Our discussion on Dream Jungle ranged far and wide (which is not unusual, I know), and it might be instructive to offer up a brief synthesis of some of the major ideas we talked about, which are still sticking to me a few days later.
Beginning with the end of class, I want to highlight the point Sigfrid made about Zamora’s bookend voice. He seems to have the last word (which is his "right" as the conquistador and discoverer), and that idea seems obvious enough. Hagedorn’s twist is to have everyone (but us) ignore Zamora’s final words, rendering them powerless. Hagedorn seems to be suggesting that there is an end in sight of (post)colonization; the conquistadors won’t be around forever, even if they like to think so.
Next, I want to emphasize that there is indeed a network of hidden connections between the novel’s two main threads: the discovery of the lost tribe and the filming of the Vietnam War movie. Both are distractions (for the characters, for the governments, for the press, but hopefully not for the reader) from more pressing, more real world issues. Both involve the commercialization and commodification of social problems that trivialize "authentic" experience. And both occupy the space of fantasy, for both are projections of a colonizer onto an alien Other. Regardless of whether or not they are a hoax, the Taobo bear the burden of Zamora’s — and later, the world’s –dream of the "noble savage." Likewise, the setting of and extras from Napalm Sunset are recast by the dreamer Tony Pierce as a simulated version of Vietnam (and, as we saw in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, Hagedorn’s version of events mirrors and critiques this process).
Also, on the subject of dreams, remember that I mentioned Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s 1939 incendiary satire of Hollywood. A crucial moment in the novel occurs when the protagonist, Tod Hackett, stumbles upon a heaping pile of discarded studio props and set pieces on a studio backlot. Amidst the sound stages of a dozen in-progress film productions — littered with cellophane waterfalls, celluloid swans, fake adobe forts, mock Dutch windmills, and a hundred other pieces of simulacra — Hackett witnesses a ten-ton truck dumping another load onto the pile, and he marvels that "the dump grew continually, for there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath, and paint" (132). Hackett later calls this ten-acre field of Hollywood trash a "dream dump."
I want to propose that Hagedorn (who is most certainly aware of West’s novel) is playing with this idea of a "dream dump" in the "dream jungle." For Tony Pierce and the Americans, the jungle becomes a gigantic dumping ground for their own fantasies — either to act out on a grand scale, as with the epic film, or on a smaller, personal scale, as with Vince Moody falling "in love" with his exotic Asian girl.
A final point: you may have noticed that several times I asked us to think through the cultural significance of certain things — the image of a helicopter, for example, or the idea of a tiger, both in and outside of the novel. This is frequently one of my interpretive strategies: picking up on a key material object in the text and reflecting on the cultural value of that object in the real world, then exploring how the author plays with or critiques that dominant imagery. This approach doesn’t work for every writer or every text (The Lathe of Heaven, for instance, doesn’t yield many suggestive objects). In a few weeks we’ll see that DeLillo focuses much of his attention on things — daily life objects that we usually take for granted, but which are imbued with hidden cultural values and assumptions. Hagedorn works in the same mode. Helicopters and tigers, granted, are not objects we encounter every day, but they are common enough images that they don’t stand out. They become part of our background noise. And writers like Hagedorn and DeLillo often masterfully foreground these objects and call attention to the values and purposes behind these objects.
It’s a narrative move I call breaking the spell of the ordinary, alienating the most quotidian of events, situations, and things from their accepted contexts. Keep this in mind as we read the final texts of the semester — you’re sure to see it at work.
