in his narrative of Hobstown, Disney is transformed into a figure of resistance; moreover, by involving his own past in the story, Eddie Sr. tries to detach himself from the ready-made cinematic world of war. As Gregg Lambert argues, “the ‘past itself ’ cannot be determined outside this possibility of being scrambled and entering new combinations with the present.”63 Much more than a mere escape, it is “an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform himself, and to attain to a certain mode of being.”64 Narrative is the production of the transformative subjectivity by which the father mobilizes himself to resist the simple continuity of the present condition. Listening to the father’s tape, the children realize the true problem: their selves are the silent battlefield of the war. Since the prisoner’s dilemma presupposes a walled subjectivity formed in a community of fear, the matrix can be broken by a different practice of self: in Judith Butler’s words, “Critique is not merely of a given social practice or a certain horizon of intelligibility . . . it also implies that I come into question 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 277. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 325. Ibid., 245. Lambert, “Cinema and the Outside,” 286. Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of the Concern of the Self As a Practice of Freedom,” trans. P. Aranow and D. McGrawth, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 282.

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for myself.”65 Eddie Sr. tries to trigger the transformation of the Hobson community through his story: “The man was fighting for his life: that much was obvious. And more than his life.”66 The father’s narrative blurs the boundaries of self and other, thereby inducing a new form of community. Artie is struck by the fact that, “The only way out was to release the us-and-us that was trapped inside the you-versus-me,”67 but this is not a return to the ideal “We” in the past: a new collectivity has to be freshly constructed out of the cliché of the nuclear family. When the father’s tape ends, and Artie rewinds it and starts to record his own narrative: “Somewhere, my father is teaching us the names of the constellations.”68 Then the sisters take over, so that the plural voices are recorded on the tape: “Around they went, all in single file.”69 Another cliché now offers a glimpse of the communal narrative act.70 It is important, therefore, that the father’s story is always renewable through other voices. In Prisoner’s Dilemma, the lack of finality in the father’s story functions as potential for a continually new narrative: there is more to any given story. The Hobstown story, which the father kept renewing for two decades, is now taken up by the children. The children’s narrative acts, the beginning of which corresponds to the initial passage of the novel, thus envelop the story of Hobstown. They pick up the father’s lone vote to start their own story, in which they constitute a space where a single voice is connected to a new collectivity. Thus the clichés in the family are redeployed so as to eventually engender the children’s action. Accordingly, the family transforms itself: instead of reaffirming “one of the blamelessly median houses where they raised blameless median family,”71 the father’s narrative act triggers others’ interrogations of their own selves. In these overlapping narratives, the principle is to mutate the familiar form of self: the patriotic Disney, the cynical father, and the indifferent children—all are called into question through the narrative act. Several layers of narrative become indistinguishable, making the novel the place where voices collectively transform themselves, without being subjugated to the father as the Great Dictator or the writer himself.72 The “we” that narrative activates 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 23. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 317. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 344. This interaction of plural voices found in Prisoner’s Dilemma is close to the view of M. M. Bakhtin, who argues that “[e]very novel, taken as the totality of all the languages and consciousness of language embodied in it, is a hybrid” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 366). More precisely, Powers’s novel expresses the process of hybridization, in which a given narrative always awaits other voices to renew it; the novel exists in this temporal dimension. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 249. This dynamic does not allow room for a transcendent narrator who stands beyond narrated events. In the inserted section called “Calamine,” another narrator, supposedly Powers, appears to explain the conception behind his narrative. The narrator is the middle son of a family in De Kalb, whose father recently died, which clarifies his similarity and difference from the Hobsons: Therefore, the subjectivity of “Powers,” a narrator who speaks of his father in such sections as “Tit for Tat,” is also involved: the author is another voice that changes through the narrative act.

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is a transformative time—namely the “outside”—where the individual voices of the family members are opened to their mutations. “Fabulation,” as Massumi puts it, “is the attraction of deviant singularities into a new constellation, the crystallization of a new collectivity.”73 The concept of the individual, which lies at the basis of the dilemma, is thus necessarily redefined. Rather than a bounded entity, the individual is opened to future transformation; as the father’s single narrative induces the children’s questioning of their own being, the importance of the individual—how much one individual can count—lies not in “the humanist idea that the most promising solutions to our problems can be found within,”74 but in the capacity to mutate and be mutated by others. Therefore, the individual is connected to the collective dimension through its transformative potential. Singular and plural at the same time, the narrative act undoes the presupposition of the bounded individual in the prisoner’s dilemma: “the possibility of another place, the other person’s story,”75 no longer an escapist fantasy, becomes a practice of connecting the self with the new collectivity.76 The transformative force of the fabricating act also illuminates the conundrum of freedom. In Prisoner’s Dilemma, freedom does not lie in the options available to individuals, as in game theory, but in the act of subverting a given situation by renarrating the past. It is not a right or property, as one of the oldest American clichés holds; rather, freedom is the capacity for transformation: “the freedom opened by counter-memory is a freedom of permanent transformation, of always being able to become other than what we are.”77 The act of freedom in Prisoner’s Dilemma lies in the transformative act that changes the composition of the individual. Narrative produces the outside in which the cliché-subjectivity is opened to its transmutability. The news of Hiroshima breaks at the end of the Hobstown story—World War II is about to end, and the Cold War is set to begin. You Are the War is left unfinished— Disney’s project of influencing the whole nation is a failure after all. In the deserted studio office, Eddie finds the filmmaker’s dictaphone. “Let’s start again, from scratch,” he begins his story. “Let us make a small world, a miniature of a miniature, say an even half-dozen, since we screw up everything larger.”78 Eddie is still cooperating with Disney’s plan to defect from the war film, but on a smaller scale: the future Hobson father envisions his family as a community where resistance to the war will

73 74

75 76

77 78

Massumi, “Everywhere You Want to Be,” 34. Scott Hermanson, “Just Behind the Billboard: The Instability of Prisoner’s Dilemma,” in Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 62. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 79. The blurring of the boundaries of individual voices in Prisoner’s Dilemma always activates communal moments. However, this indeterminacy does not constitute a labyrinth where the sense of “reality” is thoroughly negated; it causes the interaction of the transforming voices, in which they detach from the domain of clichés. It is important, therefore, that the father’s story is always renewable through other voices. In Prisoner’s Dilemma, the lack of definitive finality functions as potential for a continually new narrative: there is more to any given story. The father’s story recorded on the tape is an indicator of such a possibility. Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault, 137. Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 333.

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be carried out. At the end of the tape, he describes a future family scene—“It’s one of those unrepeatable days in mid-May, and all those who are still at home sit down to dinner”79—which is repeated in the beginning of the final section of the novel, “1979,” in which the father-less Hobsons gather at home. By reenacting the paternal words, his family appears as the embodiment of their father’s story. Yet, the transformative narrative undertaken by the children has already begun, so that the repetition takes up the movement of detachment from the reign of cliché-subjectivity. Eddie Sr., supposedly already dead, abruptly appears at the family table; with his sudden return, the clichés also return to the scene, but now their workings have been changed: “What?” the specter demands. “What am I?” The trademark, sardonic, challenging smile. It occurs to them all that there is more to any of them than any of them suspects. But sometimes we need coaxing to act on our own accord. At last Artie masters the apparition. “Tell us how free we are, Pop,” he says, through the side of his mouth. Tell me how free I am.80

There is a potential for the transformation in any given subjectivity (there is more), but the act that activates the potential is preceded by the other (we need coaxing to act), and that act is itself a response to the preceding narrative acts (tell me how free I am). Once indications of total resignation, now the clichés are deployed in a new constellation. The clichés and the familial relations enter into a different community. By cooperating with his narrative, the family defects from the cynical father and from the clichés of the cinematic world. While Powers’s novels take up various subjects—history, genes, computer science, and the human brain—the idea of mutation or variation always accompanies his work. His third novel, Gold Bug Variations, is an exploration of the idea of mutation, already seen in the Hobson children who are “variations on a theme.”81 In Prisoner’s Dilemma, every character—Disney, the father, and the Hobson children—transforms his/her self in the overlapping narratives. The novel is designed as an interactive space-time where the narrative acts echo and involve each other in the processes of mutation in their effort to break the prisoner’s dilemma. “The only satisfying solution to the prisoner’s dilemma is to avoid prisoner’s dilemmas,” Poundstone concludes,82 but that is not a simple task for those who find themselves already in the dilemma: the prisoners must invent the “outside” in which their selves can be reshaped. The choices given are insufficient in this regard; referring to the narrative strategy of the novel, James Hurt argues that “we must act cooperatively to survive,”83 but this view is still caught in a paradox: cooperation for survival does 79 80 81 82

83

Ibid., 333. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 29. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and The Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Anchor, 1992), 278. James Hurt, “Narrative Powers: Richard Powers as Storyteller,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18.3 (1998): 34.

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not question the fundamental presupposition of the self/other division posited by the dilemma. On the contrary, the act of narration, in its attempt to mutate the workings of the clichés, forms an unexpected continuum of variation inside the paradox. The novel turns the walls surrounding the prisoners into membranes, through which voices affect each other in the process of mutation. As the dilemma’s basic assumptions—the bounded individual and his/her self-interest—are transfigured by the act of narration, the values of the individual and his/her freedom are formulated anew. The self and community are questioned and reorganized by the narrative act. Thus the novel ultimately questions the idea of “America.” In Powers’s novel, the idea of the narrative act invents a new terrain inside the confines of the cinematic world. “We move, we uproot. We rebuild slowly in a strange place. We tear ourselves up and move again, for reasons only he understands. We strand ourselves, weave between Atlantic and Pacific, a moving target,”84 one of the Hobson children says. This statement, seemingly another repetition of the American historical cliché of settlement and expansion, in fact functions as the transformative version of the national experience, by which the Hobsons cooperate in their defection from a dilemma-enclosed cinematic world. Narrative is a movement, an uprooting from the role-subjectivity assigned in the gigantic cinema—the prisoners escape from the cell, because, to quote the father, there is always more to any of them than any of them suspect.

84

Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 14.

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8

Writing from a Different “Now”: Question of Ahistorical Time in Contemporary Los Angeles Fiction

In 2000, in his study of the architectural design and urban development in Los Angeles, William Alexander McClung wrote that “L.A. is better understood as existing in a perpetual present, having interrupted the culturally induced sense of linear progression in time and appropriated the past to present uses.”1 Four years later, the Los Angeles-based essayist D. J. Waldie used the very same expression to define the city: “Perhaps, Los Angeles is better understood as existing in a perpetual present where we are always tourists.”2 This coincidence between the two authors points to the peculiar experience of time the city offers, namely the overwhelming presence of the “now.” This insight into “L.A. Time” is not confined to McClung and Waldie. In fact, many contemporary critics and writers agree on the ahistorical character of the city’s temporality, in which the past holds no significance. Joan Didion notes that “the future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”3 In a different vein, Norman M. Klein’s investigation of the social imaginary in Los Angeles leads him to maintain that “the past is not the issue at all; it serves merely as a ‘rosy’ container for the anxiety of the present.”4 Steve Erickson’s 1996 novel, Amnesiascope, also refers to a similar characteristic of the city: “if there was ever a city where history counts for nothing it’s Los Angeles.”5 The common idea running through these commentaries is that the idealized present has always defined the city as a utopia, producing the past that obeys the current interest; in McClung’s words, “the past thus is created by an architecture and landscaping of the present that pretends to ‘revive’ what never (in California) existed.”6 As a result, the city has become an ahistorical utopia, free from the burden of the past. 1

2 3 4

5 6

William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythology of Los Angeles (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), 110. D. J. Waldie, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City, 2004), 16. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: FSG, 1968), 4. Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997), 11. Steve Erickson, Amnesiascope (London: Quartet, 1996), 41. McCung, Landscapes of Desire, 99.

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Fiction from Los Angeles is inseparable from this temporal dynamics. In fact, “L.A. Time” has always been a powerful framework in the tradition of LA literature: the critical view on the prevailing sense of time is found in its every aspect, which is practiced in the narrative design of many texts. In other words, fiction from the city constitutes a dystopian place where the reign of the present is countered or even denied. On the other hand, a group of contemporary LA writers—Sesshu Foster, Kate Braverman, and Steve Erickson—show a different attitude toward the ahistorical time of the city. Their texts affirm the existence of the “now” to seek its transmutability, thus exploring the “outside” of LA Time.

LA literature: Against the present LA literature has formed itself in reaction to the prevailing temporality of the perpetual present in such a way that negates the idealistic image of the city. This literary attitude derives from the fact that many “L.A. writers” are actually not native to the place: as David Ulin points out, “L.A.’s literature has been one of exile, the work of expatriates who arrived grudgingly, lamenting lost histories, lost landscapes, dreaming of the past.”7 Shared by those writers is a recurring notion that the city is located at the geographical limit of American expansion, so that the dream of new possibilities is blocked at the edge. In David Fine’s words, “Where the continent runs out, the dream runs out with it.”8 LA fiction has developed mainly as resistance to LA Time, which permeates its four major genres—the fiction of immigration, noir, the Hollywood novel, and disaster fiction. The crucial significance of the past, both in ethnic fiction and in LA noir, is evident in many narratives. In the city where the past is given little value, novels with an immigrant theme claim that histories of peoples do exist, thereby establishing the historical sense of time that defies the force of forgetting. A similar idea is found in LA noir, from Raymond Chandler to Walter Mosley. The detective novel revolves around the criminal who enjoys a “fresh start” due to his having attempted to conceal a murder or conspiracy of some kind. The detection process, “excavating the past, . . . recovering memory and past time,”9 undermines and criticizes the current state of things. Consequently, the existence of the past in these genres works as an objection to the reign of the present. This attitude is clearly articulated in Nina Revoyr’s Southland, published in 2003. The novel tells the story of Jackie Ishida, whose Japanese-American grandfather has recently died and left part of his legacy to a black boy, who had been killed during the Watts Riot in 1965. Jackie’s personal investigation unearths the past of her family—the hardships Japanese immigrants have faced in California—and the fact that the black 7

8 9

David L. Ulin, “Introduction,” in Another City: Writing from Los Angeles, ed. David Ulin (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), xiv. David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Reno: U of Nevada P, 2000), 82. Ibid., 17–18.

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boy was murdered by a corrupt LAPD officer. Thus the history of immigrants and the elements of crime fiction are combined in the narrative. In addition, with the episodes of the past and Jackie’s investigation in 1994 constantly alternating with each other, the narrative structure of Southland aims to establish a sense of continuity between past and present. As one of the characters claims, “the past never stayed in the past.”10 Revoyr’s novel, beginning with the statement that “history is useless” in Los Angeles,11 finally arrives at the protagonist’s realization of the crucial significance of the past: “the memories made her feel connected to something again, and it was more a reclamation than a loss.”12 A different method is found in the Hollywood novel. Here, the literary effort reveals the illusory nature of the everlasting “now” of entertainment. An apt example comes from Bruce Bauman, whose short story, “Day Time,” describes a film producer walking out of his job. The protagonist defines Hollywood as “the shiny, ever-altering face of America, which refuses to accept linear time. It refuses aging and death”13— the motif of the “perpetual present” reappears. This experience of time produces the fantasy of controlling time, but, as he continues, “it is a lie as movies are a lie.”14 The story, opening with the protagonist’s remark that “This is how it ended,”15 reverses and defies the beginning-end sequence; consequently, it characterizes the present as nothing more than a dead end. The narrative negates the promises of Hollywood, namely “the denial of old age and mortality, the suspension of time and history, and a decidedly un-Tithonusian celebration of an ever-present now of sensuous pleasure.”16 The most notable genre, disaster fiction, is an extreme reaction to the city’s present. As Didion points out, ever since Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, the city, as depicted in fiction, has been accompanied by a sense of doom. “The city burning,” Didion writes, “is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. . . . Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”17 This perception has been widely shared in literary and cinematic imagination: as of 1996, Mike Davis’s research shows that “the destruction of Los Angeles has been a center theme or image in at least 138 novels and films since 1909.”18 Whether they are attacks by foreign forces or natural catastrophes like earthquakes, these disasters function as violent disruptions of the status quo. The 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18

Nina Revoyr, Southland (New York: Akashic, 2003), 265. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 337. A similar narrative design is found in another contemporary writer, Aimee Phan, whose collection of stories, We Should Never Meet, describes Vietnamese orphans adopted by American families in Los Angeles. As in Southland, stories describing the characters’ orphanhood in Vietnam are constantly inserted into those that depict their teenage days in Little Saigon. With this narrative architecture, the characters’ present lives always refer back to the history that defines their identity; as one of the characters realizes, “Whoever raised you, wherever, you’re Vietnamese” (Aimee Phan, We Should Never Meet, 40). Bruce Bauman,“Day Time,” in Another City: Writing from Los Angeles, ed. David Ulin (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 206. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 203. Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, 166. Didion, Slouching toward Bethlehem, 220–1. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage, 1998), 276.

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destruction of the continuity of the present is another form of fantasy produced by the rule of the “now” in Los Angeles. LA literature as resistance to LA Time—in contrast to the city’s popular image of itself as an ahistorical utopia—has often described the city as a dystopia, where the past haunts the current landscapes and the violent disruption of the unreal present is always imminent. Therefore, the promise of a “fresh start” and the stability of identity are undermined: as McClung puts it, LA writers “have found in LA a convenient mechanism for producing the alienated citizen of modern literature.”19 Those literary texts refute LA Time through their motifs and narrative architecture. On the other hand, contemporary fiction from the city tries to overcome the confines of this tradition. Waldie is unequivocal in this regard: “The former literature of Los Angeles is nearly finished—the literature of Anglo unease with race in our ruined paradise.”20 Though he goes on to say that “literature to come isn’t here yet,”21 a close look at the LA fiction of the twenty-first century reveals its new attempts. Defying the literary tradition, three Los Angeles-native contemporary writers, Foster, Braverman, and Erickson, treat the ahistorical sense of time as a springboard for their writing, not as something to be negated. Each writer borrows from the major genres of LA literature—Foster takes up immigration and noir motifs, Braverman rewrites the Hollywood novel, and elements of disaster fiction are evident in Erickson—only to transform the temporal notion in those genres and explore the “outside” of LA Time.

An unusable past: Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex Sesshu Foster’s 2005 novel, Atomik Aztex, revolves around the condition of the everlasting present. The Japanese-American writer offers a cynical reworking of immigrant fiction, with the “parallel universes” motif. The narrative alternates between realistic descriptions of an immigrant worker, Zenzon, in contemporary East Los Angeles, and the fabricated past of an “Aztek” socialist nation, where Zenzontli, the immigrant’s double, lives. This narrative architecture, juxtaposing Los Angeles and “Technotitlan” and thus embodying Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s assertion that “Los Angeles simply cannot be understood without taking Mexico City—its southernmost neighborhood—into account,”22 nevertheless exposes a crucial gap between the past and the present: while the days of labor in contemporary Los Angeles continues, the fictive past fails to provide a stable identity for Zenzon, leaving the endless repetition in the plant as his sole reality. Like the city itself, Foster’s novel produces an ahistorical sense of time, but it turns the city’s “perpetual present” into a dystopian experience. 19 20 21 22

McClung, Landscapes of Desire, 230. Waldie, Where We Are Now, 123. Ibid., 123. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996), 178.

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The meaninglessness of the past, an idea typical of Los Angeles, sets the tone of the novel. An immigrant from Mexico, Zenzon has abandoned his former life: “I crossed deserts to get here,” he says. “I traversed the mountains of the Rumorosa & the Coast Range, skirting secret borders of forgotten history & identity. I sacrificed the Past, relationships & dreams of community.”23 This separation from the past self, a variation of the myth of a “new beginning,” defines his present. Without the continuity with the past, his routine work at the meat-packing plant on the east side of the city dominates Zenzon’s experience of the present: The line moves all the time. . . . Big hogs swinging at you, one after another, hour after hour, you had to swing with them, like a dance, a rhythm you cannot break, you can’t stand around or daydream . . . four signs on the wall say, “THIS DEPARTMENT HAS WORKED 154 DAYS WITHOUT LOST TIME. AVOID ACCIDENTS ON THE JOB. SAFETY BEGINS HERE” in English, Spanish, Chiu Chow & Vietnamese.24

In the factory, wasting time is a serious problem for the workers. Max, the foreman, accuses Zenzon when a slight delay in the production lines occurs: “‘That’s thousands of dollars delay in the operation of the smokehouse,’ Max growled, ‘an unscheduled interruption, a delay in the whole operation of the smokehouse, FIFTEEN, 20 MINUTES! Why?’”25 In order to make up for the loss, Zenzon and his colleagues are forced to work for 16 hours a day. The endless labor in the sweatshop—a satirical description of Taylorism—is a bleak experience of the “perpetual present” that characterizes his life in the city. In this situation, the immigrant desires a break in the rhythm of his everyday life. This longing is at first expressed in a violent vision borrowed from disaster fiction: Certainly in L.A., where we’ve seen riots, fires, earthquakes, epidemix [sic], crack wars and the disaster of our everyday lives, we would not be too shocked if somehow the entire City of Vernon was removed from the map over the weekend. . . . But every Monday there it was, the blue mass of Farmer John rising above the L.A. River like a fortress . . .26

The promise of disaster, a disruption of current conditions, remains unfulfilled, and Zenzon’s everyday life continues as usual. This sense of endless repetition haunts and punctuates his life, even outside the factory. On returning home one day, Zenzon suffers a sudden feeling of déjà vu: “What was the source of the sudden difference I was feeling? . . . This was my old place, the place I’d lived in some time ago.”27 The repetitive 23 24 25 26 27

Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005), 40 Ibid., 6. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 30.

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rhythm in the present produces the hallucinatory sense of past, which leads to the appearance of the “fake” past of the Aztek nation. Zenzon’s first-person narrative runs parallel with another narrator, Zenzontli, who speaks from Technotitlan, the capital of the Aztek nation, in the year of 1942. The Aztek Socialist Emporium has defeated the early Spanish conquistadors, and is now engaged in the war against the Nazis, helping the Soviet Union. As is indicated in the reshuffling of the number “1492,” the history of colonization is reversed in this narrative, as Azteks hold Spaniards and other Europeans as their slaves. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, explains the cause for this subversion of history: “we have altered the space-time continuum of the universe through our Aztek sciences.”28 At the outset, this past seems to provide Zenzon in East Los Angeles with an ideal world: the current situation of exploitation is overturned in the alternative Aztek universe. This counter-history, however, does not offer a utopian place. From the beginning, the excessively aggressive nature of Aztek culture is emphasized in Zenzontli’s first-person narrative. He proudly declares that “the Council of Tlatoani of the Party of Aztek Socialism determined we must Defend & protect our way of life thru War, our standard of living (war), our freedom of religion (War) (1000 hearts per day minimum).”29 War, together with the sacrifice of human hearts, defines every aspect of Aztek life, making it clear that this past is not an ideal to return to. The Aztek world does not function as a secure origin of identity. The narrative alternates between the somber reality of exploitation at the meat-packing plant and its inversion of history, practicing what Carlos Fuentes calls the “perverse” Mexican time: “Both submerged times came back perversely, the Indian time as sentimental nostalgia, the modern time as exploitative capitalism.”30 The discrepancy between these two temporalities is explicit in Atomik Aztex. On the one hand, the Taylorized factory-time captures Zenzon’s life with its logic of production; on the other, the Aztek past offers no solace to the ailing protagonist in the present. The Aztek world is an unusable past, pointing to “a fundamental difference between the actual world and the merely possible ones”31 that only highlights the dead end for the immigrant worker. Toward its end, the narrative begins to slide into the noir genre. One of the workers at the plant, Weasel, confides to Zenzon that he once attempted to rob the bank and killed his girlfriend accidentally. Just like Zenzon’s former life in Mexico, this past holds no significance for the criminal: “He shook his head in remembrance of that terrible misfortune. Weasel raised his voice a notch, ‘That’s all behind me now.’”32 This noirish episode predicts a coming turn of events: the sadistic foreman Max disappears, and two LAPD detectives come to the protagonist to interrogate him with blows and kicks. Though he does not disclose any information on Max’s whereabouts, Zenzon’s inner 28 29 30

31

32

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 116–17. Carlos Fuentes, A New Time for Mexico, trans. Marina Gutman and Carlos Fuentes (Berkeley: U of California P, 1996), 17. Marie-Laure Ryan, “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative,” Poetics Today 27.4 (2004): 645. Foster, Atomik Aztex, 175 (Italics added).

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monologue during the violent interrogation makes it clear that he killed the foreman and dumped his body in a huge meat grinder, so that the victim has been processed and distributed all over the city: I keep a stash of packages of hot dogs dated to the exact date they say Max disappeared, which I may consume with relish & lick my fingers. You may kick me repeatedly in the face behind the dumpsters of a diner on Monday & Tuesday too but if I don’t know what happened to Max I don’t care if you found his shoelace dangling from the mouth of a toddler choking in Barstow. I don’t have all the answers, please would you stop kicking the face.33

Zenzon is not arrested as the man’s body is never discovered; meanwhile, the LAPD investigation continues. The unending work at the production line is eventually replaced by ceaseless violence from the police. The immigrant’s experience of the “perpetual present” becomes more somber. Foster’s is a world of dystopia; however, it is not so much a flat denial of the city’s temporality as its exaggerated inversion. The narrative magnifies the everlasting nature of the present to show its dismal side through the “powerless” past and the noir mode. The alternative past of Aztek is incapable of grounding Zenzon’s everyday life in East Los Angeles, and his crime, which leaves almost no trace of the victim, remains unexposed. In this process, the novel deviates from the gravity of the past that defines immigrant fiction and LA noir. As a result, the past does not form a continuity with the “now.” Without any sense of history, Zenzon’s present in contemporary Los Angeles goes on.34 Foster affirms the absence of history in Los Angeles as the real experience of time, in which the past is utterly useless. Atomik Aztex testifies to the intolerable underside of LA Time.

The accidental “Now” in Kate Braverman A different idea of LA Time is found in Kate Braverman, whose work has devoted itself to the exploration of Los Angeles landscapes where the transformative nature of the self is revealed. In her fiction, this indeterminate subjectivity in the city is closely linked with the question of history—her protagonists often discover temporalities outside history in their process of detachment from given identities. Los Angeles in Braverman’s work appears as a locus of ahistorical temporalities that enable the 33 34

Ibid., 200. Therefore, the novel’s deliberate failure to constitute the historical continuity between past and present results in a sense of split identity. Whereas Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth argues that historical time is supported by “traditional formulation of subjectivity” (Ermarth, Sequel to History, 44), Foster’s novel ends with the unbridgeable separation of two temporalities, leaving Zenzon(tli) in a state of confusion: “I truly feel I am a man, and sort of a monkey too” (Foster, Atomik Aztex, 201).

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mutation of the self.35 Deeply rooted in the prevailing urban time and its promise of a “new beginning,” Braverman’s text goes further: rather than a mere appraisal of LA Time, her work practices the temporality of metamorphosis, in which the present constantly opens itself to the “outside.” This principle is also at work in her 2006 memoir, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir. Its autobiographical premise necessarily involves the possibility of fixing the writer’s identity, as Roland Barthes, in his autobiography, warns himself that “you constitute yourself, in fantasy, as a ‘writer,’ or worse still: you constitute yourself.”36 Braverman’s narrator, however, maintains an opposite attitude from the beginning. “Memory is not static,” she declares. “It’s in flux, mutating through time and accumulation.”37 Rejecting a definitive form of memory, the narrator instead speaks for the fluid nature of the self, which leads to the crucial passage in the first section: “Do we not reinvent ourselves from our personal rubble? Is the human drama itself not that of inspired nonlinear transformation?”38 In other words, Braverman’s memoir aims at achieving an ahistorical relationship between the present and the past. The important point in the memoir is the narrator’s insistence that this process of self-invention is not confined to the personal realm. “Doesn’t mythology demonstrate human metamorphosis as intrinsic and the forms of civilization to be in constant transition?”39 she asks, implying that the world surrounding her is in constant change. Thus the narrator defines her fluid self as the city’s double: “We have lived like our city, as flagrant works in progress.”40 No longer a stable “now,” LA Time in the memoir is the ground for the process of mutation. This notion finds a striking expression in the section titled “The Collective Voice of Los Angeles Speaks: Marilyn Monroe,” an imaginary interview with the legendary Hollywood star. Partly based on the actress’s actual interview and biography, Bravermans’s Monroe nonetheless frees herself from the stereotypical perception of the star; with her “nonlinear” reinvention of self, Monroe embodies the idea of metamorphosis, thereby practicing a different mode of the Hollywood myth. The interview redefines LA Time as a radical opening to the “outside.” Braverman’s reimagining of Marilyn Monroe marks a clear contrast with the last interview the actress actually gave, published in Life magazine in 1962. In this actual interview, Monroe’s attempt at establishing her identity as an artist is perfectly clear. 35

36 37

38 39 40

Braverman’s exploration of temporality is typically expressed in her short story, “Histories of the Undead.” Erica, a researcher in history in West Los Angeles, unintentionally comes to realize that a temporality different from history inhabits her—“it occurs to Erica that what she wants to research is not history as it actually is or was, but some more fragile peripheral version. . . . It would be a history of the undead, the flickering partials and the almost” (Kate Braverman, “Histories of the Undead,” 128). Instead of historical time defined by cause-and-effect relationships, she is gradually attracted to another kind of time. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), 82. Kate Braverman, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006), 11. Ibid., 18 (Italics added). Ibid., 24–5. Ibid., 22 (Italics added).

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She constantly speaks of herself as a natural-born actress, whose creativity conflicts with the conformity the studio demands. “I am not an actress who appears at a studio just for the purpose of discipline,” she maintains. “This does not have anything to do with art. . . . After all, I’m not in a military school. This is supposed to be an art form.”41 Monroe here repeatedly mentions her devotion to the art of acting and constitutes her current self as an artist. In course of this self-assertion, her personal past is briefly mentioned, only to serve her present interest. Monroe reveals several memories from her childhood, all of which are related to movies and acting. “When I was 5—I think that’s when I started wanting to be an actress—I loved to play,”42 she says. This is the first episode she offers, followed by her teenage memory when she began to draw everybody’s attention. Thus the familiar formula of myth-making reappears—just as Los Angeles constantly appropriates its past to construct its utopian present, Monroe refigures her past to consolidate the current, ideal form of self. In this sense, Monroe’s is a classic voice of the city. On the other hand, Braverman’s Monroe decisively deviates from this image of the Hollywood star. Early in the fictive interview, she begins to subvert the personal myth found in the Life interview. Asked about her childhood, Monroe replies, “Everyone knows about the uncles who fondled my breasts. They kissed my seven-year-old nipples, and they got hard like marbles. . . . Then I knew I was a bad girl. I would always be a bad girl.”43 This “dark side” of her past, never mentioned in her actual interview, resists the idealization of her present identity: it belongs to what Braverman’s memoir calls “personal rubble.” Monroe then emphasizes the accidental nature of her present position: she maintains that her secret is the “divinity of accident.”44 Contrary to the continuity between her childhood and identity as an actress established in the other interview, this Monroe plainly expresses a discrepancy between her past and present. “You take a bus to Hollywood and become a star,” she says. “Anyone can do this.”45 From an abused child to a Hollywood star—this past-present relationship defies the logic of linear and chronological causality; instead, Braverman’s Monroe insists on a series of unforeseen leaps that have led to her present.46 This idea of a nonlinear progression further leads Braverman’s Monroe to dream about yet another leap toward the future. Expressing her dissatisfaction with the studio, which keeps giving her the same scripts, she envisions her future days as a mother: “I would be a mother who eats feathers and flowers. That’s what’s at the end of 41 42 43 44 45 46

Marilyn Monroe, “Marilyn Monroe Speaks out,” Life 33.4 (1962): 54. Ibid., 52. Braverman, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, 158. Ibid., 159. Ibid. In this fictive interview, the interviewer constantly tries to clarify Monroe’s personality. The most explicit question is: “Are we really ‘seeing’ you through biography?” (Braverman, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, 159). These enquiries function as an attempt to render the actress’s identity recognizable. Monroe, on her part, constantly eludes any such grasp with her enigmatic answers. In this effort to escape any definition of the self, the interview displays Monroe’s detachment from her current identity, the moment of her becoming-other.

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time.”47 Monroe here tries to detach herself from the film industry, to discover a new role in life. Saying that “your name is an act of fraud,”48 she remarks that “I could have a new name, classy, like Emily or Anne, with an ‘e,’”49 so that the Hollywood star tries to transform herself, shedding her present identity once again. The text reenacts the concept of “nonlinear transformation.” This imaginary figure of Marilyn Monroe reiterates Braverman’s idea of ahistorical temporality by rewriting the Hollywood myth. The memoir practices the process of self-mutation, in which the current identity is affirmed, not as a solid form of self in the “perpetual present,” but as a phase in transition. Yve Lomax maintains the same idea as follows—“she differs with herself and becomes involved in a new mode of existence, and this is what offers the most effective resistance to and the critique of the present.”50 Through reinventing the city’s “collective voice,” Braverman reimagines LA Time as a process of mutation that grounds the transformative subjectivity.

To the other side of history: Steve Erickson’s Our Ecstatic Days The Los Angeles-based interrogation of history and the practice of a different temporality take a more distinctive form in the work of another LA writer, Steve Erickson. Like Braverman, the question of history occupies an integral place in his oeuvre, which is essentially rooted in the urban experience of time. His 1993 novel, Arc d’X, describes the city as assimilating “the Twentieth Century’s dislocation of memory from time into its own identity,”51 attesting to the ahistorical nature of LA Time. Erickson’s interrogation of history is fully developed in his 2005 novel, Our Ecstatic Days. Borrowing from the convention of disaster fiction, the novel traces the quest of Kristin Blumenthal for her lost son in twenty-first century Los Angeles, where a lake emerges out of nowhere and submerges most of the city.52 This disaster, unique among the quake- and fire-laden fiction from the city, is the product of another disaster in New York which, in Erickson’s novel, defines the character of the century. Therefore, Kristin’s personal experience is involved with the whole century, and Our Ecstatic Days pursues the possibility that the framework of history can be mutated through the protagonist’s quest. The age commenced in New York reaches the other side of 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid., 163. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 165. Lomax, Sounding the Event, 161. Steve Erickson, Arc d’X (New York: Poseidon, 1993), 224. Kristin Blumenthal is also the protagonist in Erickson’s 1999 novel, The Sea Came in at Midnight. Kristin, running from a religious cult, comes to Los Angeles to be enslaved by a nameless man who privately works on the Apocalyptic Calendar, his version of the twentieth century: “The dates on the calendar were not sequential like on an ordinary calendar but free-floating according to some inexplicable order” (Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight, 46). Kristin is viewed as the chaos factor in this calendar, so that preoccupation with the relationship between the individual and the whole century is already evident in this novel.

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the continent to go through a fundamental change; Los Angeles in Erickson is the counter-historical city where the whole age can be reimagined. The lake begins to attract attention in the summer of 2001. In the novel, this phenomenon is essentially linked with one of the most notable events of the century, namely the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York: “One man stands before a line of tanks. Another crashes an airliner into a building. One ends an Age of Reckoning, the Age of the Sky; the other begins the Age of Chaos, in which the sky melts to earth and becomes a lake.”53 The first incident mentioned is Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, when a man, presumably Wang Weilin, confronts the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army. In Erickson’s novel, this event stands for the end of the twentieth century, and Wang, as one of the characters, emigrates to New York to witness the 9/11 attacks, namely the beginning of the Age of Chaos. The lake in Los Angeles emerges out of this violent crash that commences the new century. The novel crystallizes this idea of the age into a young single mother, Kristin. To her, the lake in Los Angeles is nothing but a threat to her son, Kierkegaard.54 Once a fearless girl, Kristin is now full of worry over Kierkegaard’s safety. “Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him,” her first-person narrative begins. “. . . In my heart he opens the door to this vast terrain of fear. It’s a fear stretching out beyond these young years of mine when mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable.”55 The expanding lake, in her view, is a visible sign of danger, and Kristin realizes that it tries to take her son away—“the lake is coming for him.”56 This personal fear is, in fact, inseparable from the nature of the new century. At one point, she recollects that she gave birth to her son at the exact moment when the twenty-first century began. “‘This is a ten-year,’” the doctor tells Kristin in labor on December 31, 2000, “. . . in another hour and a half it will be a one-year, and that’s the true beginning of it.”57 Born on January 1, 2001, Kierkegaard’s life parallels the development of the new century. Therefore, the mother’s fear that the lake may claim her son is clearly connected to the larger context—the chaos may rule the new century. To abate this fear, Kristin tries to make a deal with God: “She offered God a deal. Whatever good things might be in her future, she would trade them all just for her boy to be all right.”58 This idea of the divine as insurance against the threatening lake presents the binary opposition between order and chaos, which also defines the character of the century. 53 54

55 56 57 58

Steve Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days (New York: Simon, 2005), 272. The name of Kierkegaard is an explicit reference to the Danish philosopher. Given the obsession with the ideas of repetition and recollection in Erickson’s novel, the most appropriate frame of reference is Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition. Kristin’s quest is expressed as a movement into “the lake’s birth canal” (Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days, 83), so that she goes through a second birth in the novel, echoing Kierkegaard’s protagonist who claims that “I am born again to myself ” (Kierkegaard, Repetition, 75). Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days, 3 Ibid., 43. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 77.

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Kristin is determined to stop the expansion of the lake itself. “Down in the hole of the lake, down in the opening of the birth canal where the world broke its water, lurks my son’s doom and I must stop it,”59 she insists, and goes into the water, leaving her son on the gondola for a moment. When she comes back to the surface, however, Kierkegaard is nowhere to be seen; her effort to eliminate the chaos factor from the century results in a complete failure. After losing her son, she lives on the lakeshore for five years under the new name of “Lulu Blu,” renouncing her past. Here, the city’s peculiar motif of a “new beginning” and separation from the past reappears. Yet the novel pursues a different idea in the “parallel universes” style. One day, looking over the lake, it suddenly dawns on Lulu that, when she went into the water and came back to the surface five years ago, she actually reached another lake: “That she wasn’t turned around. That she was pulled through the opening from one lake into another just like it.”60 With this idea, the world itself is doubled. On Lulu’s side of the lake, she is forced to go on without her boy; but on “the other side,” three-year-old Kierkegaard is still on the boat, waiting for her mother’s return. Lulu decides to dive into the lake one more time, in order to reach the “Other Lake on the Other Side.”61 When she rows a boat off the shore, Both Lulu and Kristin appear, strengthening the sense of doubleness—“The last vision the lake shows her is a vision of herself again, except she’s changed places with it. . . . Lulu raises her hand in farewell and Kristin nods in farewell back, continuing to push herself out into the water with the pole.”62 There is Lulu at the shore, as well as Kristin moving toward the center of the lake; her self diverges, and after Kristin dives into the water, the text itself is divided into two narratives—Kristin’s journey through the birth-canal of the lake and Lulu’s life without her son—that develop simultaneously. The former narrative, in which the mother attempts to undo the loss of her child, consists of a single, one-line sentence stretching over 200 pages: it is defined as “a passage without time”63 that traverses the rest of the text that narrates Lulu and other characters’ lives in the Age of Chaos. These two narratives are not separate from or opposed to each other; rather, they frequently intersect in terms of expression and motif. The narrative of the Age of Chaos, covering from 2001 to 2089, is filled with parents who have lost their children, just like Kristin, and orphans. Moreover, in those stories of loss, phrases that characterize Kristin’s story reappear to describe similar situations of other characters. For instance, the section titled “2029–2031” depicts the story of Barbrasita, who gives birth to a boy and consequently becomes frightened by the chaos of the world: “In her heart, her nameless little boy has opened the door to a vast plateau of fear, stretching out beyond her young years when mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable.”64 This passage repeats Kristin’s frightened mood 59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 80–1. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 259.

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at the beginning of the novel. Other numerous repetitions in the narrative, echoing Søren Kierkegaard’s observation that “life itself is a repetition,”65 demonstrate that Kristin’s “timeless passage” constitutes an underside of the Age of Chaos. Unhinged from a specific timeline, her quest is a matrix that generates and affects the history of the twenty-first century. In this sense, it is akin to the “diagram” formulated by Gilles Deleuze: “there is an emergence of forces which doubles history.”66 The Age of Chaos is, in this sense, a double of Kristin’s journey. As the “timeless passage” proceeds, Kristin’s quest begins to change its tone. She speaks of her pregnant days in Tokyo, when she miscarried Kierkegaard but somehow the boy made his way back into her womb. Shortly after this episode of reclamation, Kristin realizes that she is now moving upward toward the surface of the lake—“I rise up up and up to break the surface of the water . . . and can no longer be sure to which lake I’ve returned”67—to see a gondola on the water, in which she left her son five years ago. With this shift in Kristin’s quest, the Age of Chaos also goes through a significant change: Lulu finally sees her son after being separated from him for 27 years. The narrative of loss in the Age of Chaos witnesses the moment of reunion, which leads to the final chapter of the novel. The concluding part of Our Ecstatic Days, “2XXX,” opens with a dream of a nameless girl in New York: “The night before it happened, she had a dream about her father . . . ‘The Age of Chaos is here,’ she woke thinking, What, it’s just arriving now?”68 With this opening, it can be assumed that the date is September 10, 2001. The next day she visits the apartment of her dead father and tries to go back to her hometown, Los Angeles, only to find all the flights have been canceled. As the transcontinental train she boards goes westward, the girl loses her sense of time; finally, reaching Los Angeles, she finds half of the city is covered by the newly emerged lake—the girl bears witness to the beginnings of the Age of Chaos in the two cities. When she runs to the lakeshore to see Kristin breaking the surface, the diverged narratives converge. The Age of Chaos and the timeless passage, having experienced the changes in their mode, merge with each other. This narrative design integrates the protagonist’s divided self, as Kierkegaard notes in the concluding section in his Repetition: “The schism in my being has been removed. I am whole again.”69 This narrative self-convergence brings a significant change in the novel: Kristin, with her eyes still closed, is now faced with the boat she left five years ago, not knowing whether her boy is still there: In the dark cathedral of her closed eyes, she summons her best prayer, promises her best promise, to never be paralyzed again by her love for him, to leap blindly into hope, to stride boldly the border between terror and beauty. She reconciles herself to the whim of God or chaos or both, she finds a way to just be . . .70 65 66 67 68 69 70

Kierkegaard, Repetition, 3. Deleuze, Foucault, 85. Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days, 296–9. Ibid., 305. Kiekegaard, Repetition, 74. Ibid., 316.

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Then she opens her eyes to see her son. At the beginning of the novel, Kristin’s paralyzed state generated her fear of chaos; this time, however, she tries to act on the principle of hope. In this crucial move, the God-chaos opposition is nullified. Her way “to just be” is a place beyond the simple binarity of order and disorder. Kristin’s journey reaches “the other” Los Angeles, where the character of the century is fundamentally altered. Thus the Age of Chaos, commenced in New York, finally sees the moment of its mutation in Los Angeles, “the last city of modern imagination, where even God and chaos could be reimagined.”71 The initial framework of the age is that the disaster in New York brings about the collapse of order and the reign of chaos; accordingly, Kristin in Los Angeles also follows this formula at first, in her fear of the lake and the deal she offers to God. However, Kristin’s “timeless passage,” while generating the whole century as its double, eventually goes ahead of history to bring its fundamental transformation. The final paragraph of Our Ecstatic Days refers to the age as a “century of rapture,”72 so that the framework of history is mutated to give birth to “the other” century, namely the “outside” of history. Erickson’s Los Angeles, in the final analysis, is a counter-historical city where the reconstitution of the age is always possible. The three texts from contemporary writers are “doubles” of LA Time. Each narrative begins in a place deeply rooted in the temporal dynamics of the city, and eventually deviates from it—Foster, Braverman, and Erickson thus reconstitute LA Time from within. Foster’s Atomik Aztex embraces the “perpetual present” in its most dismal mode: the temporality forecloses the immigrant’s return to the past and hope for the future. Braverman, on the other hand, affirms the importance of the “now,” only in the process of mutation that constantly surpasses the reign of the present. Finally, Erickson explores the city’s ahistorical dimension in a radical way that transfigures the history of the century. These writers do not deny or accuse LA Time so much as actively explore its “outside.” Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth argues that “postmodern narrative language undermines historical time and substitutes for it a new constitution of temporality.”73 And indeed the question of temporality and history is widespread in contemporary American writers. Don DeLillo explores the nature of time and body in The Body Artist, set in a small, coastal town in New England. Richard Powers, in his Prisoner’s Dilemma, describes a nuclear family in the Midwest, where the Hobsons begin to interrogate their subjectivity formed in the post-World War II era. The history of another small town in the West occupies a central place in Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), in which the project of renaming the town summons the forgotten past of early black settlers. When this line of query reaches the city at the edge, it encounters an LA Time of the “perpetual present”—and the works of the three LA writers are located precisely at this point. Rather than turning to the force of the past to counterbalance the city’s ahistorical dynamics, they pursue the potential inside the dominance of the present for showing its unforeseen faces. Their style, the mutation of LA Time, sets a new tone in LA literature, as well as in American literature, opening a fresh field to be explored. 71 72 73

Ibid., 115–16. Ibid., 317. Ermarth, Sequel to History, 14.

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Conclusion

Since Outside, America has declared itself an open system of connections, its concluding part would betray the project if it is meant to be “conclusive.” The end of this book should be a membrane, not an exclusive wall, which retains contact with the “outside.” Therefore, what follows is a relaying point where the ideas mentioned in the previous chapters are picked up again in such a way that they could reveal the possibility of further connections to other literary texts and questions; then, as one of those many potential connections, this chapter will try to link the idea of the “outside” to a new generation of writers in this century. Consequently, American literature today will reveal its “de-Americanized” mode.

Identity and outside The first two chapters on Paul Theroux and William T. Vollmann argue that the American identity, particularly the masculine subject, is formed in relation to the idea of outside space. The two novels critically examine this majority identity to find the relentless power relationships at the heart of it—there is no innocent space with no strings attached, and instead, the American self is constituted by asymmetrical relationships with the other. “Outside” is just a component of the current mode of self. This insight can also illuminate the central idea of Jeffrey Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1994), in which the narrators, a group of middle-aged men, look back on a series of suicides of girls in their high school days. Their narrative act is a practice of self, formed in the relationship with the enigmatic girls as their outside. The narrators, while pretending to be investigators of the case, need the mystery to remain unsolved, in order to maintain the past that grounds their current subjectivity. The outside, in fact, is always already appropriated as an integral part of their identity: it is a hall of mirrors where the American encounters his double.

The double The motif of the double haunts American literature from its beginning, not to speak of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Gordon E. Slethaug examines its “postmodern” versions in Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Raymond Federman,

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among others, highlighting their linguistic concerns. “The double becomes a linguistic artifact,” he argues, “stripped of psychological or dualistic significance, used to explore the signifier itself.”1 But whereas Slethaug assumes the purely linguistic nature of the double, William T. Vollmann and other contemporary writers seek to locate the question of the double in the place where the act of narration touches on the historical, political, and temporal questions. A similar idea is found in Stephen Wright’s 1994 road narrative, Going Native: a man escapes from his everyday life in the Midwest to move westward, only to find that he is just another traveler reenacting the same American role—the man is a double of the American impulse to move, just like the Vollmannian traveler, who is caught in the self-repeating national cliché of “starting over” in a new place. Consequently, he finds himself stranded in a beach house in California, only daydreaming, in his unmoving car, of another exit out of the situation. This somber view is altered with the idea that narrative can activate another mode of time, in which the double functions differently. The figure of the double grasped in the temporal dimension, as is seen in The Body Artist, is not an expansion of identity: as Gilles Deleuze argues, “the double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside. . . . It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different.”2 Examples of this “transformative double” are also found in Denis Johnson, Richard Powers, and the Los Angeles writers. Moreover, Rebecca Brown’s The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary (1998) and The Incantation of Frida K. (2001) by Kate Braverman also describe the body as occupying the space-time of change through the double. In these novels, too, the act of narration produces the double, which mutates the given contours of subjectivity.

Repetition and time The use of the double inherently entails repetition. The narrative accumulation of power relationships frames the traveler’s self in Vollmann, and, in Erickson, the same drama of power is endlessly repeated at the heart of “America.” Repetitions of these situations constitute the world of clichés. On the other hand, narrative repetition as a temporal dynamics works as a principle of metamorphosis—typically seen in Powers’s Prisoner’s Dilemma, cliché-identity can change their functions in being repeated in a new narrative mode. To introduce a different function in the circuit of repetition: the decentered loop of narrative form is aimed at this effect. Carole Maso’s fragmentary style can be understood in this vein. AVA (1993), for example, is made up of a set of fragments that surface to the protagonist’s mind in her deathbed. The same, short sentences keep reappearing, constituting a rhythm of life now freed from the constraints of a linear mode of time.

1

2

Gordon E. Slethaug, The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1993), 29. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 98.

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Counter-memory The attempts at transfiguring the self necessarily involve the question of how to narrate the past, for the linear past-present connection—a cause-effect relation being its typical form—is at the basis of the stable sense of identity. Again, the pragmatic principle in Johnson, Wright, and Powers shows that how to connect the past and the present is an open operation—instead of the linear linkage, by which the past sets up the identity in the present, narrative act can achieve other forms of connection in which the shape of the current self mutates itself. Already Dead pursues the possibility of releasing the reactive past; Meditations in Green practices the rearrangement of past-present fragments, while Prisoner’s Dilemma reveals that past clichés can change their functions in being renewed in a narrative act. The Foucauldian “counter-memory” is a pertinent notion that describes those practices of transformation of the past through narrative. Vollmann’s ongoing “Seven Dreams” series—the seven novels are to describe the underside of the history of North America, and the narrator’s present self is always questioned in the course of narrative—can be understood among such efforts.

“Outside” today These ideas are part of the overall question of “What is America?” The preoccupation with the national character still subsists, but the practices of the “outside” project an image of “America,” not as an integrated whole, but as a collection of open-ended connections that is fundamentally opposed to the idea of nation-state or its expansive and inclusive impulse.3 This collectivity, always trying to elude collective identity and the logic of history—namely, the workings of integration—is best described as “Outside, America.” This mode of American fiction is entering a new phase in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the first decade of the century witnessed the appearance of writers who were born outside the US borders. “20 under 40,” a 2010 project of The New Yorker, features 20 young writers, seven of whom are from the “outside” regions—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcón, David Bezmozgis, Yiyun Li, Dinaw Mengestu, Téa Obreht, and Gary Shteyngart. Salvador Plascencia is also qualified to be included and, without the the age limit, the list could be even longer: Junot Díaz, Ha Jin, Aleksandar Hemon, Rawi Hage, Linh Dinh, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and so on. It should be noted that the idea of the “outside” is also seen in the new generation of these writers; in particular, Alarcón and Plascencia’s fiction shares the preoccupation with the narrative idea of the “outside,” which also functions as the question of subjectivity and belonging. In Alarcón, the narrative act reveals and defies the dynamics of the history of a nation-state, while in Plascencia, the author’s control over narrative progression is called into question. In 3

Keiko Nitta also warns against the abuse of the all-inclusive idea of “America.”

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both cases, the concept of the temporal “outside” plays a crucial role in interrogating the very nature of belonging. Their novels can be seen as a sort of crossroads where the preoccupation with identity in Latino or ethnic writing—“as the conditions emerge in the United States for a collective Latino identity,” Marta Caminero-Santangelo points out, “we can begin to observe more ‘narration’ of their identity in Latino literature”4— encounters the temporal idea of the “outside.” Taken together with the attempts to mutate the American space-time, these “outsiders” offer an opportunity to rethink the future of American literature. Alarcón’s first novel, Lost City Radio, published in 2007, questions the construction of collective identity based on the dynamics of integration. The novel is set in a nameless nation-state, modeled after Peru, where the nation is trying to rebuild itself from a decade-long civil war. In this process, people are forbidden to speak of the war in public, and all the place-names in the country, including the capital, have been erased and replaced by numbers. Describing the resurgence of the erased past, his narrative at once reveals and resists the workings of the nation-state and its construction of history, instead exploring the outside realm within the time of the nation. Norma, the protagonist, is a popular personality of a radio show called “Lost City Radio,” which stages the reunion of separated families. The collective dynamics of integration is most visible in this show; the reunited family reenacts a wider nationwide process, in which the state tries to reorganize itself from the division caused by the war. The radio show is, in this sense, the nation-state’s double. Nobody is allowed to speak of the war on air, and the memory of the conflict is being replaced by new history provided by the state that constitutes itself as “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time.”5 Norma’s husband, Rey, has been missing for ten years, accused of collaborating with the insurgent forces called IL. “The IL was defeated and disgraced; the country was now in the process of forgetting the war ever happened at all.”6 Any public mention of his name is also banned. The national identity, together with its history, is constructed on this huge silence. On the other hand, the novel itself creates a critical distance from this mechanism of integration. In particular, Alarcón’s novel tries to defy the historical mode of narrative by which the past and the present are integrated into a whole. Depicting Norma’s days, the narrative goes back and forth between her present and past episodes in such a way that those past memories continuously intrude into the present silence. The novel refers to those memories as “noise” that, excluded and abandoned from history, nevertheless subsist within the collective: Ten years had passed, ten years that comprised a vast, inviolable silence, and then these three days, of which, she suspected, she would remember only noise: the chattering dissonance of many voices, sounds at once indistinct and pressing, 4

5 6

Marta Caminero-Santangelo, On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007), 26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 26. Daniel Alarcón, Lost City Radio (New York: Harper, 2007), 10.

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calling her urgently in different directions. Wounding her, certainly, but no worse than the silence had.7

This style culminates in the novel’s ending. At the beginning, the novel presents Norma ten years after the war, still waiting for her husband’s return. Their reunion would make a perfect ending from the perspective of the program of the show “Lost City Radio” and the nation: the unity regained, past wrongdoings forgiven. Yet, the novel, Lost City Radio, pursues a different direction: it depicts the betrayal of Rey, who has a mistress and a son in a village in the jungle, and ends with Rey, who is caught by the army and shot to death. The incident is described simply by three words: “Rey died instantly.”8 There is nothing heroic or sentimental about his death; this terseness is a deliberate strategy in the narrative, for the lack of any significance in death precludes the possibility that the incident would contribute to the dialectic process of integration. Without a cause or a hint of heroism, a death deprived of any significance falls outside the formation of national history. Alarcón’s narrative thus explores the “outside” of the collective identity and questions the sense of belonging. Rather than presupposing or establishing a cultural or national identity, his novel recognizes otherness within the time of the nation, and practices the logic of the noise in its narrative design. The crowd of memories in the text constitutes a fluid community of those who retain their individual memories of the conflict without being integrated into a whole. Lost City Radio is a kind of membrane through which the present and the past interact with each other, without giving in to the force of a single temporality. This question of narrative temporality and belonging is also seen in Salvador Plascencia, native of Guadalajara, Mexico. His first novel, The People of Paper (2005), adapts the metafictional style to examine the motifs of time and power, both of which questions the identity of the authorial figure in the text, the planet Saturn. Built on the tradition of magical realism and metafiction, Plascencia’s novel tries to constitute itself as a multiplicity of time. The story follows the life of Federico de la Fe, a Mexican farmer whose wife leaves him for another man. The broken-hearted man immigrates with his daughter to El Monte, a town just east of Los Angeles, where he works as a flower picker. All along his journey, he suspects that something in the sky keeps watching him. In the American town, he finds that it is the planet Saturn who watches his life unfold and even controls the progression of the story. Then de la Fe recruits the gang of El Monte and launches a military campaign against the ringed planet. As one of the characters says, it is a “war against the future of this story.”9 The narrative goes through another twist when one of the characters in the California town tries to find out who Saturn really is, and eventually reaches an apartment in upstate New York to find the author of the novel, Salvador Plascencia, 7 8 9

Ibid., 238. Ibid., 258. Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2005), 46.

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who also suffers from a recent heartbreak. After this metafictional encounter, the text becomes a battlefield where the author and characters fight over the control of the narrative. While Saturn, the alter ego of Plascencia, tries to order all the elements in the novel, other characters—Baby Nostradamus, Rita Hayworth, the marching Franciscan monks, and so on—crowd the pages of the novel and try to elude his grip. The visual design of page layout practices this polyphonic idea, with most pages of the book divided into multiple columns or sections, each with its own narrator. Accordingly, the sense of time in the novel is diversified. Saturn lives in the contemporary United States, struggling to dominate and organize the other characters into a single, coherent narrative time, whereas the others bring many different temporalities into the text. Rita Hayworth’s imaginary immigration from Mexico to Hollywood, the fictional history of El Monte, the affair between de la Fe’s wife and Jonathan Smith who comes from England—all the threads of time try to break loose from Saturn. This battle between the One and the Many is haunted by a sense of repetition, since Saturn’s authoritarian gesture repeatedly evokes that of colonizers who have devastated his homeland of Mexico. As the text itself alludes to Hernán Cortés, the authorial figure is aware of the problem of power in his effort to dominate others. The construction of a linear, conventional narrative is seen as an insipid repetition of history, of which Saturn becomes increasingly tired. Saturn ends this tug-of-war by undermining his own author-ity. In the last chapter of The People of Paper, he witnesses the future that he cannot control, and de la Fe and his daughter walk out of the text: And while Saturn thought about all these things, preoccupied with a future that would never be, no matter his strength, Little Merced hepled Federico de la Fe button his Pendleton shirt and pack his bag. Together they walked out of their stucco. . . . They walked south and off the page, leaving no footprints that Saturn could track.10

As a result, the author-figure’s attempt to bring all the temporalities under his rule fails, and the multiplicity of time remains outside his control. Plascencia’s novel thus calls the rule of an authorial temporality into question through fusing different temporal modes into the narrative. His novel does not achieve or seek any sense of stable identity; instead, characters inhabit Saturn’s world—namely his self—and reveals the internal otherness within it. The narrative invents a community without a common identity or temporality; in contrast, the narrative points to the existence of the “outside” of the sense of belonging. Both Alarcón and Plascencia start their narratives with an ordered mode of temporality: the rebuilt nation-state in Alarcón and the organized narrative in Plascencia. Then they begin to seek the “outside” through practicing aberrant temporalities. In the process, the collective identity in Lost City Radio reveals internal 10

Ibid., 245.

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noise that escapes the workings of the state and its history, and the text of The People of Paper becomes a multiplicity where Saturn encounters a number of temporalities that escape from his rule. The concept of the “outside” also functions in Alarcón and Plascencia, by which current temporality-subjectivity is questioned and replaced by a fluid sense of time and self. At the same time, the presence of writers like Alarcón and Plascencia points to the “outside” of American literature itself.11 The experience of Mexican immigrants in the United States is a significant factor in Plascencia’s fiction, though the novel goes beyond the common question of cultural dilemma between the United States and their homeland. In Alarcón’s Lost City Radio, not a single mention of the United States can be found. Just like Alarcón, Téa Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, unfolds in an exclusively non-American setting of a nameless country in the former Yugoslavia. Obreht’s narrative alternates between two stories of “the tiger’s wife,” a realistic account of an encounter between an escaped tiger and a deaf-mute girl in a village during World War II, and the “deathless man” who keeps haunting the twentieth century of the Balkans marked by a series of violent conflicts. The two stories are intertwined with each other without forming a single or stable narrative whole that guarantees the identity in the present. These texts are not to be seen as “return” to the writers’ roots, for they consistently question the sense of belonging itself. In other words, the narratives constitute memories without belonging, refusing to fall into existent categories. It is here that these writers’ attempts intersect with the writers of “Outside, America.” As if responding to those writers who try to transform the conventional idea of “America,” the emerging literary outsiders also mutate the national literature into a collection of outside memories without a sense of belonging. This connection points to the nonnationalistic mode of American literature, in which the multiplicity of temporalities and countermemories call for further mutations. Outside America, instead of the expansion of American values into the globe, the century is witnessing a new phenomenon that “America” is turning into a huge “outside.”

11

Koji Toko’s view of “fake American literature” also inspired this discussion.

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Index

Agamben, Giorgio 17n, 101 Alarcón, Daniel 125–9 Alexie, Sherman 34 Already Dead: A California Gothic 35, 43, 47, 49, 125 American Dream x, 37–8 Amnesiascope 109 Angels 47 Apex Hides the Hurt 122 Arc d’X 62, 118 Argall 31n Atlas, The xiii, 21–3, 26, 33 Atomix Aztex 112, 115, 122 Auster, Paul 34 Body Artist, The xiv, 83, 92–3, 124 Braverman, Kate xv, 110, 112, 115, 117–18, 122, 124 Brown, Rebecca 124 Butler, Judith 90, 104

Erickson, Steve xiv–v, 49, 62–3, 109–10, 112, 118–19, 122, 124 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds xi, 115n, 122 Eugenides, Jeffrey 123 Foster, Sesshu xv, 110, 112, 122 Foucault, Michel xi, 16, 19, 34, 67, 69–70, 72, 76, 78, 80, 101 Frantic Transmission to and from Los Angeles 116 freeway 63–6 game theory 95–6, 99–100, 106 globalization 21, 33 Going Native 124 Gravity’s Rainbow 67 Grosz, Elizabeth xi, 15, 86 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri ix, 23, 33 Interface 88, 90, 92–3

cinema 67, 69, 72, 81, 95, 98, 102–3 cinematic field 70, 95–6, 103 cinematic world xiii, 68, 74, 95–7, 100, 103, 107–8 cliché xiv, 36, 38, 69–73, 78, 95, 97–8, 103–5, 107–8, 124–5 Cold War, the 3, 22–5, 34, 95, 106 counter-memory 68, 80, 106, 125, 129 Deleuze, Gilles xi, 37, 42–3, 67n, 70, 89, 97, 121, 124 and Félix Guattari xiii, 27, 84n, 87 DeLillo, Don xiv, 83, 93, 122 Didion, Joan 64n, 109, 111 difference x, 24–5, 33, 41, 45, 48, 57, 89–90, 92 Disney, Walt 95–6, 98, 100–2, 104–7 Dogs, The 124 double xiv, 19, 21–2, 25–6, 31, 33–4, 112, 116, 121–4, 126

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Johnson, Denis xiv, 35, 45, 47, 49, 124–5 Jones, Thom 35 Kerouac, Jack ix, 1 Kierkegaard, Søren 119n, 121 Leviathan 34 Lingis, Alphonso 6n Lost City Radio 126–8 manhood xiv, 5, 10–11, 16, 20, 35–6 masculinity xiii–iv, 5–6, 11, 16–20, 35–7, 40, 44–6, 69 Maso, Carole 124 Massey, Doreen 22, 26 Massumi, Brian 10n, 18, 101, 106 Meditations in Green xiv, 68, 80, 125 membrane 89–91, 93, 102, 108, 123, 127 metamorphosis 44–5, 75, 116, 124

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140

Index

Monroe, Marilyn 116–18 Mosquito Coast, The xiii, 5–6, 16–17, 19 mutation 15, 44, 46, 48, 52, 55, 73–6, 78, 84, 89, 91, 93, 96, 106–8, 116, 118, 122, 129 narrative act xi, 65–6, 83, 96, 103, 105, 107–8, 123–4 Nealon, Jeffrey T. xii, 36n, 40 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35–6, 40, 43, 46, 47 Obreht, Téa 125, 129 On the Road ix, 1 Operation Wandering Soul xiv, 63 Our Ecstatic Days 62, 118, 121 People of Paper, The 127–9 perception 73–7, 79–80, 86–7 Plascencia, Salvador 125, 127–9 Postcards xiii, 1, 4 potentiality 16, 19, 49, 72 power relationship ix–x, xii–iv, 4, 6, 13, 15, 21, 23–7, 30, 33, 36, 38, 49–51, 53, 55, 57–8, 62, 76, 123 Powers, Richard xiv, 63, 95–6, 107–8, 122, 124–5 Prisoner’s Dilemma xiv, 95, 105–7, 124–5 Proulx, Annie xiii, 1, 4 Pynchon, Thomas 67

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Reagan, Ronald 5, 18, 80 repetition xii, xiv, 27, 64–5, 76, 84, 86, 89, 92, 107, 112–13, 121, 124, 128 Reservation Blues, The 34 resistance 6, 10–1, 19, 68, 71–3, 76, 81, 101–4, 106, 118 Revoyr, Nina 110–11 Ricoeur, Paul xi road narrative xiii, 2–3, 18, 64 Rubicon Beach xiv, 49, 54, 59, 62 Shaviro, Steven 75 temporality x–ii, 10, 16, 44, 49, 62–3, 66, 68–9, 84, 87–8, 90–3, 109–10, 114–16, 118, 122, 127–9 Theroux, Paul xiii, 5, 17, 20, 123 threshold 53, 57, 62, 88–90 Tiger’s Wife, The 129 transformation 35, 41, 43, 46–7, 49, 52, 56, 81, 103, 105–7, 116, 118, 122, 125 Vietnam War, the xiv, 19, 64n, 80 Virgin Suicides, The 123 Vollmann, William T. xiii, 21, 23–4, 33–4, 123–5 Whitehead, Colson 122 Wright, Stephen xiv, 68, 81, 95, 125

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