Author: julie/jules

It’s not enough to say "my sentiments exactly" in response to Speiglman’s comic project, In The Shadow of No Towers, since this blog has to be at least 300 words. The theme that rings most true throughout the text is the government’s, in tandam with the media’s, "hijacking" of the atrocity, and its departure from the actual and experienced pain of the victims and survivors by repetitiously employing cinematic coverage of the images of the event, which removed the tragedy from the real and replaced it with a fantasy world akin to that of movies and video games. Personally, I was living in San Diego California at the time, and as I walked through our living room to the front door for work at 6am, my father sat motionless in front of the T.V. He had the same look on his face, one of excrutiating effort to suspend his disbelief, as he has when he watches a traumatic war movie or documentary. Of course, when I meant to simply glance at what he was entranced by on the screen, I couldn’t look away. I didn’t have to suspend disbelief; I simply couldn’t believe that what was happening in New York and at the Pentagon was real. I believed for the first few minutes and probably, for the following few days, that what I had watched on television that morning was fiction, a new rendition of Executive Decision where the inherently evil Arabs succede in their plan of terror, an add for a videogame, anything but real. (While the media had projected images of Arabs and/or Muslims as terrorists prior to 9/11, a ploy that implicates that all Arabs and/or Muslims are potenital terrorists, it only got worse after the event.) 

While Speiglmen indicts the U.S. government for hijacking the fear of the American public to go to war in Iraq in several of his strips, he also addresses the nation’s preoccupation with Hollywood. In the strip on page 2, the artist/comic suggests that American’s can no longer see beyond Hollywood. With the two towers on top of Speiglmen and his wife’s head, the towers being out of sight to the person with the tower on his/her head but visible to the other if he/she is observent, they are blinded by a Collateral Damage billboard with Arnold Swarzenegger’s head on it. Not only is the implication heavily ironic since the movie is about a ‘Veteran Firefighter’ who looses his wife and child in a bomb blast and then becomes an assassin or terrorist, in which case the billboard functions prophetically, but as the caricature of the author is preoccupied with trying to understand what’s really happening beyond the Hollywood banner, he and his wife are attacked and spanked by a caricature of an Arab Muslim, at which point, the towers on each of their skulls falls. (Perhaps this strip relates to Speiglmen’s insistence on the glowing bones in the North Tower just before it fell?) Speiglmen literally cannot see the towers falling behind the billboard, which suggests that the artist and by extension, the collective consciousness of America, are so preoccupied with film, media, and other spectacular diversions from reality, that it is impossilbe to comprehend real tragedy when it happens since we’re all so used to being detached from it when experiencing its simulation on screen.

Throughout the text, the author is simply trying to digest the experience as a New Yorker present at the time of the catastrophe. "Time stood still" and he conveys that it really felt as if Armagedon or the Apocolypse were on the horizon. DeLillo’s essay, "In the Ruins of the Future," is also obsessed with the essence of time, and he describes the clash of civilizations represented by 9/11 as being a matter of time. "The terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past" while the West, currently spearheaded by the hyper-technological United States and the internet, live "permanently in the future." The terrorists, according to DeLillo, desire a premodern state of existence in which religion governs their perceived right to self-determination, which is a state of existence that the modernizing Western powers want ousted, a U.S. preference that appears to based more so on economic reasons than moral. For DeLillo, time stood still on September 11 because the premodern struck the modern "to reduce the world" and to bring about their vision of its return to an earlier time, ironically, with the hijacked technology of the West. Both works acknowledge that September 11 didn’t just come out of nowhere, and neither author subscribes to the simplistic notion that terrorists are psychotic animals without any objective but to senslessly kill. While DeLillo argues that the terrorists of 9/11 are reacting to global modernization, particularly their forced modernization, Speiglmen asserts that the U.S., particularly when under ‘the dictatorship’ of Administration’s like the current theif, G.W., are just as guilty of terrorism (terrorism of its own citizenry psychologically and peoples of foreign nations physically) as those the U.S. government accuses of terrorism- "Equally Terrorized by Al-Qeada And by His Own Government," Speilmen and many others, such as myself, are disollusioned by the violence and victimization of ‘innocents’ perpetrated by both nations and non-state groups. 

As I’ve been hankering away on my oral presentation all weekend, I’m sick of Fight Club, the book, the movie, the whole nine yards, primarily because, as a woman, I’m not that fond of the underlying misoginystic conception within the text to begin with. As you all may guess, Fight Club was my last choice to present on, and tomorrow, it will become quite clear as to why. My visual for tomorrow’s presentation will, disappointinly, not be a a technologically advanced one, but rather, it will consist of poster board and other eccentric anachronisms, so please refrain from narrowmindedness (just kidding- I think we’re all pretty open minded).

Palahnuik’s witty narrative and catch phrases, the attractiveness of the narrator’s alter-ego, the Freudian complexities, and the social commentary on why it’s all so messed up for ‘the (white?) man’ in contemporary society makes the text an interesting experience, but the explanations are often flawed and misguided. Without revealing too much, Marla’s consistent degradation throughout the film and the novel is problematic and downright repulsive. The woman-hating and blaming for the social ills that constitute postmodern society is not only ridiculous, but it is socially dangerous and irresponsible. Some argue, "Juliet, your missing the point," and that really, the novel and the film is a critique of the evils of an inhuman, unfeeling consumer society. Some say the film brilliantly portrays the Freudian notions of ‘the Id,’ Tyler the alter-ego, verus the debased ego (the narrator/Jack). Others insist its really about learning how to become a man and establish a credible identity in a P.C. society that explicitly resents all that is white and male due to the white man’s history of violence. Still, others believe Palahnuik’s narrative is a testament to the working class and the underprivelged (white?) men that are dispossessed by the consumer culture under which they are enslaved. Yes, this is all possible, but when all of this seems to hinge on a hatred toward women and what femininity represents, when violence and ultimately, terrorism, are presented as the only alternatives to "being a pussy," its hard to appreciate the complexity of the numerous overlapping themes in both texts.

Marla is the problem, and by this, I do not mean it in the way that the narrator/Jack/Tyler do. She and everything that she represents, including consumerism and all women (since she is the only female in the narrative), is positioned as the enemy, when perhaps the real enemies are the narrator’s actual father, father figures, and perhaps, his corporate father’s who are, in reality, far more responsible for the contemporary evils of consumerism than women are. Marla is a scapegoat, when perhaps, (white?) men and their ‘forefathers’ should be held accountable for their current situations. Needless to say, my sympathies do lie with white men and the conditions they face in today’s society (no offense guys), since maleness and whiteness comes with privelges that are still unavailable to other groups in this country, regardless of the P.C. backlash against white male supremacy in the 1990’s. For instance, white men still run this coutry (and apparently not to bright ones at that), and men (not sure if this is true of specifically white men) get paid, on the average, $15,000 a year working the same job a woman works (a fact that easily verified through many online sources and studies). Sorry Mr. Palahnuik and Mr. Fincher, I’m not buying it.

Just kidding. While the film makes mention of Dukakis as "a miserable failure," and perhaps Donnie Darko could be interpretted as such, this simplistic, yes, Wikipedia analysis might be the most insignificant feature of Richard Kelly’s cult classic. At its most basic layer, the movie is structurally based on Philosophy of Time Travel, a novel that is simultaneously the central text around which the film’s plot and characters orbit, creating a vision of hypertextuality at its most postmodern. However brilliant the film, I find that there are several inconsistencies, which may reflect my inability to comprehend the profuse and scientifically complex themes of Donnie Darko. 

Donnie Darko is an outsider, a character on the fringes of his community and even his family due to his psychosis (sleep walking, hallucinations, insomnia, etc.), so it makes sense that he is the outlet to the alternative universe that comes to pass on October 2, 1988. Since each event seems to happen as a result of a previous event, the themes of cosmic fate and causation also fall in step with the premises of Philosophy of Time Travel. Since, Donnie Darko is "the living reciever of the tangent universe that spins off the primary universe," the tangent universe being the alternative reality that occurs after Donnie Darko lives when he is supposed to die on October 2nd and the primary universe being ‘the true reality’ that existed before Darko’s death and immediately after he is killed by the plane engine that warped through a worm hole to the past, the tangential or alternative reality begins and ends with ‘the dark hero.’ But why does Frank, his sister’s friend in the bunny Holloween costume, come back from a future that hasn’t happened yet to pull Donnie Darko from his cosmic fate, death by his mother’s and sister’s plane engine? Why didn’t Frank just let Darko die and allow the primary universe or God’s path to take its course naturally?

If Donnie had not been pulled out of bed by Frank at precisely midnight, Donnie would have been taken out by the engine and everything would have been as it should have been. Frank, in that case, would not have lost an eye, and then die. Gretchin would have never met Darko, but yet, she wouldn’t have been run over, and, of course, killed, and Darko’s mother and sister never would have been on the plane home from his sister’s Star Search performance. However, if Darko’s mother and sister had not been on that plane home, the engine that was supposed to kill Donnie Darko and ‘make everything right’ and therefore, terminate the tanget reality, which ultimately claims so many lives at its end, might not have hit the worm hole and the alternative reality, the one in which Darko lives beyond October 2nd, would have destroyed the true reality and its alternatives, hence Frank’s repeated utterence and daily count down to ‘the end of the world.’ So perhaps Donnie was meant to live out the tangential reality and survive for an extended 28 days, triggered by Frank’s "Get Up" at midnight on October 2nd just minutes before the engine crashed into his room, in order to realize he would inevitably have to die in order to save Frank, Gretchin, his mother, and little sister.

Darko lives at the center of the alternative reality for 28 days, and all the characters in the film gravitate toward him. He is ‘the gifted’ or hallucinatory one that can physically see the immediate future actions of every person he encounters, including himself, at given times. But it seems that this ability or curse only leads him to play out the tragedy, once again, that had resulted in Frank’s and Gretchin’s deaths, and sent the future’s dead Frank back to Darko’s "primary reality" on October 2nd before the engine crash. After all of this rambling, I still don’t understand why Frank time travelled back from the alternative reality’s future to the real universe minutes before Donnie’s fated death, if all Donnie had to do was die to maintain reality for everyone as it should be and prevent the end of the world? Someone help me out.

Is Jack Gladney really possessed by his fear of death, or is it a symptom of some greater anxiety? As a white American male, it seems that Jack feels disempowered by the unceasing infiltration of "the Other" into his white-washed suburbian, middle-American utopia via immigration, technology, and globalization. Throughout the narrative, the reader is confronted by Jack’s inabilities to understand and accept the ‘foreign’ goods, services, and people that he encounters. According to literary critic Basu Biman, "signs of otherness, then, attach indiscriminately to people and personnel, products and services" in Gladney’s mind. For instance, the supermarket is a symbol of presumably white American capitalism, consumerism, excess, and even, gluttony (to some extent), but it has also become an suburban metropolis of the global market. Upon his first trip to the supermarket with his family in the novel, Jack sees a number of "exotic melons of several pastels" (36) to choose from and Murray, in a later supermarket venture, compares the modern American supermarket to "a Persian bazaar or boom town on the Tigris" (85). Jack is consumed by Orientalist notions of exoticism; foreign nationalities and cultures are feminized and ‘third-world,’ like the fruit they contribute to the world market that ends up on an American shelf. He is overwhelmed by the "small dusty third-world place" the American supermarket has become, and in concert with his children’s naive, but incessant talk of ‘other’ places and people, his wife’s illicit liason with Mr. Gray, an ethnic ‘other’ whom he feels he must confront and wrest control from, he ultimately understands infiltration of ‘the other’ to be an affront to his security and dominance as a white American man. Another example of Gladney’s discontent and xenophobia is at the moment he demands the "third-world technicians" emboddied in the modern ATM machine to "Speak English, for God’s sake."   

As Jack plummets down the tunnel of percieved loss of self-efficacy and control, he becomes more and more obsessed with the fear of death, another instance of total loss of control, and the acquisition Dylar, a drug he believes will mitigate his anxieties. Shrouded in a black robe and sunglasses as he lectures with certainty on the intimacies of Hitler’s biography, even Gladney’s pseudo-identity as imperious professor and founder of Hitler Studies provides him inadequate agency, since his powerful presentation of Hitler is just that, a presentation and something that is not fundamental within Jack in real life. 

Jack’s anxieties ultimately culminate in a violent act, the shooting of Willie Mink (Mr. Gray), who Jack insists is the embodiment of the agressive ‘other,’ in an attempt to regain his percieved loss of self-efficacy and reaffirm his ‘nationalist’ identity. This incident parallels Fight Club, insofar as Durden responds to the globalized consumer culture rampant in what he believes is a feminized, contemporary America with violent acts of terrorism in order to reestablish the white male’s masculinity and agency in a culture that has come to reject all that is white, Nordic, and male. Gladney is also comparable to Fight Club’s narrator, also named Jack in the movie, when Fight Club’s protagonist shoots himself in the head to be free of Durden’s psyche and to regain psychological solidarity and peace of mind. In the same way, when Gladney shoots Mink, but refuses to kill him, Jack feels that he has perhaps regained his masculinity and validity as a white American who is still able to maintain his identity in the shifting postmodern plain of invading ‘others.’ It appears, however, that DeLillo offers little in the way of an actual solution to the anxieties of men such as Jack Gladney, and it also seems that though Jack didn’t kill Mink, nothing has truly changed in Jack’s or his family’s lives. Is this DeLillo’s way of commentating on the condition of postmodernity, that there is no real solution to xenophobic anxieties, and moreover, does DeLillo suggest that there is, perhaps, no real problem either? Perhaps globalization and ‘the other’ are inevitable components of the American way of life, and despite the disbelief and resentment of middle Americans like Jack, it may be the dynamic, vibrant shine that makes the Unites States what it is.

The variety of texts this week imply, at least to me, that direct interaction and texts that ‘make sense’ are on their way out. The postmodern world is rather a frenzy of machines, machinema, and hypertexts, in no particular order, that require rapid association, or disassociation, a celebration of disorientation, and complete abandonment of time and contemplation. Apparently, the digital take over of film, industry, and personal existence is inevitable, and if we aren’t lost yet, we will be, that is if we don’t welcome an intellectual divorce from narrative theme, history, and depth.

In the instance of Mouthrop’s Hejirascope, the poems, narratives, letters, and seemingly absurd personal accounts of characters like H. Marshall MuLuhan appear to be incongruous. The "hyper-hypertext" is categorically calculated and fitted to some indiscernable scheme and meaning and there is obviously some method to the madness. The rapid succession of the stories and poems, however, makes it difficult if not impossible to discover the overall text’s meanings. But perhaps I’m missing the point. Perhaps, the discernable meaning is what the witness perceives. Perhaps, like in many postmodern texts, there is no objective reality. "Truth is in the eye of the beholder." Truth is relative, relegated to a nonexistent status(postmodern condition), or maybe it is what one makes it (existentialist).

Despite the disillusionment of Moulthrop’s website, there were some notably clever insights on the matter of the postmodern technology, which is supposedly replacing the physical reality that is not cyberspace according. "The internet is the reversal of the bomb," insofar as it propagates a multiplicity of alternative universes, however shallow, miguided, and factually incorrect some of these alternative realities may be. The cyrogenically preserved H. Marshall MuLuhan, a benefactor of innovative technologies, in relation to the subcategory, "Irrelevant," claims that we’re all foreigners in America and the world of globalization. Since America was built on the backs and by the hands of "others," or laborers, the issue of the preservation of a national/cultural identity is irrelevant. We were all immigrants once, a beacon of truth despite the absurd context in which MuLuhan says it. Though the overall objective to the website may be a representation of one’s struggle for meaning amid utter chaos, the momentary insights and outwardly absurd humor are creative. However, they are rapidly replaced with new, seemingly disconnected images or poetic fragments, and establishes a reality in which one can hardly process the moment and the epiphanies and significance that accompany it. The profundity of such momentary insight with regards to art and philosophy is sidestepped by an entirely new set of images that overtake the last as if it never existed.

Hejirascope, Pax, the state of the art of machinema for the masses, and the internet are living organisms. They are the creators and simultaneously the posterity of a new human existence, one which transcends traditional limits and boundaries pertaining to how one defines himself within a culture, within a nation, within the world. It seems that globalization and technology define the postmodern era so much that are relationship to the state as "subjects," to our communities, to our friends (internet and "real"), and to our core self-image is no longer definable by the simplicity of a master narrative or a unitary dialectic of signification. We are all living hypertexts that create and recreate ourselves in the comtemporary technological organisms of cyberspace that inevitably, and frighteningly, will eliminate our roots in history and direct interaction.

There are so many postmodern concepts in Dream Jungle already mentioned, I am left to ponder the unanswerable or, at least, the elements of the novel that puzzled me. The time shifts involved in the story of Zamora’s life and the Tabao and the many angles Hagadorn employed to fill in the gaps of first hand experience at ‘The White House’ leaves one with more questions rather than less. For instance, the time frame spanning from Paz’s second attempt to interview Zamora at his delapidated mansion and his death is not documented, and the reader is left to wonder what exactly ‘killed’ Zamora. Was his demise and death a self-fullfilling prophesy since he was no longer a benevolent celebrity venerated for his stone age discovery of the Tabao, but rather, known as an ignoble scam artist, as Paz’s father believes?

 The constant infiltration of "Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s expedition" coupled with recurrent Conradian illusions that bind Zamora, Tony Pierce, Moody, and absurdly, Sabastian Claiborne seem to answer the question of Zamora’s death. "Zamora held out his arms, ready to give as well as to receive. He was a long-lost king, a glorious saint, a triumphant savior. Our hero, our savior." This man, Zamora, is Conrad’s Kurtz reinvented. Zamora’s home, whether imagined or real, whether among an authentic Tabao people or a constructed or "fake" tribe, is "the darkness." The stark comparison between Kurtz and Zamora leads me to believe that Zamora, while literally self-isolated in the darkness of his vacant house, is consumed by the darkness, or the chaotic void of a universe in which humankind is persistently trying to impose social order. Zamora’s construct of order, again whether imagined or real, was the adoration "of his devoted supplicants," the Tabao and the fame, the parties, and the glory that the alleged "the ethnological find of the century" brought him. Zamora, like Kurtz, and Magellan before them, are at home among strangers, among the suppliant, the colonized "other," people that are transfixed with the godlike appearence of a distanced fatherly benevolence.

None of the characters, however, are ‘at home’ with their families, the traditional unit one should be closest to according to premodern/modern standards. Kurtz abandon’s Europe and ‘his beloved,’ Magellan was a notorious conquistador, not a family man, and Zamora is so isolated from his wife Isle and his daughter Dulce, he no longer exists to them at his death and posthumously. "My daughter’s happy now, lost int he warmth and glow of my rum and her mother’s radiant smile…The girls are having fun. And not once does my name come up. Not once." Is this Hagedorn’s assessment of the postmodern condition of family? Is family more fragmented, detached, and without connection in contemporary, globalized societies?

Paz’s alienation from her bible thumping sadist of a brother Ricky and her break from her family when she moved to the U.S., Lina’s flight from her mother and her home with Zamora at Casa Blanca and her relationship to her sexually and physically abusive father, Janet’s distanced relationship to Pierce (a strictly professional relationship in film and a biological partnership to propagate the species), and Moody’s escape from his girlfriend and son, Alex, are all instances of the postmodern disconnection of family. The unit no longer represents unconditional solidarity or loyalty, but is something that can physically dissolve and break down at the drop of a pin. However, Lina, Paz, Janet, Moody, and Zamora are all characters that Hagedorn depicts with the substantial conscience to yearn for their family connections to be reconstructed and made whole again, even if only in remembrance. In Zamora’s case, even in death as his spirit is peering out from the urn, "the source of his agony," the "failed love" of Isle is what his restless spirit realizes was most important. 

Admittedly, I am a subject of and subject to the gross scheme of capitalism Hollywood signifies, since I love movies: Hollywood, foreign, old, new, Noir, mainstream, low- budget, obese- budget, etc. I agree with Benjamin in the sense that the capitalist propagated mass culture entails mass production and mechanical reproduction that does annhilate "authenticity" in that "the presence of the original" is no longer feasible or desired. I disagree with him, however, insofar as certain film and photography are "authentic" modern and postmodern texts that are equally artistic and "auristic" in contemporary culture as was painting prior to "the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production."

Benjamin insists, as do I, that "the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced." By extension, Benjamin suggests that anything that is duplicated no longer bears the authenticity of "the unique" work of art. Just as copies of the original paintings of Monet are worth a piddling fraction of the original, any tangible art that is ‘reproduced’ is authentically reductive. Benjamin, and Duhamel, critic and extremist in his hatred of all that is cinematic, cite that film, and its precurser, photography, are ‘illusion-promoting spectacles of distraction’ born out of an age of mechanical reproduction and mass commodification. Every tool to make a film is mechanized, ‘reproducible,’ and therefore, lacking "aura." While film utilized the latest technology, which is mass produced, ‘the creators’ or the people responsible for writing, production, and creation, still exist. To say that technology and the reproducibility of the means and ends of film production render ‘the creators’ or artists obsolete, is perhaps a reflection of the critic’s ignorance of ‘the art’ of film rather than his understanding.

As was earlier mentioned in a previous blog, I realize that holding on to tradition and conventional understandings of art in ‘a time of uncertainty’, World War Numero Uno, is a common and possibly necessary reaction to the dissolusionment of cultural collapse amid the mass death of the future generation. "The Lost Generation," to which I’m not sure Benjamin is necessarily a card carrying member, had few if any hopes for the future return of substance in the form of culturally codified traditions. The emergence of film might have been one more alarming mutation that morphed out of the onset of the 20th Century, according to those to whom ‘the old ways,’ of painting included, represented tride and true age-old conventions that made sense. The advent of technology, whether under the gigantor, souless machine of industrial capitalism or some other evil, has produced new art and has made it accessible to the masses, such as myself, rather than preserved it for the elite ‘cult’ of yore. While the phenomenon of exhibited art for the public is unconscienable to those that could afford to view it as an elite member of socity, I revel in it.

I concede that most Hollywood films are grossly formulaic, mushy, and hyper-unrealistic fantasy narratives that serve little purpose beyond perpetuating the dominant cultural and social normative order, but there are those miraculously occuring films, photography exhibits, graphic arts, and other hypertexts that transcend the means and ends of production for the lowest common denominator. Sometimes, its possible that even Hollywood is infected by such creativity, in which case, creativity and mass culture combine in yet another type of artistic mutation: Star Wars- not the new ones, Donnie Darko, Ghandi, Taxi Driver, anything Alfred Hitchcock, and so on and so forth.

Even if paintings cultivate concentration, which is, of course magic, and film promotes ‘collective distraction’ and criticism (not that I agree with this narrow assessment of film), why isn’t there room for both? Why does Benjamin insist that "art," in its broadest sense, should not evolve and continually ‘become?’ Why must art be constricted to narrow definitions proposed by critics such as Benjamin that are no longer applicable in the 21rst century? Paintings are fine, meticulous, beautiful, an excorcism of exceptiional talent (given that they’re good), but then again, so are a lot of art forms, ancient and contemporary.

Morrison’s Song of Solomon runs the highway of postmodern conditions, which include blackness, black womanhood versus black manhood, history or its absence, naming that connects the individual from his/her heredity or obliterates filial ties, storytelling and perspective, and the absense of objective truth. Pilate’s story, her life, however, seems to suggest a supernatural purity and truth that supercedes all others in the novel. Even Milkman, the central character, is without conscience throughout most of the novel in regards to the women in his life, a fact that Lena makes clear to him. Is Pilate Morrison’s version of the ideal, African American woman or is she distopian woman in her isolation? According to Macon Dead the Second, she is.

Morrison however, seems to suggest that Pilate’s greatest earthly flaw, her unseemly stomach which lacks the natural mark of life, the navel, is precisely that which makes her magically angelic to those who know and love her, but diabolical to those who cannot accept such an anomoly. Pilate is "expelled" from ‘normal’ life because she is percieved as ‘unnatural.’ She is a dichotemy, a "snake" to her brother Macon and ultimately a savior to Milkman, her immediate family, Reba and Hagar, and the severed family line that Milkman seeks to rediscover. Pilate’s an outcast to her black people, and yet she is self-sacrificial for her daughter, Reba, and, especially, her granddaughter, Hagar, and as Milkman comes to appreciate, her house was open and accepting to both Guitar (her murderer) and Milkman.

Pilate’s character exudes a dual condition of both witchery and divine spirituality in her isolated existence. Her nonexistent navel "isolated her." "Already without family, she was further isolated from her people, for, except for the relative bliss on the island, every other resource denied her: partnership in marriage, confessional friendship, and communal religion," and yet she is the most generous and accepting character in the novel. She attempts to reconnect with her people, specifically her estranged and distrusting property mongering brother, Macon Dead, she accepts, loves, and spoils his son, Milkman, and she continually goes without to give more to her ‘daughters.’ She is an impoverished, ostricized bootlegger ‘with a heart of gold’ and she is even a confidant to Ruth when she is pregnant with Milkman. Furthermore, Pilate seems to function as ‘a life preserver’ whereas her brother, is depicted as ruthless capitalist who is devoid of any connection to his people since his father’s death and who is even capable of murdering his unborn son. Pilate, regardless of her lifetime’s expulsion from black society at large, is more connected to her family and history than any of the other characters in the novel, as illustrated by her encounters with her father’s ghost.

Milkman is self-destructive, as illustrated when he allows Hagar to kill him (and doesn’t), and he is without a filial history or individual purpose until he discovers Shalimar and the ghosts of his ancestors buried under desserted family names. He is guided by the bones he steals from Pilate’s house and the story of her pilgrimage to Virginia after her father’s death and her confrontation with her brother years earlier. Her spirit is connected to her father’s ghost and simultaneously connects to Milkman’s quest for identity in his search for his heritage. She bridge between ‘the lost generations’ of her family and a spiritual informant of past and present to her brother’s son. At her death Milkman whitnesses the wonderful spirit that his aunt Pilate is. "There must be another like you…There’s got to be at least one more woman like you." Perhaps, she is the only woman of her kind; one that recognizes and accepts her alienation, but that loves life and family anyway.

Morrison seems to portray Pilate as a Christ figure, one that gives up her life to better her family’s life and connections. She is never accepted due to her ‘deformity,’ but she is the messenger that carries her family history- "sing."

Another question I have concerns the 7 Days. Does Mr. Smith’s organization mirror Pyncheon’s Tristero? Both operate on a silent, virtually invisible plane in society. How alike and different are the two? Did Morrison get her idea from Pyncheon since her novel was published after The Crying of Lot 49?

As complex and problematic as the novel was in its subtle shifts in time and narratives, I found the novel to be the most dynamic and interesting yet. While all of the naratives in Russ’s novel are rife with feminist rhetoric (even Jeaninne ultimately rejects the patriarchal assumptions of her self-worth, i.e. marriage and children), each woman is unique; none fold to the male ontological notion that all women are "essentially" feminine. They don’t possess the same characteristics, preferences, interests, and capabilites and none of the women want what the men in the novel think they want: child-rearing and a husband.

As Haraway articulates, as does Russ in multiple scenes throughout The Female Man, women (feminist cyborgs and the like) do not live cookie-cutter lives according to essentialist theories that prescribe to women what they should be because it is ‘their nature.’ This point is reminiscent of The Intuitionist/ Bell Hooks discussion in which I asserted that while Whitehead’s protagonist is a black woman who encounters other black ‘folk’ in the novel, Whitehead’s black characters are tremendously varied, none of whom lend to an essentialist ontology. Whether these characters conform to traditional archetypes of black experience (cliche’s according to some) or not, none are "essentially" the same. Similarly, Russ’s ‘female men,’ though they are all genetic analogues, are all very different people. Each is a product of her (what Bourdieu calls) habitus. We are told that their respective universes are alternatives to one another, and by extension parallels since each produces the four ‘analoguos’ women, but each world is a radically different environment from the next, which yields strikingly different subjects. According to John Fiske, "Culture is not concieved of as the asthetic ideals of form and beauty found in great art, or in more humanist terms as the voice of "the human spirit" that transcends boundaries of time and nation to speak of "a hypothetical universal man (the gender is deliberate- women play little or no role in this conception of culture)." Russ implies through her variant women that there is no universal experience of women. All lead unique, individuated lives within her respective ideological constructs (male in Joanna’s and Jeaninne’s realities). ‘Essentially,’ typical female experience is one of subordination according Haraway, but the plethora of possible female identites are limitless. Women must unite with other women consciously (Haraway) since women are so diverse. Women’s groups are not ‘natural,’ but they are conscious constructs. Russ’s female protagonists, such as Jael, the assassin, "The Reasoner," lives by her own constructed, conscious "hatred" of anything male. Janet, ‘the savior,’ is another utopian possibility of female identity not yet known in the world of the reader since we still live in a gendered society. 

Russ also implies that Janet’s world is the utopian reality in which women become the historians (Janet explicitly revels in her telling of Whileawayan history since the plague), the scientists, the dominant keepers of civilization, but this female uplift is only possible if gender is no longer a fissure in the human race. Haraway suggests that "imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis" may also create "a world without end." I don’t agree. Men and women are men and women. Whether gender is a social construct or a ‘natural’ phenomenon or combination of socialization and biology, I like being a woman and understood as being such. Thanks.

"The cyborg incarnation" of Janet is not bound to the history of men, which according to the anti-feminist characters in Russ’s novel, such as the men, is "a very bad mistake." As ‘the sharp glasses man’ at the party on page 43 tells Janet, "You can’t challenge men in their own fields." This of course signifies all fields in Joanna’s world, a world in which she has literally become ‘a female man’ because she has pursued a line of work in a ‘man’s field’ as a writer and, God forbid, a thinker. "If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and rightnow very bright and beady eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman."

I found the end of the novel to be problematic at the point at which Jael claims responsibility for Janet’s world, the genderless utopian future that neither Joanna nor Jeaninne will ever be a part of. How is it that Jael’s war and its objective, the ultimate demolition of the male species, can yield Janet’s world if the two women of different realities from two different times, Jael of the relative past and Janet of the ‘undetectable’ future, have crossed paths? According to an earlier passage in the novel on page seven, the narrative voice (perhaps Joanna, perhaps the author, perhaps a muddling of the two) informs the reader "the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never one’s own Past but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present…and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present- an entirely different matter from your own Past." So, since Janet visited Joanna’s world, one alternative past, but a past that isn’t hers, and Jael’s world, another version of the past that also isn’t Janet’s, then neither Past is Janet’s. Jael tells Janet that the plague is a false record of history generated by the women in power after the war in Jael’s universe in which all men on earth were wiped out. However, though perhaps what Jael tells Janet was true prior to Janet’s time travel, Janet has existed or entered Jael’s reality, and therefore, everything from that point on changes retroactively. So, either the plague really did happen in Janet’s past prior to time travelling/ universe hopping or it was a lie. Either Janet’s entry into Jael’s universe instantly created another present in Janet’s world (one that is not Janet’s), in which the plague was a socially generated fabrication, or it wiped out Whileaway altogether, for if Jael’s war is the cause of a genderless reality, not the historical the plague of Janet’s actual present, then Janet’s Whileaway and its history no longer exist. Perhaps Janet can never return to Whileaway because it no longer exists. By visiting the Pasts that are not the pasts of her present, or visiting pasts that could have been her Past before the plague and therefore, retroactively changed everything, her former present reality might not exist in exactly the way it was before she started universe hopping, in which case, Whileaway is not Whileaway and never really was.

I’m still very confused about this, as evident in my rambling. I’m sure there are numerous combinations of realities and mutant worlds, and other possible impossibilities that Russ attempts to unfurl. I’d like to know more about them.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meanings of the word Memento include "one’s thoughts in relation to memory," "a reminder, warning, hint as to future events," "a reminder of a past event or condition, of an absent person, or something that once existed," and a number of other connotations that are not strikingly relevant to the film.

The protagonist’s entire body is a memento, a blurred, ‘freakish’ hypertext of tatoos that function as reminders of ‘truths’ or clues he’s constructed under the limitation of short term memory loss. Who he is, as Lenny "reminds’ him, is something he can’t understand. Even his long term memories are possibly forged constructs, lies the protagonist allegedly tells himself "to be happy." The mementos of his previous identity, his life as defined by the memory of his relationship to his wife and her brutal murder, may not be ‘real.’ Whether we are to believe the testimony of a corrupt cop, who uses the noir protagonist in order to further his profit, seems to be as murky as the credibility of the long and short term memory of the protagonist. However corrupt, the cop seems to be more genuine in his soothsaying by the end, or rather the beginning of the film’s sequence of events, than the suggested protagonist. Is there any element or circumstance in the film that can be trusted? I believe that there isn’t.

The memory he has of his wife’s rape and murder, a graphic recollection of her blood and suffocation in the bathroom, is the one defining element about the protagonist’s current character. If this memory is a ‘fake reminder,’ meaning it does not document an actual or ‘real’ event, person, place, or thing, than his current identity is predicated upon the meaninglessness the protagonist is most afraid of. Even when he believes that he can remember something, it could be all wrong, subjective, and  incomplete. Memory is a conscious and cognitive design of how one wants to remember something as opposed to what actually happened, and its easy to ‘remember what one wants’ since we can’t recall every last detail of an event, person, place, and time. Furthermore, our vagrant hero wants to believe that ‘the world is still here’ and his ‘actions still have meaning,’ even if that meaning is constructed on false pretenses rather than none at all.

He continuously claims that "he knows who he is" since he believes he can remember who he was before his "condition," and yet he contradicts himself in the film following Lenny’s exposition of the multiple truths or nontruths about the protagonist. Although he should probably trust the cop more than himself, he writes "do not believe his lies" on the back of his picture simply because he doesn’t like what "Lenny" tells him about himself. The protagonist purposefully lies to himself at certain moments throughout the film, just as he confesses in the end, or rather at the beginning of the journey to avenge his wife: "maybe I do lie to myself to be happy." 

According to Lenny, one history of the protagonist suggests that he killed the man who he believes murdered his wife several times, including the man he kills at the conclusion of the movie. In yet another alternative reality, "the memory guy" potentially killed his diabetic wife. In Freudian terms, he thoroughly dissociated with his fatal mistake and replaced the memory of the actual occurence with a "fake" memory:Sammy Jenkis.

Sammy plays the role, in the protagonist’s mind, of the innocent amnesiac who shoots his wife up with too much insulin. The protagonist (I can’t remember his name- speaking of short-term synapse failure) exhibits such clear and unequivocal insight when he’s talking about Sammy over the phone because he is psychologically distanced from the experience of killing his wife since he remembers Sammy as the one that unknowingly committed murder. If what Lenny says is even partially true of the protagonists history since his wife’s death, the protagonist is a killer equivalent Jenkis. Both kill or continue to kill because they cannot remember what they’ve just done. Since the events do not imprint in the memory of the short-term impaired, the actions and events in the amnesiac’s life cannot shape his/her identity. Instead, the protagonists actions bear no meaning on who he is. Meaninglessness abounds. Since he cannot remember the immmediate experiences of killing his wife and the perpetrater’s he’s framed as responsible in his long term memory, they are no longer a part of his identity according to his reality and self-awareness.

Time is also of the essence in the film. Beyond the reverse sequential order of events, ‘the backwardness’ in which the film is structured, which is actually the most progressive in terms of the plot’s revelation, the protagonist wonders, "how am I supposed to heal if I can’t remember tim?" The memory he can’t forget is the one he wants to forget, his wife’s murder. Whether it acutually happened or he made it up, it overwhelmes everything else about the protagonist. He is his wife’s avenger and lives for no other reason. That is who he believes he is. While he forgets himself and all of the things he’s done since among the misinformation of tatoos, potentially of his own device, he can’t forget the memory of his dieing wife. Was the memory forged? Did she die in the way that the protagonist remembers or the way in which Lenny describes? Does it even matter?

The pervasive theme of contemporary politics in Whitehead’s The Intuitionist is all the more accentuated while reading Bell Hook’s "Postmodern Blackness" in tandem with the novel. Hooks’ article argues for the validity of postmodern discourse as a transformative device to alter and improve the lives of the "nihilistic" mass, black culture in America, in which all blacks engage in "the intellectual work," such as critical theory and cultural production of arts, literature, music, and so on, to advance a black identity of diversity, and yet, maintain connected to the source, the black community en masse. In other words, black intellectuals or "elitists" need to break from the ideological myth that their work, which include theories, criticism, literary and artistic contributions to the postmodern discourse of the academy, is too difficult for the displaced masses to understand or contribute to effectively. Hooks insists that there needs to be a continuous and dynamic interchange between the African American intellectuals and the body of people they represent in the academy and in mass culture. One should not write about the "exhile and suffering" of his/her race if one is not connected to it, meaning living it as well as knowing it. Hooks is optimistic with the postmodern era insofar as the vocality of knowledge of shared experience and cultural production can constitute a forum for radical resistance against the legacy of colonial stereotypes that black "essentialism" propagates even today. Essentialist theory argues for a fictitious cultural divide between black "Nationalists" and "Assimilationists," an outmoded classification system of the modern era. If African Americans in the intellectual, middle class, and "underclass" are willing to participate in the postmodern discourse with one another, in the academy and in life, black America will forge an identity in the postmodern discourse as the truly "other and different" that can leave its distinguishable legacy on the postmodern fabric of America. I respect her positivism, even though such a theory is difficult to implement in the political sphere of contemporary America. The Two-Party system, or the two-headed one-party system, makes it difficult for such a distinct referendum to maintain its purity since politics consumes all causes to inevitably dillute them for the consumption of mass culture.

Contemporary politics in the postmodern world is a continual theme in The Intuitionist that distinquishes the novel from The Crying of Lot 49 and Leguin’s The Lathe of Heaven. While the novels we read previously seem to sublimate the issue of politics, Whitehead confronts ‘the art of politricking’ head on. Political factions will appropriate anything and anyone to either further their own agendas or dismantle the oppostional faction, without regard, it seems, to the individuals, groups, and the consequences of such dehumanizing tactics. For instance, the two candidates for the Guild Chair, Chancre and Orville Lever, introduce the themes of political or "election year ploys," a willingness to do anything and everything to please their targetted supporters. "Chancre lost among the Old Dogs of the Guild was more than compensated for by the goodwill generated by the raise and the new mother-of-pearl jackknife screwdrivers." Chancre’s actions are not manifestations of his good will and passion for the humanity he governs, but are simply rhetorical tactics he can use to secure his own success, power, and entitlement to authority. He is not rooted in or connected to the Guild members that support him or that he claims to represent. He is detached from them, and the narrator implies through the character, Chuck, that Chancre is an encumbant politician willing to hold onto his "cushy leather chair for dear life" regardless if he’s reelected. Hooks cites this divide between the intellectual/political elite and the masses they represent as problematic, and I believe the politicians that I am forced to nominate and elect neither represent my perspectives nor my values. I will no be lumped into the two-party categories of Democrat or Republican, since I am neither.  

Chancre appropriates Leila Mae for political gain as well. At first he uses her black, female, intutionist cultural identity to bolster his reputation as an even keeled, open minded politician, but he of course ultimately sets her up to fall from the grace of white, male American perception since she is these things. He uses her specific identity initially to support his claim to open mindedness, and then uses them against her when the neoconservative political wind picks up after the elevator crash at the Fanny Brigg’s building occurs. She is the perfect candidate to secure Chancre’s neoconservative base because she is made to look responsible for the Brigg’s elevator collapse. She’s a black woman, dually alienated, and according to the white supremacist notions Hook’s argue’s still dominate the American, postmodern political arena, Leila Mae is all the more incompetent because she is an Intuitionist, an advocate of a new way of thinking, of being, of understanding.

Chancre’s opponent, Lever, "the liberal," "apparently thinks that only Intuitionists are capable of building coalition’sm shaking hands with fundamentally different people." Lever is no less a politician than Chancre, and therefore, no more benevolent. He appropriates Leila Mae by pitting her against her boss and accuser, Chancre. The Democratic Party in the U.S., is supposedly more "liberal" than The Elephant, and it is infamous for taking possession of the myriad of human, social, and civil rights that The Right disregards altogether. However, through this appropriation, the urgency of such causes, such as Hook’s passionate message to the black community to engage in postmodern discourse and ownership of their cultural and artistic production, becomes dilluted under the liberal flag. It becomes ‘just another cause’ that one feels he/she can do little about because there are so many and because there is such disunity and infighting between groups such as "the black liberationists" and "the environmental fanatics." One would hardly see the connection between such divergent "liberal" groups if it weren’t for the word liberal. Any and all of these disconnected, politically charged groups are used by The Left, in many cases, to further its own course of political power without truly addressing and improving the plight of the groups it deems as its "liberal" fledglings. 

"As it is in politics, the only victor in the end was ugly comprimise." Hook’s argues that "the ugly comprimise" blacks face in postmodern society pertains to identity politics. The masternarrative of modern society categorized blacks as either "nationalist" or "assimilationists," a comprimise that glosses over the diversity truly prevalent in the African American community. In the same way, Leila Mae is made to comprimise her identity in the political world. She has to "play the game," put on her game face and a rigid uniform with wing tip shoes that signifies her membership to a group that she shares little common experience with. She studied elevators and so did the rest, but this is no foundation for unity and acceptance, especially since she is of "the voodoo" orientation in the field. She, however, must conform to a standard, a white, male American standard, that isn’t hers, in order to pursue her career. In the starkly Empericist world of white men, she has to comprimise her identity because she is not only alienated by her white counterparts at the Guild, but she is alienated from the black culture in postmodern New York city. She is not connected to the black community, as exemplified in her encounter with Mrs. Roger’s and in the prevailing hostility between herself and Pompey. Leila Mae feels that she is in her own group, and not akin to the black slums of the city or the impoverished, uneducated African Americans emboddied by her father. Hook’s argues that continuity and knowledge between the black classes of shared experience in an alienating white world is a necessity. Moreover, Leila Mae is not accepted by the status quo or the politicians that seek to permanently ostricize her from any real world connections. She is alone as "the other" and "the different" because she is the postmodern African American woman who can not longer be labeled as only this or only that. She is a combination of differences and otherness that can no longer be classified by the archaic modernist system, and is therefore, cannot effectively represented in a transformative way in the political world.

 I must digress and take issue with Bell Hook’s open armed embrace of rap. As an African American woman, a cultural constituent Hooks is a member of and believes to be cut off from postmodern cultural production, I assumed she would be disappointed, if not outraged, by the overt sexism in the majority of mainstream rap. The genre glorifies black men, representatives of the "underclass," who revel in the mistreatment and degredation of their women, a cruel practice, which doubly binds the African American woman to a marginalized status of the lowest order, since she is not only black, but a woman also. Although Hooks declares the legitimacy of rap because it signifies and expresses "the yearning" of the black youth of the "underclass," and therefore, provides empowerment through vocality to defeat the infectious nihilism that blacks face in postmodern society, I do not agree that it communicates the yearnings of equality that African American women desire in American society, Queen Latiffa and a few other choice female/male rappers aside. On the contrary, I believe the mainstream undertone of the music as a whole, in its most derrogatory form, is counterproductive since it directly degrades the race it proportedly advocates by misongynistically denegrating its women.

I’ve never been one for science fiction, and although Lequin’s Lathe of Heaven is considered a member of the genre, I believe this novel’s tragectory far surpasses simple sci-fi (if, in fact, science fiction ever is merely “simple”). When I finished reading it, I reclined in my shoddy, Staples computer chair and stared at the calendar on my bedroom wall for about a half an hour. I imagined how many times the events scribbled and smeared in black ink could have be rewritten if I were a character in the novel. The disillusionment set in when I realized it wouldn’t matter since I wouldn’t be able to remember the variations of my existence that someone else is dreaming into reality anyway. That’s when I meandered out to the balcony and chain smoked approximately five cigarettes to fasten myself into some sense of normalcy again, the rational desire to quit smoking in the face of unconscious addiction. Needless to say, my reaction to the story was powerful.

Beyond the morbid events of The Plague that wipes out 6 billion people, the government’s blood thirsty reaction to the turtlesque aliens landing on earth, which are assumed (with emphasis on the word assume) to be hostile, and the void Haber’s central emptiness brings to bear on the whole of humanity via his effective dream, the dynamics of postmodernism saturate the the science fiction plot with aspects of socialization, the concepts of naturalism, and culturally infused understandings.

George Orr, for instance, is emmersed in a psychological state of self doubt reinforced by the institutions of power. He is informed, through the sublimated and overt code in society, that he is a drug abuser, a patient, and therefore, enfeebled to the point at which he does not and should not have any control over his own life. Orr is constantly reminding himself that he is not strong, physically, morally, and particularly, pyschologically, since he cannot stop himself from changing reality through his dreams. Ergo, George should trust Haber, “The Man,” the representative of the unquestioned benevolent and accomplished institutions of power that are merely trying to better humanity, while of course, never trying to exploit it. Regardless of how many times Orr ‘effectively’ changes reality, even to the point at which all people are homogenously gray and the world is a tasteless, odorless matrix of similitude in which Haber resides like the Christian God at the apex of it all, Lequin’s protagonist insists that he is weak and that Haber is moral in his quest for unabated authority, since he claims to have humanity at heart, though ironically, he has no heart. Isn’t this what all great politicians profess, irregardless of the evidence that lends to the contrary?

Orr, however, is strong. He is moral even when he is no longer required to be. Since society’s moral structure is no longer succinct with or attached to the solidarity and consciousness of historical evolution of “morality” as we know it, Orr could choose to believe that morality is obsolete since nothing in the world is substantial, lasting, or remotely true, and since Orr’s reality is a conglomerate of the three states of reality, dreaming, waking, and “effective dreaming,” who cares? The only ‘moral’ code he has to obide by consists of not getting locked up by remaining free of the label, “insane.” Orr knows that he is not insane, although Haber has the power to present him as such.

Orr is moral because he intrinsically knows that its not his place to change things. His ultimate moral efficacy seems to draw from Eastern concepts of the universe and the human being’s place within its order. He is a part of the world, not outside it, as Haber is. He is connected to humanity, as much as he possibly can be in a realm of slipsliding realities “in the mist,” as illustrated in his relationship to Lelache. He is morally strong in that he recognizes that the world just is, and it should evolve in the natural progression of evolution and rational consensus. He is such a moral fortress, in fact, that he manages to cross the vista of nothingness Haber has dredged up from his disconnected unconscious and, literally, bring the world back into being by simply pushing a button. Orr of course downplays his contribution to humanity by telling the Alien, E’nememen Asfah, “I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my existence, to press one damned OFF button.” He crossed a nihilistic void of ultimate loss, suffering, and “the presence of absence” in order to ensure the world’s existence, at the expense of loosing the one real connection he had in the world, his wife, and his own sense of being? What strength!

This brings me to Haber. One classmate insists Haber is a cartoon-like villain, and I must admit, I was vaguely reminded of the villain Jafar in Disney’s Aladin. Jafar, the power hungery adviser to the King, parallels Haber, an adviser appointed by the institutions of power in America. However, this is vastly oversimplified. Jafar is a one and a half dimensional character, if even that, while Haber is a complex of natural and learned human characteristics. In Orr’s mind, Haber is a bearlike, ball of human flesh, layered like an onion with nothing at the core, as Orr discovers by the end of the story. Haber is a prime example of Ada’s signification of language in the sense that he’s all talk, most of which the average reader can distinguish as a complicated mess of diction, conceptualizations, ‘fake’ history, and long windedness expressing absolutely nothing. Orr insists on his benevolent “power of will” to perfect the world because it seems that he has been conditioned to believe in the godlike goodness of societal structures, but Haber is neither benevolent nor specifically evil. He is the void, wrapped up in the pretty corporate apparel and prestige of his own artificial impositions on reality. He is not a part of humanity, but apart from it, in his own mind and in the perception of the narrator. He is not apt to perfect humanity (no one individual is, suggests Lequin), particularly since he has no sense of connection to it or its history. When he recounts the death of his extended and immediate family as a result of the carcinogenic plague, for example, he exhibits no remorse, he is void of feeling, even though he experienced it in the past of that existence. He is quick to seize on the new histories of the various realities of the world as if he were an automated encyclopedia detached from any real sense of compassion or emotion for the very thing he actually destroys by attempting to perfect it. This concept reminds me of Hawthorne’s The Birthmark. Haber, like Hawthorne’s wacky (and sexist) scientist , both play the roles of the seemingly benevolent doctor who aspire to godhead to save feeble humanity from its own imperfections, but end up bludgeoning it to death with “progress.”

I don’t get it. What’s the deal with Antwerp?

Pyncheon’s Crying of Lot 49 begins with a vivid description of the “insulated” Oedipa Mass. Though this novel was published in 1965, she is the product of, what I call, ‘The Whole Foods culture’ that runs rampant through mainstream America. Tupperwear parties and Scientific American merely cap the iceburg of the dual nature of Inverarity’s America, a culture that is embedded in the modern corporate world exemplified by San Narcisco, that yields a ‘wasted’ universe of “the disinherited” or dispossed of San Francisco, and those such as Mike Fallopian and Pierce Inverarity, who appear to succeed in the circuitry of the mainstream world, and yet also seem to circumvent it through their connections to the enigmatic Tristero.
Tristero, whether it is real or ‘a forgery,’ in the same way Genghis Cohen refers to the W.A.S.T.E./ Tristero stamps as “forgeries” when compared to the U.S. Postal Service stamps, emboddies the postmodern reaction to the homogeneity and the safe reality of the mainstream that has been structurally laid down as a ‘buffer’ between everyday human life, and “the underlying truth.’ The truth is as obscure and inaccessible as the Tristero. Truth in the form of ‘hard’ evidence is rendered indecipherable and it cannot be discerned with a ready made explanation, but it does include the “swirl of houses and streets” of our cookie cutter, ‘circuit card’ communites and “the heiroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” that lies beneathe.
The postmodern reaction to mainstream in the novel is connected by the Tristero symbol of the muted post horn. However, the W.A.S.T.E. system, assuming that it is exists, is a discordant opposition without a clear motive or plan for resolution. W.A.S.T.E. is an alternative that offers no alternative solution. Each person Oedipa encounters that obides by some cause affiliated with the symbol or is in some way connected to the muted post horn, has their own sense of the emblem’s history in terms of how it relates to his immediate cause, eventhough none of these men appear to know the true history of the symbol, if there is one. Objective reality or truth is not the point. Perception of truth as applied to one’s identity and the expression of that identity is of significance. For example, Mike Fallopian, an employee of Yoyodine, recieves letters through the Tristero that bear no real message or significance. He, nor any of the employees at Yoyodine who use the alternative postal system, express anything of significance. They don’t attempt to change the systems in which they live and make them any better. He is rebelling for the sake of rebelling, and it appears, for no other reason. However, Fallopian is an inconsistent, untrustworthy character, as are all of the men in the novel, since he ultimately embraces corporate showmanship and suggests that Tristero is all in her head. The member of the “Inamorati Anonymous” that Oedipa, as Arnold Snarb, meets at the Greek Way, wears the symbol in honor of a former suicidal executive who “was automated out of job” and blames “love” for his “disinherited” state as a ‘dithering executive’ that can’t come to a “decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee.” Love had nothing to do with the executive’s misfortunes, but he founded the I.A., to which members subscribe because, feeling alienated, they identify with a “society of isolates… a whole underworld of failed suicides.” The group, however, chooses to alienate itself even further rather than make a conscious effort to take a stand against a society that renders them incompetent, such as the case of the executive that attempted to torch himself. According to Oedipa’s findings, the original Tristero, possibly nothing more than a Spanish misanthrope who desired to undermine the elitist, mainstream Thurn and Taxis postal system that had “disinherited” him from wealth and power. He, in turn, created a band of terrorists to set up an alternative “power spectrum,” that happens to be no better than what it opposes. Oedipa, whether she believes she’s awake, or hung up in a nightmare, or some combination of both realities, navigates through these and many other experiences, which includes her dealings with her husband Mucho, who was initially, a “sensitve” car salesman who could not except the “motorized, metal extensions” of the hopelessly impoverished, but who ultimately ‘looses his identity’ to L.S.D. , prescribed to him by one Dr. Hilarious, who seems to have been involved with the county hospitals and government in some conspiracy to eliminate individuation. This easily connects to Stanley Kotek’s qualms with Yoyodine Inc. and its policy toward the creativity of the individual employee. While Oedipa is harassed by Hilarious to take L.S.D. to soothe anxiety, a very real marker of personhood regardless of its sometimes negative consequences, L.S.D. also eliminates a sense of the individual self, which Mucho looses. Expression of the individuated self is, in fact, creativity, the ability to create or invent. Yoyodyne forces its employees to sign a patent agreement which stipulates that employees, if they do create, cannot take credit for their individual expression. It is therefore labeled a product of “teamwork” and the individual is lost in the mix. However, Koteks as does Fallopian, Driblette, Metzger, the sleezy lawyer, Mucho and Hilarious all accept their fates by either surrendering to the complete assimilation of self with everything else or die. Then there’s Dr. Hilarious, who is overtaken by the paranoia hyper self-consiousness yields. He seems to individuate too much since he comes to believe that he is the locus of all plots and conspiracies due to his service to the Nazi’a at Buchenwald. All are symptoms of the postmodern reaction to modern societal structures. Oedipa doesn’t seem to accept any of these reactions as viable or useful since they further the alienation of those around her and deepen her own sense of isolation.
Though these many causes attached to Tristero diverge according to separate mythologies, supposing “there really was a Tristero…then by that continuity, she might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she’d looked.” What is truth beyond our own perceptions and personal myths that we hold onto? Whether Tristero exists as a tangibly real enitity that levies its power along the dispensation of the myriad of mythologies of “the disinherieted” or whether it is Inverarity’s perverse attempt “to survive death, as a paranoia: a pure conspiracy against someone he loved,” Oedipa is remarkably changed. At the conclusion of the novel, regardless of her isolation and her sense of loss, since she can no longer trust in the people or the superficial ‘matirx’ of ‘Kinneret towers’ and postmodern American institutions that have kept her “insulated” and quiet, like Tristero itself, she has gained a clearer sense of self since she can never go back to her former, “buffered” way of life. The novel, though it appears cyclical in terms of her hunt for the cold, hard facts of Tristero, which may not exist at all in any situation in the postmodern world, it is not cyclical because she chooses to finally act on behalf of her own self interest. She attends the Crying of Lot 49, the point at which she will truly finds out the significance of the Tristero. She decides to take action and move toward some semblence of reconciliation, a move that none of the diverse constituents of the Tristero symbol or the Tristero system itself has accomplished. Tristero seeks to remain silent, to hide, to pillage society in the darkness, and yet never to take responsibility for its actions, and therefore, never gain a unique identity that can express its discontent, let alone resolve the “disinherited” status of its loosely affiliated, in some cases grossly misguided, memebers. Contrarily, Oedipa will no longer accept what she is told to believe, from any side. She wants to know, for herself, the underlying continuity between “the Whole Foods” culture of San Narcisco and Kinneret Among the Pines and its inadequate, silent, diffuse, and immoblized oppostion, the Tristero. She desires a new identity, individuated, defined, competent as a woman as well as an American, and resourceful even when the given resources are questionable. At the end, standing “in a patch of sun, among brilliant rising and falling poinst of dust” before she enters Lot 49, she is the only woman, highly distinquishable among the men in “black mohair…pale, cruel faces.” She is ready to move forward, to take action on behalf of her responsibility as ‘executrix’, to take responsibility for who she wants to be in relation to the world of the entrenced and the isolates, who ever that may be.