Category: Reflections

I shall begin by stating that the use of tense in this novel is absolutely fascinating and I think we should discuss it for a few minutes in class.

I say this because I have the feeling that our entire conversation will be dominated (as I’m sure it should be) by discussions of race. However, I don’t know that this novel fits as comfortably with the arguments of bell hooks as we would like.

First, this narrative seems to be set in (an alternative universe?) in “Big City” America in the late 1960’s early 70’s. The very fact that the society is still segregated greatly simplifies race relations in the book: Whites are intolerant and blacks are not tolerated. It’s made clear that Fulton would have been silenced if not light skinned. (Somebody argued that this was evidence of a complication of race relations. I strongly disagree for the aforementioned reasons.) While I know we are to make every effort to avoid this debate, I don’t think that this text presents a post-modern sense of “blackness” in the way that Hooks champions in her article. If anything, this text is more like Ellison’s Invisible Man, as it uses complex metaphors and surrealistic imagery to present a rather uncomplicated (though astutely critical) version of race relations in the US.

Also, I wish to disagree with a previous argument that was posted on the blog that seems to imply (I may have misunderstood) that Lila Mae and Pompey’s mutual animosity somehow represents hook’s analysis of nominalism. Instead, I would argue that, in many ways, this personifies the “nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified” (house v. field) that is the hallmark of the essentialist camp. Furthermore, the simple fact that Lila Mae misjudged Pompey demonstrates this mentality more than it undercuts it. Does this text champion the black intellectual in the way Cornel West would find productive? Do we really learn anything about Fulton besides his race? It would be completely irresponsible of me to suggest that this text is essentialist (and I have no intention of making this argument), but I don’t see it moving Black representation in a new direction. I don’t know that his book is the answer to bell hook’s request.

Either way, I think we should talk about the use of tense in the novel.

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 . . .

bell hooks, in her essay entitled “Postmodern Blackness” confronts several key issues in postmodern discourse that address the African American voice, both critical and participatory.  I would like to look closer at her discussion of “yearning” and the ways that this “psychological state” plays a part in a medium, namely rap, that hooks identifies as a positive and creative outlet and public forum for African Americans.  She states that, “it has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice…a ‘common literacy.’ Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging.”  If rap is identified as a postmodern music, with the sampling of beats and lyrics and assimilation of music genres and forms, then the freedom of the African American voice that hooks identifies as a part of rap, is a positive outlet and art form, even when dabbling in postmodern constructs.  hooks points to Lawrence Grossberg’s essay “Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism” which states: “The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own–and consequently our own–existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real–it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper.  From the earliest roots of hip hop to the present day manifestations of the form; from the Bronx battles of Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash to the flow of Notorious BIG, the ability to express and the want to boast has been a part of the scene.  As Grossberg points out, it made no difference that the boasts were real: BIG drew what he rapped about from stories he heard on the street, and not necessarily from his own life.  Yet, this form of music enabled the African American inner city voice to be heard.  It is also interesting to look at the way that graffiti, a part of hip hop culture, subsumes and recontextualizes the utility of the subway train, and in so doing, provides the canvas for another voice to emerge.  For an interesting discussion of the history of graffiti art, I recommend Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis In New York City by Joe Austin.  In looking at The Intuitionist, at the struggle of the African American voice therein, I go back to Kira’s discussion of the end of the novel, and the ways that Lila Mae attempts to reconcile the revelations.  Lila Mae, in stating, “Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you” (241).  In light of the book, the “not-you” is elevators, and the ways that they work and don’t work.  In a larger context, even within the text, Intuitionism can be a way of communicating with the “not-you” who is of a different race, cultural background, sexual orientation, and so forth.  Learning to navigate the difficulties of communication and finding the voice that allows that is the most important task.

I think books like The Intuitionist please bell hooks, as it seems to incorporate much of what she finds to be lacking in postmodernist representations of black Americans. Colson Whitehead does not revert to simplification in portraying the black community of New York (is it?), but shows how, despite similar background and class belonging, black American experience is always unique and will create differences, and sometimes even antagonisms, within the group. 

Even though Lila Mae and Pompey are two of the very few black elevator inspectors who are actually allowed to work as such, there seems to be no common bond between them, only mutual animosity. Lila Mae looks down upon Pompey because of his apparent adaptation of a ‘white’ outlook on the world (and a racist sense of humor), while he sees her as a presumptuous black chick whose rise in the firm is alleviated by all the hardships he went to go through in the attempt to be accepted as a black professional. In fact, their attitude towards each other seem to the white people around them to confirm the view that one colored person means integration, whereas two colored means “you got a race war as they try to kiss up the whitey” (249).

Of course, their attitude towards one another has nothing to do with ‘kissing up the whitey’; they are merely results of attempting to display the ‘caricature of strength’ needed to get by in an antagonistic world. For whereas the world they live in – and the trade they live by – is the very emblem of social mobility, the color of their skin makes it impossible for them to ascend like white men. The comparison with the white black man, Fulton, emphasizes this. Towards the end of the novel Lila Mae admits that her hatred towards Pompey is based on her hatred towards herself: what hostilities she has ignored and what ‘white’ or Empirisist vision (i.e. judging things based on surface appearance) she has adapted in adjusting to the white world that surrounds her in her upward ascent. Lila Mae and Pompey can thus be seen as representatives of what Cornel West called the “anxiety-ridden” black middle-class, which is “insecure” yet “willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be” (in hooks, 8).

The other group West describes as those sharing the collective plight of the black Americans is the hopeless members of the “vast and growing underclass” (Hooks, 8 ). In the novel these are the dwellers of the colored parts of the city. These people whose skin color force them to live their lives trapped in what seems to Lila Mae a distasteful and atavistic “horizontal maundering about” (171) the city’s dirt, water and ‘dark murk’ beyond the dream of social ascent. They are invisible to white men, and the closer they get to the power network that runs the city, the worse their predicament. At the financial district their very bodies dissolve, and their voices are silenced to such an extent that even organizing sentences becomes an “impossible prospect” (223). The reason for Lila Mae’s slight contempt for these people is that she (like most black kids?) was taught to believe in the possibility of social ascent, and early taught the mechanics of this ascent by her father, a man himself trapped at the lower level of society.

Fulton’s first dream of ascent was of high buildings in which people were stacked on top of one another and no-one knew anything about his neighbor: where he came from or what he did. In this dream-world, successful integration depended upon not being recognized or having contact with people of the same background as yourself. It is the white man’s idea of integration: each black individual separate in a white world, – and it is very similar to modern city anonymity. Yet it is a state that cannot protect the black man from free fall. The shafts of each elevator are separate, and there is always the threatening black void beneath you. Fully integrated into this kind of community, Fulton realized he could not make his satire bite because no-one was there to share his vision. This is why he came up with his vision of the second elevation: a different approach to black ascent.

Fulton’s final dream is of a world based on interconnectedness: of shafts in which you rise from the original black nothingness and into something that transcends it and diminishes the probability of falling. In this ride, there is only ascent, no fear of free fall. You leave the world below you behind – that black coffin that diminished you and kept you grounded in the mud – and rely on new “dependable allies” (222). This mutual lift must be based on Intuitionism: it is a black thing, associated with an awareness (black, and hence stereotyped as witchcraft and voodoo by white men) that can only be partially understood even by sympathizing whites (like Chuck). This means that the ‘second ascension’ is all about communication: Intuitionism is communication: communication which what is not-you. Only when black Americans have been able to communicate in a way that unites their common experience and prevents them from falling back into separate states of black dispair (i.e. when they have formed new allies), can the subject be dissolved without becoming nothingness.

In this way, I believe, The Intuitionist asserts bell hooks’s point that issues of identity are still important to black Americans, and must be allowed in postmodernist writings in order for it to maintain its function as a discourse of difference and resistance. Insisting on dissolving the subject before individuals belonging to marginalized groups have been able to negotiate some kind of subjectivity only serves postmodernism to become exclusive instead of inclusive, and favor the voice of the (white intellectual) critic over the real (and colored) other.

My thoughts on The Intuitionist were touched off by bell hook’s discussions of "difference" and "otherness". These terms reminded me of the modernist tenet of the individual as alienated (or the theme of distance vs. participation in Hassan’s chart from last week’s reading). This is certainly true for Lila Mae in The Intuitionist. However, in bell hooks’ discussion, difference and otherness seemed to have a presence or a form (this in turn reminds of absence as a presence – another of Hassan’s dichotomies), whereas in The Intuitionist difference and otherness become qualities that make a person most invisible.

Lila Mae, as the Department of Elevator Inspectors first black female inspector is in a position to stand out against the ranks of white men who populate the department. It seems that her uniqueness, or otherness, would make her most visible, but that is not the case. She is shunned during after-work outings to O’Connor’s. She has only to don a maid’s uniform at the Department’s annual Follies to vanish completely from the radar of her white colleagues: "Lila Mae picks up empty plates from the tables of her coworkers. No one recognizes her" (148).

Yet Lila Mae sometimes perceives other characters as invisible. One passage describes Jim and John, the ransackers of Lila Mae’s apartment: "The invisible everymen. The true citizens. Lila Mae counts few people as friends in this world. Jim and John are the rest" (29). In fact, Lila Mae is described as being "a practicing solipsist" (I can’t find the page). Lila Mae points out that the Empiricists "…looked at the skin of things" (239), and is sure that it is Pompey who sabotaged the Number Eleven elevator in the Fanny Briggs building. However, she eventually realizes that she was wrong about Pompey, and that she only "looked at the skin" of him: "She could not see him anymore than anyone else in the office saw him" (239). This leads me to wonder, who is really invisible in The Intuitionist? How visible is anyone to anyone else?

It seems that Fulton himself, grounded by the perpetual lie about his race, had to get past looking "at the skin of things", as well. "He created a life of transcendence that was as much a lie as his life…" (241). Posing as a white man, he blended seamlessly into a white man’s world – becoming invisible as part of "the rest" (29). At the end of the novel, Lila Mae wonders about Fulton’s intentions in his late-in-life conversion to his own theories: "That there could be, in the world he invented to parody his enslavers, a field where he could be whole?" (241).  These musings lead her to revelations about "otherness": "Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you" (241). With these words, I saw the pervasive modernist tenet of distance (the individual as alien) evaporate into the postmodernist participation (where characters interact, or communicate, with each other, as part of the larger world).

The Intuitionist complicates the simple binary between ‘surface’ and ‘depth,’ taking the discussion in a different direction by focusing on postmodernism as a reaction against the Enlightenment project.  Instead of suggesting that modernism emphasizes depth and postmodernism emphasizes surface, the novel reverses the links by pointing out that empiricism is built through a methodology of surfaces, in the sense that surfaces are tactile, measurable, ‘real.’  Because they appear so obviously real, surfaces are comfortable, and in fact the whole system of objects rests upon them.  The trust that empiricism places in its own senses – that seeing is believing – opens up the danger of a reversal, a reflexive property in which believing leads to seeing, a scientific axiom used to support a received racist cultural axiology.  Late in the novel, Mrs. Rogers reveals Fulton’s purpose in writing Theoretical Elevators, his joke that undermined empirical epistemological tenants: “these are his words—‘They were all slaves to what they could see.’ But there was a truth behind that they couldn’t see for the life of them” (239).  This takes an explicit racial direction when Lila Mae responds that “They looked at the skin of things” (239).  Intuitionism, in the novel, at first appears to be an attempt to recover the depth beyond the observable surface, but rather than burrowing into this depth, the novel postulates elevation and expansion as the direction of intuitionist possibility.  Elevation is the novel’s overriding metaphor, a metaphor for human potentiality and social transformation.  The snippet of Theoretical Elevators beginning Part Two of The Intuitionist looks beyond “the dull obviousness of biology” (221) in order to move beyond the surface – not into depth but above surface.  Fulton’s theoretical elevation posits a postmodern subjectivity in which race is abandoned as a meaningful distinction, a movement in which people “lose solidity in the verticality. At ninety [stories], everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating” (222).  The medium, the surface, the body, the skin – they all disintegrate in the rise of potentiality.  Naturally, this “critique of essentialism,” as bell hooks calls it, is open to criticisms which lament the loss of authentic black experience as a touchstone for collective political action.  I don’t presume to have any answers, of course, but I imagine we’ll have a spirited debate on these antithetical positions in class on Tuesday.

Hi, it’s Jun. Sorry to remain silent in the class. But it will take some more weeks for me to be able to join the discussion freely, because my English speaking is little bit slow and unclear yet. So for now, I think, posting my thoughts here is a better way for me to join our class’ discussion.

  Chuang Tsu was an ancient Chinese Philosopher (died in about BC 250), he and Lao Tsu are two major masters in Taoism. They are well known to the people in East Asian countries like China, Korea, and Japan. And I think, in these days, they are very well known to western people too. But I’m not sure ‘a butterfly’s dream’ is also familiar to you. So I would like to introduce you the story. Le guin keep quoted his and Lao tsu’s epigrams, but she did not introduce this story in her novel. (But I’m sure she got some motif from it) The story goes like this:   One day Chuang tsu had a long long dream, (long dreams are very popular motif in ancient Asian stories, and they are too long so the dreamer can not realize easily they were just dreams) in the dream, he became a butterfly. He had fun while he was flying from flowers to flowers. After he woke up, he could not make himself sure, whether he became butterfly in his dream, or a butterfly became Chuang tsu in the butterfly’s dream. There was nobody who can prove that he’s not in a butterfly’s dream but a butterfly was in his dream. By that he realized there is no distinction between dream and reality.

This story is one of the most famous and popular one among Chuang Tsu’s stories to Korean people, and it became more famous when the ‘Matrix the movie’ hit the Market, because so many movie critics in Seoul quoted it. The other critics, of course, referred to Jacques Lacan or Derrida.

  In this story, Chuang tsu wants to break down the distinction between dream and reality. He even says that there is no use of that kind of distinction. It is what he and postmodern philosophers agree. I think that’s why so many post modern philosophers keep refer to Taoism.

  And I think Le guin got her motif for <the Lathe of Heaven> from the story. In the end of novel, distinction between dream and reality means nothing to Orr. After all the events, he would think that ‘Oops, I have a bad reality this morning’, just like we, ordinary people, think that ‘Ooops, I had a bad dream this morning.’ This is what he admitted. He admitted, that dream and reality are not different things to him anymore.   

‘’‘’And also I want to add my thoughts referring to Derrida and Lacan. (I enjoyed Le guin’s novel!)

Derrida said that, in the preface of ‘Of Grammatology’, ‘The future will be monstrous’. Even though some modernists or modern novelists describe dystopia in their works, they still have a ‘metaphysical’ concept of ‘Utopia’ in their mind, but to the postmodernist, the world is only monstrous, because they don’t have, borrowing Derrida’s word, a ‘frame’ to see the world within (I think this topic came up in the class). They do not have distinction between a good world and a bad world.

     Lacan in his late times said, or by referring him Slavoj ZIZEK said that, if you want to   make a ‘perfect whole’ you have to alienate something from the ‘whole’. That is the concept of Lacan’s ‘the symbolic’. And if you want to get to Lacan’s ‘the Real’, then you have to call back what alienated to the ‘whole’ and make it kind of a ‘mess’ again. I think ‘Aliens’ in this novel is a very good metaphor of that thinking. Orr made ‘aliens’ to make a perfect world, and in his ‘real’ world, he make aliens came to his world and he and they make the world a mess. That is, I think, postmodern dystopia. It is not an opposite of Utopia. Although they are ‘dystopia’, it is not ‘that bad’ to postmodernists, because they would refuse to retain ‘metaphysical’ distinction between good and bad.

I was flipping through Preservation Magazine at work and thought that this article would be interesting in light of our class discussion about Lathe of Heaven, utopia and Portland.

Though it is only an excerpt, the entire article is interesting in its assertions and concerns.

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.

I’m focusing my post on the Harvey piece this week, mainly because its content compelled me the most. Most notably, his assertion that “postmodernism can judge the spectacle only in terms of how spectacular it is” (56-57) while discussing “the loss of a historical community” in relation to Barthes’ theory of jouissance. My thoughts regarding this returned to America’s forced reconstruction of two national landmarks over the last five years: the World Trade Center, and more recently, the city of New Orleans.

While both are in still-debated stages of rebuilding, the debates behind those efforts seem to point to a discrepancy amongst certain circles as to what the motivations should be for their reconstruction, and I believe that the issue of how to recognize the historical roots of each through the reconstruction is what is causing the polarization between arguing factions. Both were emblems of different value sets in this country, and Harvey’s piece lends slightly to the difficulties that many have had reconciling how to replace them effectively (if at all).

The Freedom Tower, chosen as the replacement for the collapsed World Trade Center in 2003, has been a hotly-contested issue with regards to its functionality and design. What’s happened now is that a historical community (however short the history) has ascribed itself to a space and idea that never originally had one. While the original Towers were fundamentally symbols of capitalism, what happened to them tweaked their meaning to the world at large and to the city they resided in, and reconstructing them has proven to be an exercise in searching for the appropriate meaning, both thematically, and architecturally, for which the Freedom Tower will stand. Designer Daniel Libeskind has been under constant fire from various groups regarding the intent and goals of his design (Donald Trump wants it to be, of course, “bigger and better,” which speaks directly to Harvey’s “judge the spectacle” remark), and I think the reasoning behind much of the fuss is that no one is really sure what the new hub for commercialism should be. Is it an artistic landmark, a tribute to its past, or a functional headquarters through which worldwide business is channeled? The efforts to satisfy the the various aspects relates to Harvey’s sentiment that PoMo architecture “takes bits and pieces from the past quite eclectically and mixes them together at will.” It seems as if Daniel Libeskind is forced by the multi-pronged requirements of the artifice to adhere to a PoMo design aesthetic, yet held hostage by the fact that what he is designing has to find an appropriate history to respect and acknowledge.

Something different, however, is happening with the early discussions of how to rebuild the city of New Orleans, which, unlike the World Trade Center, carried with it an assured history and historical community. Yet many now feel that the prospect of rebuilding the city may only give way to the Disneylandification of it, a PoMo topic both talked about in class and discussed in the Harvey piece while discussing Levittown. He quotes Venturi:

“One does not have to agree with hard hat politics. . . to support the right of the middle-middle class to their own architectural aesthetics, and we have found that Levittown-type of aesthetics are shared by most members of the middle-middle class, black as well as white, liberal as well as conservative.” There is absolutely nothing wrong, they insist, with giving the people what they want, and Venturi himself was even quoted. . . “Mickey Mouse teaches the architects,” saying “Disney World is nearer to what people want than what architects are giving them.” (60)

So what to do with a city like New Orleans, where the “middle-middle class” doesn’t face the greatest challenge? Here is an instance where the prevalence of PoMo, history-erasure tendencies certainly may have a dire effect on not just the aesthetic history of a rebuilding effort, but issues of gentrification and socioeconomic displacement enter into the fold as well.

(On a side note, Harvey closes out his piece by discussing corporate and capitalist roles in PoMo art. the same issues are brought up continually by Kalle Lasn’s magazine, Adbusters, which recently had an issue devoted to this very topic.)

I agree with Ada that language is important in this text. As Harvey mentions, the relation between power and knowledge is a central one in postmodernism. Theorists like Foucault and Lyotard attack the notions of meta-narrative and meta-language, emphasizing instead the existence of a plurality of ‘power-discourses’ and ‘language games’. The individual is at any given time in the cross-section of many different discourses or language games, many of which are connected to specific (institutional) contexts. According to Foucault, the codification of such discourses (or systems of knowledge) is often intimately connected to the exercise of social control and domination within the particular context covered by the discourse. Similarly to Lyotard’s, his work emphasizes that those in command of communication are also in command of power.

In le Guin’s novel, the relationship between Orr and Dr. Haber can certainly be thought of in terms of a power-discourse: a language-game as well as a mind-game. From the very moment they meet, Haber has the upper hand. He is the jovial doctor, and Orr his malfunctioning (schizophrenic?) ‘jellyfish’ of a patient. The doctor’s knowledge of the human brain and of technology is what constitutes his power over Orr. The unequal power relationship is manifested in the lack of communication between the two characters. For the whereas Orr looks to Dr. Haber for a reassuring and clarifying dialogue, what is offered him is a one-way communication in which the doctor holds the power of the word. Orr is silenced from the very beginning, and the more powerful Haber gets, the more difficult it is to speak up against him. Not until his position is beyond threat of any counter-argument, does the doctor enter into some sort of dialogue with Orr. But by then it is too late for Orr to engage in a verbal power struggle with his doctor. As the end of the great experiment draws near, the doctor indeed makes an attempt to completely nullify Orr’s balanced personality (or what some of his colleagues would call his holistic adjustment) by representing it as a ‘canceling out’ of his entire person. In this sense it is possible to read Orr’s increasingly eccentric dream-worlds as the mind’s creative resistance to oppression.

The more in control Dr. Haber gets, the more totalitarian and controlling he becomes. Not merely does his position in the world greatly improve through the manipulations of Orr’s dreams, his physical appearance also changes. His voice becomes deeper and more commanding, his laughter hollow, and his whole character take on ‘larger than life-size’. Along with the ever greater sacrifices of innocent lives the doctor is willing to accept in order to create a state of “THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER”(132), these characteristics indicate that his ideology is crumbling while his thirst for power grows. Haber’s ‘benevolent’ utopian state, in which there is no more war or racial conflicts, is nevertheless totalitarian, controlling and suppressing. The final dream-world before the crisis is a kind of combination between Orwell’s 1984 (most of the legislation on which this society is founded is indeed reported to be from this year) and Huxley’s Brave New World. It is definitely a capitalist society: Haber and his WPC are reported to control 90% of the world’s trade. It is also a tough-minded society in which humans are considered Utilities (the HURAD), and it is growing tougher yearly. In this sense Haber’s project of restoring the world has only led him into the Foucaultian trap of “replicating all the multiple repressions of capitalism in a new form” (Harvey, 46). In fact, the further his utopian project runs, the more the dream-worlds resemble the dystopia in which the novel begun. Why?

To me, Orr and Dr. Haber represent two different world views. Orr represents a holistic view of life, in which the individual has a feeling of interconnectedness with the world, and does not seek to change it. Dr. Haber, who has “the quality of the will to power” which “is, precisely, growth” (128), is a representative of capitalist society and ‘progress’. His urge for power and expansion takes us (the readers, as well as the dream-worlds) back to the nothingness from which it started. The reason for this, I believe, is the same as the reason why the basic geographic and environmental circumstances stay much the same throughout the novel. By having Orr claim that all the worlds of the text are dream-worlds he created just as earth was destroyed in a holocaust of nuclear war, pollution, and over-population, and by never letting the subsequent dream-worlds escape the destructive ‘heritage of the last century’, I think Le Guin is making a conservationist point. Unless we check reason (which Enlightenment freed from submission to God)/ science, the human love of power will merely merge with the capitalist urge of growth and expansion to send us forever into slightly diverging – but similar – circles of death and ecological devastation. That is why the wildly imaginative sci-fi story is balanced – or has a dialogue with – the chapter epigraphs on Taoism. They function to reminderus of the limits of human knowledge and power, and to urge us to be at peace with the rest of the world. The link to Taoism may explain the curious turtles included at the end: In the I Ching, or The Book of Changes, the secrets of the future is revealed in the cracks of the tortoise shell.

im surprised how many of the novel’s themes were left out of this week’s blogroll (an advantage of getting to write last!). first, no one said anything about race. this is partly a love story between a white man and black woman. there are also strong undercurrents of the nostalgia le guin feels for the radical black political movement of the late 60s (SNCC, black panthers, etc). on the love part, it seems that by endowing lelache with a multitude of animal characters; a crab, spider, snake, and treating orr as a jellyfish, le guin is saying something to the efffect that love can happen between anyone, even an aggressive terra firma animal with a passive aquatic one. (remember the sharp divide between land and sea in the opening). certainly there’s more to be said about environmental degradation and how this plays into postmodern thought, as well as drug culture, etc… im looking forward to our tuesday discussion. i loved this book!

Some people have addressed the sci-fi aspect of The Lathe of Heaven. Jules begins with the caveat that she’s never really been much of a science fiction fan, as it isn’t a genre taken seriously by many critics of Literature-with-a-capital-l; and then Chris, it seems to me from his scathing critique, feels the novel is pulp sci-fi. But this raises the postmodern issue of the blurred line between high and low culture. Harvey explains that some feel “capitalism, in order to sustain its markets, has been forced to produce desire and so titillate individual sensibilities as to create a new aesthetic over and against traditional forms of high culture” (63). Chris points out the cartoon bad guy and how the hero gets the girl; and there are clearly other formulaic components present in the novel. However, it seems to me that LeGuin has co-opted a traditionally “lowbrow” form of entertainment to create a philosophically complex text, thus working against the traditional literature (and its critics) who eschew science fiction. She is using sci-fi aesthetics, but the novel’s underlying issues could certainly stimulate discussion among “highbrow” readers, if only they’d deign to read it (with an open mind).

I remember seeing an interview with Quentin Tarantino where explained that, in his films, he uses violence merely as an aesthetic; thus he’s co-opted filmic elements that have traditionally been used to satisfy “lowbrow” viewers to create some of the most influential and critically-acclaimed films of the ‘90s. As Dr. Sample pointed out in class, The Lathe of Heaven belongs to the group of books on our syllabus that one might take to the beach. Thus the novel appeals to a “lowbrow” audience, and indeed a less discriminating reader could zip through Lathe for some cheap entertainment; but the novel also addresses a variety of complex issues – from schizophrenia to environmental degradation – that a beach reader wouldn’t think twice about.

I have decided to post before reading anyone else’s postings because last time I became so enthralled in everyone else’s thoughts, I couldn’t fixate on my own interpretation. Sooo, if I repeat anything already mentioned, I apologize.

Throughout The Lathe of Heaven, it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all the different changed “realities.” For instance, towards the end I was confused about why the gray people disappeared, but the aliens didn’t. Or why some gray people remained, but for the most part all of the aliens were left untouched by “The Break.” I really don’t understand the significance. And if Haber and Orr could always remember the outcomes of the effective dreams, why was Heather so oblivious to it after another reality shift? She was physically present for two or three, so wouldn’t she at least remember those instances? If Haber could remember all of them, even after Orr effectively dreamed without him (in the cabin) then why couldn’t Heather? This doesn’t have anything to do with analyzing the postmodern relevance of the novel, but I was certainly left confused over these issues.

I also found the whole symbolism of the “onion” when describing Dr. Haber’s personality could also be applied to the book as well. The entire plot structure was layered, each dream pealing off… or rather adding on an additional layer to the already stacked storyline. A never-ending onion where it’s never exactly clear where the center is or how things truly began. Did Orr really start having his “effective dreams” when the world came to an end, or is that simply when he became aware that he was changing reality? Perhaps one of his dreams brought the world to an end, he just doesn’t remember. Ah, again, the postmodern theme of untruth. There is no true reality. None of the characters could offer trustworthy perspective on how things were literally supposed to be. I was also thinking about how the only way this book could work is through the science fiction genre. The author herself is creating an alternate reality by writing in the future, redesigning the world and the state of the country. The framework of Orr’s constant reality-shifting is based on a futuristic/unknown reality which itself is yet another layer, another transformation of the reader’s reality.

I also couldn’t figure out why the description of Heather was so over-the-top, emphasizing her harsh exterior, comparing her to a black widow. (But then her name was Heather, which bugggged me!) Orr liked her so he unconsciously changed her into someone more gentle and soft? Therefore he too used his dreams to make life better for himself and wasn’t all the time impartial to the personal results of the dreaming? Haber’s description was likewise exaggerated to portray a large, husky, overbearing individual. However Haber nor Heather have any of the actual power. Heather is helpless with the law. Haber is incompetent when left to his own effective dreaming. The only character with any control and power is the scrawny, small guy. Another level to the nothing-is-as-it-seems symbolism running through the novel. Nothing is true. Etc.

According to Hassan’s table in Harvey’s article, modernist theory centers around the mind and being as a whole while postmodernism embraces schizophrenia and coexisting realities. That’s why Orr and Dr. Haber can never create the utopia they seem to be trying for and can never set the world right. Why, in the end, when Haber works alone to try and place his vision of a perfect world on the universe, the present becomes schizophrenic because there can never be one, perfect answer for all. Why Orr keeps misunderstanding the phrases told him through hypnosis because, as the Harvey article says, there is more than one meaning and interpretation to every word, just as there is more than one reality to every life. Reality or truth, then, seems to be relative in the postmodern scheme of things. For citizens in Orr’s world, their reality is whatever Orr’s latest dream has conjured up. For Orr, reality consists of multiple realities and effective dreams. The interesting thing is that the backdrop always looks like it stays the same (same geography, president, basic makeup of things) which seems to suggest that while we all live in the same world with the same basic elements, our realities can still be drastically different.

Within the different truths Le Guin tries to come up with an answer to how we are to survive in a pluralistic world. Because of her apparent Taoist belief (I really know very little about Taoism, I’m just taking it from previous posts) it seems that Le Guin’s answer to the question McHale poses in the Harvey article, “Which world is this? What is to be done with it?” is to become one with society and accept that we are not alone? That we are all a part of each other, as the aliens, in some way, are a part of Orr, and that to survive in this world we must live plurally…It doesn’t matter what world we exist in, there is no truth for a singular being. We just have to “get by with a little help from our friends.” In fact, Dr. Haber is the only person with no friends, family, or loved ones and in the end feels so lonely that he wants to enter the crowds running from the alien attack.

I do think, then, that postmodernism is indeed a break from modernist thought and theory. From what I gather from the Harvey article about modernism is that there is one reality, one meaning that encompasses the whole of humanity. One “singular reality” that can speak for all society. The question “Who am I?” is an existential search leading from the singular past to the omnipresent future where subjects question their existence as a singular being in an ambiguous world that does, however, contain a definite past. Postmodernism, on the other hand, refuses to accept a “singular reality” and instead, “realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate” changing the “Who am I?” to a different meaning of “Who am I now, today?” It is different from modernism in that there are so many selves and so many realities that one conclusion cannot be reached since in a pluralistic society, there are many truths.

P.S. Karen is sorry that she cannot share her thoughts with you on this blog. It seems to have a mind of its own and decided to eat Karen’s post.

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?