American Postmodernism

I think for Baudrillard, Watergate served not to purge immoral and unscrupulous officials from the government; but instead it served to maintain an intrinsically immoral and unscrupulous political/economic system. It was a symbolic ritual. The Washington Post reporters purged and then revived a “moral order, an order of truth” (173); however, the truth (or “relations of force”) in this moral order are “indifferent” and shift and reconfigure “in the moral and political consciousness of people” (173). By denouncing Watergate as morally indifferent, even though the system itself is what is morally indifferent, the reporters serve to uphold that morally indifferent system through a symbolic purge and consequent revitalization.

Baudrillard also says, “Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance” (180). While he is perhaps talking about political power, I related this “signs of power’s resemblance” to the idea of conspicuous and competitive consumption. For example, carrying around a bottled water is not only convenient for quenching your thirst, it signifies your power: you have the economic power to not only purchase goods that are available for free, but you can afford to be concerned with your health, while members of other socio-economic classes can not; you also have the educational power to know that drinking water is good for your health. This leads into the selling of brands, as opposed to products, and this blurs the line between signs and reality: are you buying the shirt or what that shirt’s designer represents?

Baudrillard keeps mentioning circuits, for example he talks about an “uninterrupted circuit” (170) and an “unreal circulation” (172). It seems that a few of the authors we’ve read have mentioned circuits, but one in particular stands out, Pynchon. In The Crying of Lot 49, he says “the ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had” (14). Another connection I made was that, when describing San Narciso, Pynchon says, “like many named places in California…was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway” (13). Baudrillard describes Los Angeles as “nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation” (172). It seems that Pynchon’s world clearly corresponds to Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacra in that both sort of see reality as this abstract circuit of representations.

Hmmm. As I read these hypertexts, I was actually most struck not by their structure, but by their content. In “The Mode of Information and Postmodernity” Poster claims that “[l]anguage no longer represents a reality, no longer is a neutral tool to enhance the subject’s instrumental rationality: language becomes or better reconfigures reality” (60). The disappearance of reality is also what Baudrillard deals with in “Simulacra and Simulations”. But the ‘disappearance of the real’ is not necessarily connected to the disappearance of life, although in Hegirascope and Pax I got the sense that this was the case. The subject matter of these works (at least the ‘paths’ I found myself on) seemed to be communication (naturally), quirky relationships (love?), life and death, and the ultimate loss of reality. With Hegirascope I constantly felt like I was reading an updated re-writing of Beckett’s Endgame. There are poems(?) about the bomb, about a de-personalized ‘subject’ waking up in a place where he searches in vain for other people, about death and bones and Viking funerals. Others overtly position themselves within the postmodernist discussion of signs and reality, like the ones that talk about simulacra and those that mention Walt Disney and his frozen state of non-death. My question thus becomes: Why the pessimism? As the introduction to Pax points out, these hypertexts possess an inherently playful structure. This makes the hypertext become alive as you read it, which makes moving through it a fun and pleasurable experience. The feeling of pleasure, unfortunately, is destroyed by the darkness of its subject matter, which to me resembles a more modernist sense of alienation and paranoia. It does not matter that Hegirascope asserts that the electronic network (was it the internet? I don’t remember) will survive any cataclysm; that it in this sense is larger than life itself. To me, this only makes the whole project seem more depressing. Why do these texts have such a negative attitude towards the technology that ‘gives them life’? Why does their subject matter connect this technology with death by the bomb? (And aren’t these modernist themes?) There have to be (there are) more optimistic ways of linking the new possibilities of technology to the human experience. The fragmentation of the subject in the hands of technology leads to infinite possibilities, at least some of which should be joyful.

Just as a precursor, I don’t really know where I’m going with this…

When perusing the Pax and Hejirascope I found myself torn between feeling the need to realize the “genius” of this new form of “text” or “literature” and wanting to click on the x in the top right hand corner. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them…I found them interesting, I just couldn’t enjoy them for the “literature” they provided. Like some other people have posted, I enjoyed Pax more, but that was because of the flying naked (and extremely anatomically correct) figures on the screen. I found it hard to turn my eyes away from the people to read the text. I wasn’t sure which character it was until I looked closely and if I chose to look at the people then I missed what each character said as he/she said it and then I didn’t know if I wanted to click on him/her again. In the end I just watched the people for the full ten minutes and then read the text at the end. Sure, the text could be viewed as “poetic” (and some of it really was) but it could also just be random. Monkeys typing on a typewriter will eventually type Shakespeare. Eventually I might come up with something of value.  Ok, it’s not that random since in the introduction Moulthrop mentions that there are certain techniques to try as you “read” (click on just one person, click on a few and rotate their thoughts, click on people at random).  I do agree with Sigfrid and others, though, that Pax had a timeline to its journey and there might be what some consider a plot with the darkening of the screen and the changing facial features of the different characters.

Pax also reminded me of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books (someone might have already posted about this). There are a specific number of outcomes which are most likely eventually finite, but each person reading gets to create his/her own text while reading and there are many difference outcomes from which to choose. But don’t mistake that you are choosing them, not creating them, because they are already created or simulated beforehand.

I did note, however, that the impermanence and subjectivity of these texts related to my reading of Baudriallard. The literature of Pax and Hejirascope is never actually written down and there is no order to them. So when you play the game you are duplicating an “original” that has no original, that never actually existed.  The images of the people are representative of the “real” but I think they also hide the fact that there is nothing really there. Someone else noted that the people have names and look “alive,” but they don’t really have a back story and are not having those thoughts.

And I’m actually going to stop talking about Baudriallard now because, while I believe I understood many aspects of this article, I was left confused about others…especially the part about Watergate. Anyone want to fill me in?

Because it seems I now have to somehow form thoughts about hypertext fiction/literature that go beyond my usual, terrible wince, I spent some time researching the ethos and history behind it, and I found some things that I suppose might shed some light on the excercise.

I found a moderately enlightening essay (which says it’s "posted by Gary Hink" but I don’t know if that means he’s the author) that characterizes hypertext fiction like this:

"[it] is not text that readers comprehend by traveling within or throughout; rather, it is text with potential narrative that readers actualize through their reading sequence." (para. 9)

Basically – and this seems to be the the operative buzz word – the defining characteristic to latch onto as a reader is the temporal nature of what you’re reading, which means that instead of the printed text, which stresses "where" you are as readers (with regards to plot or physical page number), hypertext stresses "when" you are, which is a fun headache. The essay goes on to cite Sartre’s idea of "existing in the constant present" (para. 22), wherein each timed second is its own, independent of its preceding second as well as the one who follows (each step you take is the first step, etc.), and that since hypertext has a wide array of enterances (links), it puts the reader in a position of the beginning of the story no matter where they first click (same goes with the end, which Hink says happens "when the individual reader stops reading" [para. 37]). The essay cites Hegirascope an awful lot, so if you were confused or frustrated about your expected role as a reader during that whole experience (as I was), this essay should probably throw you a bone as to what Moulthrop and others are trying to accomplish with the form.

In a way, examining hypertext lit triggered for me a slight crossover to Jameson’s comparison of the Peasant/Diamond Dust Shoes in The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, but this may be a stretch. I’ll give it a shot anyway. Aside from the formal construction of a hypertext, its physical existence may somehow embody the "flatness or depthlessness"(Jameson, 60) Jameson cited regarding the Warhol peice. Conversely, the book, as an object, could be the agent "stressing the raw materials" (58) (with its labor-related attachments of printers, papermakers, booksellers), as in the Van Gough. We’ve re-applied this theory to many things such as TV ads (Nike shoes, etc.) as a way to examine the erasure of the labor history behind the element at its core; since hypertext is essentially something that could easily be a self-published venture, couldn’t this too be viewed in the same light?

Then again, this could be because I used work in publishing. And it could also be because it seems to me that hypertext might just be something primarily created so that cultural critics and armchair smartipants folks could write about it. It may be the only literary form birthed without the sole intention of the non-academic population as its audience. I’ve got nothing to back that up, though, so lets not dwell on it.

Regardless, here are some links:

See you all in class. Adios.

I found that of Moulthrop’s works, I preferred Pax to Hejirascope. I liked the freedom of choice that both offered in terms of the player’s clicks determining the narrative, however I felt that because Hejirascope was all text, it seemed less personal and connected. I liked that there were people in Pax, even if those people were simulations, they were simulations with names and sentiments (even if they are created) so it was easier for me to become more involved in the text. I also liked the fact that Pax had a sense of closure, that the screen began darkening to warn the viewer that the text was changing (like when you know you only have 20 pages left of the book you are reading, so the ending must be coming up soon) and then the screen announced the “end of the world, please insert token to continue.” This pairing of seriousness and playfulness can trigger the player to reflect on the situations he considers to be real but may in fact be simulations.

Moving on to the Poster article, one thing that I found was the discussion of the role of electronic writing. He says “electronic writing also subverts the culture of print.” It is true that electronic writing allows for easier access to the information (who can complain about the ease of accessing scholarly articles online). However, I still find it necessary to print electronic texts so as to have the writing in my hands and be able to mark it so that I know what I deemed to be important. When we were given this reading assignment, for example, the article was available via online sources so we did not even need to go to the library. Yet we were instructed to print out the article so that we can have it in front of us, with our notes and annotations. I wonder if the need for printed material will lessen as new generations become accustomed to electronic texts.

One part of the Baudriallard article that captured my attention was his discussion about work, that people work because they feel that they have to but the “scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production of work-real, has disappeared.” This makes me think Office Space where the main character has a job in business but ultimately is not producing anything worthwhile, he sits in a cube with other cube-dwellers and doesn’t ponder the implications of it until he is forced to come to terms with that missing part of himself. The main character is happy at the end of the movie as a construction worker, because he is actually producing a tangible good and can immediately see the effects of his efforts. Office Space is popular because it is funny but because it also strikes a nerve and people are aware on some level that their work may not be as “real” as they would like for it to be.

Jarrod – I actually thought your post was insightful, especially when you speak of the "regressiveness" of reading hypertext fiction. If we were fully centered rational individuals produced by the authoratative regime of print in the Enlightenment and Modern eras, we are now decentered skeptical subjects under postmodern computer mediated writings. If hypertext only leads us to the vague suggestion of an argument made by a web photo and an itune, the writing is relying solely on rhetorical strategies, the main feature of Ancient Roman communication represented by the teachings of Quintillian. Thus with computer mediated technologies, we are stepping back millenia. I also like the idea you posed with starring in your own fantasy film (I think this is what Total Recall was about), at least in that I would get that flat screen plasma TV ive been dreaming about. Actually, if a conglomeration of databases tried to write a movie with me as the star, it would basically be me sitting at my desk reading for like 12 hours straight. This movie would probably be rated "G," although i don’t know.

The thing about Baudrillard is that his writing is just simply poetic and amazing. However, his theories just don’t seem applicable to very many things that I can think of. Poster gives the example of TV ads, which by showing a busty blond with pom poms signifies a number of referents – beer, sex, football, etc. This, unfortunately, is not how TV ads work. At least anymore. Companies try to flood images of their products in our media/psychological sphere for exposure only – market penetration. Obviously, considering the recent demise of General Motors, probably the most ubiquitous advertised products on TV, the whole advertising thing just doesn’t work. Sales are most likely tied to "real" factors like the price of gas, cheaper better built foreign cars, etc…

While hejirascope lacked strict boundaries and order, Pax convinced me that it had a beginning and an end, and in some respects it had a plot. THe first half of the game was rising and the secong falling. This correlated to waking and sleeping, light and dark. Like hejirascope, the subliminal words constantly reappearing evoked death, terrorism, ecological danger, and epistemological uncertainty. While it is difficult to reach any broad conclusions about these texts, we can safely say that they are not wholly optimistic texts. 

After working through this week’s readings I shrugged my shoulders then threw up my hands in a gesture of defeat.  I am boggled by some of the work seen this week, and am also excited to explore the implications of my experience because these works, more so than any of the previous course work, seems to align itself with the reader(watcher) response vein of analysis.  I would like to look at the idea of control as Kira brought up in her blog posting.  Giving up control is difficult, having partial control may be even harder to handle.  In relinquishing control, we are led through different modes of awareness.  In working through Hejirascope and Pax, I was struck not so much by the work itself, but instead, how aware it made me of more conventional modes of writing and communication.  I thought about paper and pens and the fact that I couldn’t make notes in the margins of these hypertexts.  I thought about a typewriter and a letterpress and the red pen of an editor.  I thought about the work that went into my copy of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, and the way that I had worn through the pages, flipping from work to work, dog-earing favorites.  Sure, I tried to construct a narrative in the randomness and repetition of Hejirascope and I did try to focus on something other than the blinking eyes of the Pax characters, but was snapped out of the experience by the sheer awkwardness of it all.  My appreciation of these hypertexts and the analysis of their work comes from the experience I had outside of the texts, and the awareness that they elicited in my thoughts about printed work. 

 

I found both Hejirascope and Pax interesting, but in different ways.  Jarrod mentioned how limiting print/book literature is in comparison, and I agree.  These hypertexts sort of made me think of Choose Your Own Adventure books on speed or something!  I initially found the effort to untangle Hejirascope frustrating – I couldn’t figure out what all of the different pieces meant (individually or together), and I couldn’t find a tangible “beginning” to try to create “sense” out of the confusion.  Then, I had a desperate need to follow a specific track, so I could have some semblance of cohesive images because I found the attempt to hold five or six pieces of different stories separate and in tact, waiting for a continuation of one of the five or six, to be mind-boggling. As I followed the different tracks, I ended up trying to link to the next page in the sequence or waiting for the page to automatically advance to the (hopefully) next page in the sequence.  The difficult part for me was accepting that there was not a necessary sequence and that there was not necessarily a beginning or an end to a piece.  I found myself sometimes searching through every link possible to find the next piece of the whole, sometimes to no avail!  One aspect of Hejirascope that I appreciated, though, was my ability to go back to a page if the time lapsed or if the link I selected did not take me to one of the tracks I was trying to pursue.

 

Pax seemed to do the opposite, however, leaving me with a feeling of loss – like I missed out on something irrecoverable if I passed up one of the characters.  One aspect of print material in which I find tremendous value is its tangibility – the fact that I can hold it and keep it and remember it the way it was.  I was distressed by the fact that once the session had used the full cycle of allotted hours and phases and once I left the screen, what I (and the characters) had created would be lost forever in the great void.  What if I found the perfect combination of words, thoughts, and views? (I will add, though, that after discovering that I could copy and paste the sequence into Word, I felt a little better about the “permanence” of the words I had put together – and that, in and of itself, probably goes against the design and purpose of the text!)  I also didn’t like that if what the character added didn’t seem to fit with the poetic quality of how the other characters’ thoughts had been unfolding or if I just didn’t like what they said, I couldn’t erase it from the pattern.  Once the character contributed, it was there for good.

 
One last thought…I liked the description in the “About” section that described the ideas that prompted the creation of Pax.  In it, the author quotes John Cayley’s idea of creating “textual instruments.”  That description gives me a poetic and peaceful image of all of the things technology has to offer.  Often it seems that the feeling and emotion in people decreases with all of the technological advancements we go through (the writing of an email or IM is so much less personal and more anonymous, it seems to me, than a handwritten letter, or an e-text less tangible and malleable than an actual book, etc.), but the idea of technology making an instrument of the text seems to bring back some of the human touch.  When I think of instruments, I think of how any given sequence of notes can be played by an infinite number of people and can express different sounds, tones, or moods with each one.  The same idea then transfers to the idea of the text through the Pax hypertext medium – the same characters with the same thoughts to share convey different sounds, tones, and moods depending on the author/clicker.

I decided to experience Hegirascope and Pax in a very stodgy, un-postmodern way: I read the instructions first.

I read the introduction to Hegirascope. I marked the index page as the text told me to.  Then I clicked "begin". After a few minutes, I gave up trying to come up with some erudite opinions on it, and just noticed how I felt. Sometimes I wanted control, and sometimes I didn’t. At times, I let the model take me where it wanted me to go, and at times, I steered myself. What I realized after I was "finished" was that no two people could really play either of the models the same way. No two people would make the same choices at all times. So, each time a person played, a creation was born. The user changed the game, and the game changed the user. Each time, something unique was created.

I think that Poster touches on this in his article, "The Mode of Information and Postmodernity". In talking about TV ads, he writes: "The viewer is the absent hero or heroine of the ad. The viewer is solicited to displace him or herself into the ad and become one with the meanings associated with the product" (62). It’s not an exact parallel, but it reminded me of playing Hegirascope and Pax – the user adds him/herself, the model adds itself to the user, and somehow something new, something separate, is created.

Although the models are not meant to be narrative (as Stuart Moultroup himself points out in Pax), I did come away with the sense that I went on a "journey", as one might experience when reading a novel. I felt that there was absence as presence – because, when a user begins the models, what we don’t know is bigger than what we do know. The user slowly chips away at the information, making something out of fragments. Perhaps it is a bit like making one’s own "dream-dump", or mash-up, or some such.

Playing the models also made me think about choices. There seemed to be an infinite number of choices in the two models – you could choose to go to another screen in Hegirascope, or choose to interact with another character in Pax. Or you could choose not to choose. I’m not sure what this all has to do with postmodernism, but I think I still like narratives, though. When I read something, or do something, I have decided to give up my control and let the author lead me. Plus, I think I still like reading/experiencing things from beginning to end – I still prefer the journey that way.

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.

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

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

Given the diverse subjects addressed in this week’s readings, I really don’t know where to begin. Yet, given the nature of the hypertextual fictions that we encountered, not knowing where to begin seems strangely appropriate.

I was most interested in the ramifications, or at least the ones I noticed, of cyber-texts on literature. If anything, engaging in Pax and Hegirascope demonstrates that the book itself is a technology with limitations and advantages of its own. In fact, hypertextual literature, in many ways, seems to be as large of a regression as a technological advance. The audience interaction, lack of a clear ending or beginning, and the constant digressive nature of the narrative structure are closer to an oral tradition than one of print. In fact, everything that makes hypertextual literature different than print seems to stem from story telling before the advent of the printing press. This begs the question, what advantage, or new dimensions, does computer technology bring to story telling. Don’t we miss narratives? I can see the benefits in terms of information dissemination (i.e. hypertextual links in an encyclopedic definition) but does it add anything to a piece of fiction beyond gimmicks?

To answer my own question, I found the unique use of the word/text combo in Pax to be especially interesting. I don’t know that I cared for that particular piece, but the idea of interactive moving images seems to be a promising avenue. Perhaps a hypertextual version of "The Sims," where many characters are participating in a single story that display multiple, yet unique, perspectives with the click of a mouse. To combine this discussion with the topics addressed by Poster, the coupling of fiction with databases filled with personal information may very well be the future of storytelling. A simple glance at the cache of any person’s computer should reveal, not only topic preferences, but spending habits, favorites sport teams, and even sexual preferences. Imagine personalized fictions that could pander to the reader’s desires, interrupted by commercials for their favorite products. Perhaps this could be taken to the next level. They are adding microchips into the tags of clothing to track consumer habits. Couldn’t this be linked to a fiction, one starring the reader, set in the stores that the reader visited that very day? The possibilities are endless.

This has to be my single most incoherent and ridiculous post I have written to date. I didn’t even mention Baudrillard. Perhaps if I added a hypertextual link, it wouldn’t seem so idiotic.

Our discussion on Dream Jungle ranged far and wide (which is not unusual, I know), and it might be instructive to offer up a brief synthesis of some of the major ideas we talked about, which are still sticking to me a few days later.

Beginning with the end of class, I want to highlight the point Sigfrid made about Zamora’s bookend voice. He seems to have the last word (which is his "right" as the conquistador and discoverer), and that idea seems obvious enough. Hagedorn’s twist is to have everyone (but us) ignore Zamora’s final words, rendering them powerless. Hagedorn seems to be suggesting that there is an end in sight of (post)colonization; the conquistadors won’t be around forever, even if they like to think so.

Next, I want to emphasize that there is indeed a network of hidden connections between the novel’s two main threads: the discovery of the lost tribe and the filming of the Vietnam War movie. Both are distractions (for the characters, for the governments, for the press, but hopefully not for the reader) from more pressing, more real world issues. Both involve the commercialization and commodification of social problems that trivialize "authentic" experience. And both occupy the space of fantasy, for both are projections of a colonizer onto an alien Other. Regardless of whether or not they are a hoax, the Taobo bear the burden of Zamora’s — and later, the world’s –dream of the "noble savage." Likewise, the setting of and extras from Napalm Sunset are recast by the dreamer Tony Pierce as a simulated version of Vietnam (and, as we saw in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, Hagedorn’s version of events mirrors and critiques this process).

Also, on the subject of dreams, remember that I mentioned Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s 1939 incendiary satire of Hollywood. A crucial moment in the novel occurs when the protagonist, Tod Hackett, stumbles upon a heaping pile of discarded studio props and set pieces on a studio backlot. Amidst the sound stages of a dozen in-progress film productions — littered with cellophane waterfalls, celluloid swans, fake adobe forts, mock Dutch windmills, and a hundred other pieces of simulacra — Hackett witnesses a ten-ton truck dumping another load onto the pile, and he marvels that "the dump grew continually, for there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath, and paint" (132). Hackett later calls this ten-acre field of Hollywood trash a "dream dump."

I want to propose that Hagedorn (who is most certainly aware of West’s novel) is playing with this idea of a "dream dump" in the "dream jungle." For Tony Pierce and the Americans, the jungle becomes a gigantic dumping ground for their own fantasies — either to act out on a grand scale, as with the epic film, or on a smaller, personal scale, as with Vince Moody falling "in love" with his exotic Asian girl. 

A final point: you may have noticed that several times I asked us to think through the cultural significance of certain things — the image of a helicopter, for example, or the idea of a tiger, both in and outside of the novel. This is frequently one of my interpretive strategies: picking up on a key material object in the text and reflecting on the cultural value of that object in the real world, then exploring how the author plays with or critiques that dominant imagery. This approach doesn’t work for every writer or every text (The Lathe of Heaven, for instance, doesn’t yield many suggestive objects). In a few weeks we’ll see that DeLillo focuses much of his attention on things — daily life objects that we usually take for granted, but which are imbued with hidden cultural values and assumptions. Hagedorn works in the same mode. Helicopters and tigers, granted, are not objects we encounter every day, but they are common enough images that they don’t stand out. They become part of our background noise. And writers like Hagedorn and DeLillo often masterfully foreground these objects and call attention to the values and purposes behind these objects.

It’s a narrative move I call breaking the spell of the ordinary, alienating the most quotidian of events, situations, and things from their accepted contexts. Keep this in mind as we read the final texts of the semester — you’re sure to see it at work.