Author: jmonte

In Art Spiegelman’s graphic narrative about 9/11/01, the alternating first and third person voices more completely conveyed his range of reactions and emotions to his experiences that day.  For example, on p. 5-6, the voice in the left column is in the third person, a device that seemed to communicate the tremendous coping involved with being a survivor on that day.  Spiegelman places his character in the position of those who fell from the towers, and the third person voice may indicate his personal struggle with discussing the experience; thus, “I” becomes “he” and the story becomes easier for the character to recount.  

            Whether or not Spiegelman intended for his story to be narcissistic, his graphic frames, or style of telling of it, slows down the story’s movement, allows one to analyze the message without the special effects and editing that one must counter with film, and emotionally transports reader/viewer to consider how a New Yorker processed the destruction, death, and misinformation accompanying the fall of the towers.  His inclusion of his relationship with a homeless New Yorker juxtaposed to his falling from the tower (the anti-Semitic Russian woman), written in the first person, shows a contrast between his willingness to confront day-to-day hatred (I dare say the normal hatred and intolerance of the everday) and his despair (as shown in the left column and written in a distanced third person voice) at how to make sense of the hatred that was behind the fall of the towers and the hatred that formed among Americans in reaction to it.  When the Russian woman reveals her knowledge of English and a boldness, born in her in the aftermath of 9/11, to assault him with it, Spiegelman voices his frustration.  A major source of frustration for him in these frames seemed not only to stem from his disappointment with how political parties sold out on the fall of the towers, but what overwhelms the pages is his knowing that there may be no one or worse yet, there are many sources behind the destruction and fall of the towers that day.

Donnie Darko and his rabbit friend reminded me of another film friendship between a strange and yet happy guy and his invisible white rabbit. Anyone ever hear of Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart? If I remember correctly, Jimmy Stewart’s character causes a lot of embarrassment for his sisters (because he goes around talking to an invisible being), so they try to have him committed. Because this is a comedy, there’s a bit of confusion about who is getting committed and the hospital ends up mistaking the sister for the one who sees invisible rabbits. Jimmy Stewart’s character continues his friendship with Harvey, and the sister, once released, realizes she liked her brother as he was, seeing invisible rabbits somehow made him nicer than other human beings.

While darker than Harvey, Donnie Darko is about a young guy who sees a rabbit; of course, Donnie Darko’s invisible rabbit is a source of aggression and violence for Donnie, who aside from his vandalism and a single incident of pyromania seems to be a likeable guy who goes against the status quo and who suffers from schizophrenia. Like many characters who defy social codes and speak against them, tragedy and death awaited Donnie. While I understood the sci-fi explanation which reasoned that Donnie was a link between the real universe and the alternate future universe, I had a difficult time making meaning of Donnie’s death. To view Donnie’s death as a sacrifice he made for those occupants of a depressing universe which he inhabited seems to be a copout; why should Donnie have to die to make things okay for everyone else? I thought this part of the film’s plot was an easy way out for the writer and director; the lead character saves the day and gets to escape a life that seemed almost meaningless for him. If the director is pointing to the despair felt by many people in the postmodern world, I suppose Donnie’s death pulls us to consider how unfair and meaningless many parts of life can be. I wondered whether Donnie laughs in the end because he understands this about his world.

To get started, let me say that I’m only just at Dylarama in my reading.  Thus far, the Gladneys (or Jack Gladney and his step-family with Babette) have visited the Red Cross Boy Scouts camp and have been shuttled to the abandoned karate studio to escape the black chemical cloud.   There’s a lot to be said about this story and the complicated themes moving through it, but what I am focusing on most is the parent-child relationships within the Gladney family and how the fast-paced information culture is a variable of argument, interest, and amusement in these relationships.  In Jack’s relationship with his son Heinrich, it seems that the two suffer each other, a father-son relationship difficult from all angles.  Jack trumps whatever bundle of knowledge Heinrich places at his feet, in what reads as a battle of wit.  I wondered though, why Jack cared so much about possessing a greater intellect than his offspring, but the more I learned about Jack with his professor’s robe and thick glasses, the more I understood how he created a story of himself for himself, the image of J.A.K. Gladney as opposed to what lies beneath his disguise.  At other moments between Jack and his children, I was caught off guard. 

Towards the end of their stay at the Boy Scout camp, he observes Steffie sleeping, a spiritual moment that he believes is important. “In my current state, bearing the death impression of Nyodene cloud, I was ready to search anywhere for signs and hints, intimations of odd comfort” (154).  After Steffie utters “Toyota Celica,” Jack comments that the brand name spoken by his sleeping daughter is a truth that “amazed (him) more.”  His mind wanders as the reality of how far reaching marketers, television, and commercial forces are warping his children and his world.  It is a moment where Jack, by observing his children and their relationship to media, recognizes his own disparity. 

Since I am reading on, I will not comment on whether or not Jack’s disparity can be traced to the overwhelming media presence in his life, or whether this scene shows a picture of how parents may view themselves and the nature of their world by watching as their children experience their world, anew.  There are other moments in the book where the narrative seems to point to this kind of reading; for example, when Denise warns Babette not to chew sugarless gum and Babette responds by reminding her daughter how just weeks before it was sugary gum that was a product to avoid.  It’s funny how commerce and information or misinformation plays into our lives, and then again, it’s a bit troubling to think about how this kind of culture is affecting the next generation.  So, this is what I am thinking about so far . . .

Mark Poster’s article The Mode of Information and Postmodernity left me with many questions and a good deal of paranoia.  On p. 64, he writes, “Computerized databases are another form of electronically mediated communication . . . [and] liberal writers have rightly been concerned that the vast data accumulated in this form and its relative ease of transfer pose a threat to the privacy of the individual” (64).  He goes on to mention how agencies gather information about individuals and let it flow across various systems without any control on behalf of the individual.  Poster lays out a fine example in the case of the electronic trails we leave using credit cards and cell phones, which allows corporations and other institutions to make pie charts of our day to day habits and plan for how to further target us as consumers.  I never realized what magnificent quantity of stuff my bank knew about me until they mailed me my year-end statement and Starbucks had its own category on my account.  While amusing, it’s a bit troubling to think that our lives, which seem more in-transit than for past generations, are so familiar to code reading machines.  On p. 66, he writes: “Databases constitute additional identities for individuals, identities which . . . take the place of those individuals” (66).  The shiftiness of my identity, according to the bank or any other credit company, is strongly influenced by how well I open credit card accounts, keep debt, and make payments.  So, I can’t just walk into a bank and buy a home—it doesn’t matter what your character is, what experience you have—it all boils down to how well you fit a healthy consumer profile.

Going back to my original statement, the article left me wondering more often than I normally would, who’s out to get me?  At the other end of the spectrum, electronic media provides me, as a reader and a reading consumer, with a bit more control over what decisions I make; in his discussion of hypertext and digital spaces, Poster points out that hypertext “encourages the reader to treat the text as a field or network of signs in which to create his or her own linkages, linkages which may become part of the text and which other readers may follow or change at their will” (70).  Using something like Wikipedia turns the tables on writer and reader so that now we’re merging and shifting toward and away from each other depending on where we are at a given moment.  In a Zen kind of way, it seems there’s both good and bad to come from electronic media; yes, Internet users and builders need to sort things out with privacy and censorship (I’m alluding to the AOL case and how AOL has done away with censoring its chat rooms because they were sued), and yet, digital and electronic media allows for readers and viewers to take control of how they learn (though that raises questions about whether or not viewers and readers are choosing their paths responsibly; of course, who’s to say viewers and readers shouldn’t have the choice to learn in a reckless, multi-path way?).

When I was your age, I walked twelve miles wearing no shoes through six feet of snow.  And so follows the older generation’s disappointment in and fear of youth and new ways of doing things.  While reading Walter Benjamin, I kept in mind the context of his article—written in 1936—and the times’ apprehension about new media and the changes it would usher in.  In his discussion of how an appropriate distance is lost between art and viewer when media becomes transportable (or statically containing movement), I was reminded of current debates about media use on the Internet; for example, the music industry’s suing a twelve year old girl for downloading music, and a writer’s association is accusing Google of massive copyright infringement.  For Benjamin and I’d say for the organizations of our time who believe they are threatened by technological advance, it seems as though there’s a lot of oversight and jumping to conclusions; in his discussion of how the camera changed the viewers’ position, Benjamin says that the viewer will no longer identify with the stage actor and instead connects only with a machine, the camera.   What Benjamin ignores is the artist behind the camera; yes, the audience may only see the actor on a screen, but the audience takes part in a holistic piece of art put together by the filmmaker—the director.  As a portrayal of reality, film is admittedly fragmented, with cuts taken here, effects created out of order and inserted back into film, and yes, the camera has many angles to choose from, which is why a camera offers more dimension than say static art. 

            Elsewhere, Benjamin notes the quality of culture in which film is a dominant art form.  He says that the film audience is in the position of critic, but is an “absent-minded” one due to film’s rapid movement of images.  We who watch become immersed by the illusions and cannot stop to think about what we’re watching, and oh no, the powers that be will control our minds with it.  Well, okay, commercials and pop-up ads are behind huge sales in our distracted society, but it is rather ridiculous to blame violence and inhumanity on a means of expression, whether it be film, text, or sound—there’s as much negativity that one can find when viewing or listening to today’s web page as one can find in a literal reading of the Bible.  My last thought on the Benjamin article is that he never thought of all the good drugs we’d develop for our adult onset ADHD.  The oversight of it, heh!        

As I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Soloman, I searched for the novel’s relationship to postmodernism and what I noticed immediately was Morrison’s selection of names for her characters.  For example, when Macon Jr. is nicknamed Milkman by Freddie after he catches Ruth nursing her boy well beyond the time she should, Freddie coins the name “Milkman.”  Everyone in town but Macon Sr. knows why the boy is called Milkman, though Macon has his suspicions given the significance of the name.  Of course, the irony is that we know the existing meaning of being the milkman’s kid has nothing to do with why Macon Jr. becomes Milkman, and this reminded me of the postmodern idea that all signifiers circulate and recirculate existing images (and yet bear different significance depending on the observer).

Pilate is another character whose name is significant but probably not for the existing image or meaning that it is taken from.  Yes, she’s a fierce black woman disfigured by a missing belly button, but it’s not like she killed Christ or anything.  What stands out about the naming of this character is the pride her illiterate father took when choosing her name, blindly, from the Bible.  And, what could have been a one-time, arbitrary method for choosing one’s child’s name, the procedure is adapted by Macon Dead in the naming of his own children First Corinthians and Magdalene called Lena.

Last thoughts on Song of Soloman and its connection to postmodernism are that the setting, characters, and the plot didn’t really ring postmodernity for me.  What did stand out was the constant shifting of realities for the characters over time and the disappearance of stability and something solid to stand upon as each made a rite of passage into adulthood; however, these moments in the novel only led me to consider how life is and has been this way in times that we wouldn’t necessarily label postmodern.

Joanna Russ’ Female Man challenged my previous views of feminism and the feminist movement in the U.S.  Perhaps I am fortunate to be a young woman forty years after the Women’s Rights Movement—I say this because there seems to either be a new form of female empowerment or a lack thereof among today’s American women  (we’re not burning our bras and protesting so much as my mother’s generation did).   Considering the novel’s ending—the literary punch in the face–and Russ’ inclusion of a savage female cyborg with claws and metal teeth, I’d say the novel aggressively argues for women’s rights as well as transgender rights.  What I responded to most was the fierce parody of male and female relations within the different spaces and times experienced by the novel’s character(s)—something I’ve never experienced to such extremes, though I guess that’s parody.  Or better yet, the “happy” women who compete within their traditional roles as mother/wife/servant, and who are bloodthirsty for any woman who challenges these roles (ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill).  Nowadays there seems to be a reversal; working women and the generation of women who fought for women’s rights sometimes hold a certain amount of resentment towards young women who choose to stay home, manage house and family, and make a career of being a wife and/or mother. 

Other parts of the novel that I am curious about are Russ’s parody of how some women depend upon “a man” for a sense of self.  For example, the narrative during Jeanine’s date: “His contribution is Make me feel good; her contribution is Make me exist.”  Russ’s feminism in these passages seemed to be the places where the novel was postmodern—traditional modes of gender roles were/ are not truly stable, and a woman, a transgender, and a man’s sense of self will continually shift.  When Jael points out that all four J women are each other’s possibilities in other spaces and times, I was struck by the arbitrariness of circumstances and the ambiguity of self had by these women (and well, all of us).    Who is saying Goodbye at the novel’s closing?  All the women and someone else?  Is it Joanna saying goodbye to the possibilities of her old self?

In Memento, there was a fluidity that I sensed between the black and white scenes and those filmed in color.  I considered these variations in color and these switching backs of scenes in a backward but linear order a metaphor for the imperfect human memory, which is intensified in the character Leonard.  Because Leonard believes he is unable to recall anything that has happened since the night of his wife’s murder/rape and at the same time insists that he will not give up the structure of living each moment in a linear, progressing order, he suffers from his desire to control his mind and get revenge on his wife’s supposed offender.  The possibility, however, that Leonard is responsible for his wife’s death makes him a tragic character—someone unable of letting go and incapable of letting go (his last memory being his wife’s death).

          

Then there is Teddy.  On some level, Teddy reminded me of Orr’s doctor in the Lathe of Dreams.  Of course, Teddy is and isn’t who he says he is, but what are we to believe since we’re viewing this reality from the perspective of someone with a memory disability?  Anyway, Teddy behaves parallel to Leonard.  He too wants to be in control, reduced to taking advantage of Leonard’s disability by setting him up as a hit man.  Again, I circled back, the way Memento wants us to, and considered how Leonard unknowingly overdosed his wife with insulin and that he’s already avenged her rape at some time prior to the action in the film.  This is what Teddy tells us, so his death at the beginning of the movie seemed unjustified.  But Memento made me think about whether it matters why Teddy got shot; the outcome for Teddy is having his disabled hit man turn around and destroy him (in a Frankenstein fashion).  Does Teddy deserve death?  Maybe not, though it could be that things work as they must in the long run.  Teddy was behind a lot of other deaths, Leonard was his paranoid weapon.  I wondered what would happen to Leonard after his “master” is no longer setting up his days—but then there’s that little flicker where Leonard’s the man sitting in Sammy’s seat at the asylum.  So, could that be what our writer and director suggest awaits the unchanged modernist?  Living our days around a bunch of other crazy people.  Well, that doesn’t sound so different.

In The Intuitionist, I thought about a number of themes/issues: race, working women, corrupt politics, and the idea of passing—in which black people conceal their racial background. Since I first read about passing in an early American literature course, I made the assumption that in the last thirty or forty years (time frame of The Intuitionist?) covering up potentially damaging details of identity didn’t have to happen; for example, women writing and performing on the stage guised as men, and likewise, black Americans posing as whites in order to work in certain professions. While the idea that trying to be something that you’re not will only bring you trouble is a cliché of our times, and Whitehead hits us over the head with this several times in the novel. Lila Mae confronts the possibility that she, too, is trying to be someone else (wearing the shoulder-padded, male suit) when she also faces a generation gap in her meeting with Mrs. Rogers. Later, Lila Mae runs into both a generation gap and the problem of overcoming race when she realizes that Pompey got by at the Elevator Guild by avoidance. He says, “What I done, I done because I had no other choice. This is a white man’s world . . . I was the first colored elevator inspector in history. In history! And, you will never ever know what hell they put me through.” Fulton, she discovers, hated himself for lying and yet, did he have any other choice if he wanted to work as a theorist? Perhaps Bell Hooks, in Postmodern Blackness, is getting at something like this when he talks about his attendance at a primarily white, academic party and he discussed postmodernism with another black man, which he considered a show for the white academics. Hooks talks about language used in postmodernism: “I find myself on the outside of the discourse, looking in.” Hooks’ point could be well received by someone like Lila Mae and Fulton. But, whether it’s postmodernism, academia, or most other areas, I think there is something to be said that there are codes that all folks are asked/forced to follow if they want to get in. And, like Pompey, many will do what they have to do to get by—to survive. Maybe a good number of us are passing . . .

Based on the article by Michael Berube, it’s hard to say when Postmodern fiction was born and what it is exactly. And yet, here we are discussing Postmodern American fiction. So, after finishing the Lathe of Dreams and reading David Harvey’s “The Condition of Postmodernity,” I thought about Harvey’s discussion of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, in which “incommensurable spaces [are] justaposed or superimposed on each other” (48). In this heterotopia of postmodernist fiction, “characters no longer contemplate how they can unravel or unmask a central mystery, but are forced to ask, ‘which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of myselves is to do it? instead.” Orr, the powerful/passive dreamer in Lathe of Dreams, seemed to fit this postmodernist model for a fiction character. Because realities were altered while he was sleeping and because he was dreaming, Orr woke up and each time wondered, “Which world is this?” Since the conditions of the day-to-day world were changing, sometimes radically, Orr needed to discover how he figured into each new world. Similarly, Oedipa Maas had to approach each situation and person as though individually separate from each other and yet tangled up, sometimes intentionally and with no intention or connection at all.

I find this jarring and I’m beginning to think I prefer modernism. Maybe my approach to analysis is still caught up in the moral crisis born of the Enlightenment, but I’m pretty uncomfortable with all the uncertainty. I’d like to know that a glass of milk is a glass of milk, even if it has the possibilities of changing into some other substance at some point in the future (this is a random example, I know). And yet, I’m noticing a postmodern effect in most media—films portraying the lives of people who will never meet and yet showing how their lives intersect all the time (Love Actually and Crash) or the Internet’s hypertext world. To close, I have to say that the idea that there is no singular explanation or meaning behind something is somewhat welcoming because it doesn’t seem to close doors on anyone about being right or wrong (I’m thinking of the Lathe of Dreams discussion about the snake bite scenario); and yet, it can rub me the wrong way since I like having answers and finding a moral at the end of my stories.

A small preface: I wrote this response prior to my first class, last evening, in the American Postmodern. I would still like to post my immediate thoughts to the text, although, now my understanding of the postmodern is changing, and I’m pretty sure that my reaction to the shiftiness within Oedipa’s story (and maybe not her story at all) was Pynchon’s intention for his readers. So, here it is:

While reading The Crying of Lot 49, I wondered whether I, like Oedipa Maas, was searching, as human beings tend to do, for meaning, which may be non-existent in this novella. Throughout the novella, I found myself attempting to make connections between various “clues” that Oedipa stumbled upon in her own attempt to find out what happened when her lover Pierce named her executrix of his estate. Of these many dead-end searches for connections between things, the first I came across was Oedipa’s observation that her face matched that of a pornographic nymph, which lit up a sign at a motel she was staying at. Perhaps, I thought, we are supposed to recognize Oedipa’s perception of herself as a bit of a sex nymph, and considering that shortly after she sleeps with Metzger/ Baby Igor this analysis seemed probable. This however, is Oedipa’s only impulsive sexual deed in the novella, and later seems to hold little meaning for her in the story. The first of many, this scene served as a way to communicate the story’s resistance to a traditional fiction story’s manner of relaying meaning (which I’d define as a writer positioning scenes, characters, themes, narrative, plot, and more in such a way that a reader can walk away knowing that his/her connections between these different elements constructs the story’s overall meaning).
When Oedipa realizes she won her bet with Metzger, she cries as Metzger reveals that Pierce said she wouldn’t be easy. I felt I should stop myself from trying to understand this statement as a straightforward or even metaphorical statement that would appear in a traditional short story, such as one written by someone like Joyce Carol Oates or someone like that. But the questions that crossed my mind included: Does Pierce mean that Oedipa is not easy to seduce? Does he mean she is not easy to understand, reach, communicate with, manipulate? If these meanings are possible, then they may help explain the paranoia that Oedipa confronts in herself throughout the novella and throughout her search for some form of meaning in this whole “executor of real estate/ American mogul; i.e. Pierce Inverarity” ordeal.