Author: Jennifer Janisch

Authorship/Form in The People of Paper

This is the second book in a row that I won’t be able to finish in time, which is frustrating because this is due to a lack of time rather than a lack of interest. I still wanted to post on what I’ve observed so far, namely on authorship and form. Immediately–maybe three pages in–I was reminded of House of Leaves, per various voices claiming the page. In House of Leaves, Danielewski uses different fonts to distinguish between Zampano and Johnny Truant, and uses the appendix so that Truant’s mother, too, informs the text. We spent a great deal of time in class talking about authorship with that book, as I’m sure we’ll also do with this one, given the nature of authorship in these pages. Per that nature, or rather, structure, Plascencia distinguishes between authors not via font but via capitalized headings, columns, and chapters. Reading through this various authorship was, for me, not necessarily easier or harder than reading through the authorship in House of Leaves, though, to clarify, when engaged in Zampano’s text, I knew right away when the authorship changed to Truant due to the font change, whereas in The People of Paper, I sometimes made the mistake of reading a second column with the assumption that I was following a continuation of the same author from the first column. It was only when the POV in that column contradicted this that I was reminded to scan up to the heading to see who was speaking. As I progressed through the book, I didn’t make this mistake as often, for the form became more familiar.

While the various authorship reminds me of House of Leaves, the omniscient Saturn brings to mind the film, Stranger Than Fiction, where a character becomes aware that he is indeed a character. Certainly, Federico de la Fe feels aware of this Saturn/Author that follows him and Little Merced, forcing Federico to hide in mechanical tortoise shells, etc. The book falls in line with some of John Barth’s metafiction, notably in his short stories in  Lost in the Funhouse wherein the author interrrupts a story to discuss his process in writing the story or to otherwise insert some authorial information into the narrative. I had always disliked the effect this had on the story–that temporary removal of the reader from and subsequent insertion of the reader back into the text, but Plascencia frames his differently so that it is not a matter of interruption but a matter of structural authorship; in other words, the reader knows from the very first page of The People of Paper, just like the reader knows in House of Leaves, that this is indeed the way the narrative is structured, therefore you’re not reading a traditional narrative for twenty pages and come across a sudden, off-putting interjection by the author, as was the case sometimes with Barth. Mary Karr, in her memoir The Liar’s Club, writes a relatively straight narrative but for a sudden shift to second person in one paragraph in the middle of the book where she speaks to a man she had been formerly writing about in third person–a man who, as a child, had molested her. This accusatory paragraph directed at “you” stands out for me in the book because it was unexpected and it departed from the otherwise solid, objective memoir. This seemed, to me, to be the kind of thing that would’ve been weeded out in a workshop and I’m curious as to her defense of that paragraph.

I just wanted to note, lastly, that I was both envious of and in awe of the fact that this is Salvador Plascencia’s first novel, not to mention the fact that he’s a recent graduate of an MFA program and only three years older than me…

Off Topic: Quick Note About House of Leaves/La Strada

I haven’t finished Mao II yet but will post when I do. In the meantime, I thought I’d let the class know that I just finished watching La Strada, which is the film that Danielewski mentioned in the interview that Prof. Sample posted a while back (Danielewski took the name Zampano from the film).

So, it’s an Italian film from the early 1950s and was not what I was expecting at all. Actually, the character of Zampano was not what I was expecting at all, but I think I managed to find a couple of insights into Danielewski’s choice.

First, to summarize (SPOILERS): the character Zampano in the film is a big, muscular one-man traveling show, performing feats of strength, etc. He brings on this girl, Gelsemina, who has the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin and a face described by another character as an “artichoke.” She’s really sweet and there’s some lingering love issues but he treats her like sh*t pretty much and at the end leaves her in the middle of nowhere and sneaks off. Years later, he hears that she dies and finally, realizing how much he loved her, falls to his knees by the sea and cries–the first time we see him display any sort of emotion.

So, not quite the intellectual who might write of the Navidson Record, right? Well, per those aforementioned insights:

1) Early in the film, before performing this trick where he straps a chain around his chest and expands his chest to break it, he tells the surrounding crowd that “men have gone blind” from doing the trick… I think he said something about straining an optic nerve… I forget. But, as we know of course, Zampano in HOL is blind.

2) The guy was a drunkard. And in HOL, there’s a lot of references to Zampano drinking, like the slip where he talks about a character drinking and accidentally says “I” instead of “he,” etc.

3) Also, I was thinking about that line in the book (the coded message) that says, “Dear Zampano, who did you lose?” Of course, if you read the quick summary I gave of the movie above, the clear answer to this is the girl, Gelsemina. That was pretty much the climax/resolution of the film–how he lost her and how he realized he “lost” her. Everything in the film led up to him losing her. So…

… That’s all I got. Has anyone else seen the film? If so, did you make the same or any new connections?

Beloved through the Postmodern Lens

I, like the posts underneath me, had trouble locating the “postmodernism” in this text. In fact, when glancing over the reading list for this course before the start of the semester, I remember seeing Beloved on there and, although I hadn’t read it, I knew enough to be confused as per how it was postmodern. I thought this would be cleared up when reading it, however, but for a few points, I can’t see how this book is the same as say, House of Leaves or The Crying of Lot 49. I went back to the Harvey article from a few weeks ago to review that list he gave insofar as differences between postmodernism and modernism to see what I could dig up or to help with my understanding of establishing this book as indeed postmodern. 

I kind of found a few things that maybe the class can consider. For instance, he lists “Interpretation” under modernism and then “against interpretation or misreading” under postmodernism. So, of course this is clearly evident in a book like House of Leaves which is “against interpretation” because it interprets itself. But how might we think of this in relation to Beloved? I was thinking, possibly, that Beloved herself might fall under the “against interpretation/misreading” due to the fact that this unexplainable phenomena occurs as possible resurrection but there are also existing sources in the book that might propel the interpretation elsewhere… does this make sense? For instance, it is easy to “misread” or misinterpret” Beloved because she can be many things–a ghost, a resurrected being of her dead daughter (thus, the flesh form of the ghost), or the actual daughter (as made a possibility by I think Stamp Paid when he mentions to Paul at the church that there was a girl who had been held captive for the last eighteen years and had just escaped from her tormentor a few weeks before… or something). So, because the way the book handles Beloved, we might see what Harvey distinguished as the one of the difference between modern and postmodern… maybe… or it could simply be something open to a lot of interpretation and not really against interpretation…

Hmmm, on that same note, he mentions “paranoia” under modernism and “schizophrenia” under postmodernism. I was looking at the end of the book, in particular, relating to schizophrenia or the joining of the women. This might be too literal of a stretch here (or maybe just a stretch, literal or otherwise), but there is a certain schizophrenia in the characters–perhaps Harvey was writing more about the writing of a postmodern text as being schizophrenic rather than the content therein as schizophrenic (as opposed to paranoia), but I thought I’d throw that out there for the class.

I’m not sure if Harvey helped or hurt me in my understanding. I looked at Davis too, of course, since she talks about this, but she left me with more questions than answers (which is why I went back to Harvey). For instance, Davis even states that she is suspicious of reading Morrison’s fiction through the lens of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or “white” academic theory… (243) but later states that we should be wary of calling postmodernism a “white phenomenon” (244). She links the lives of black people with postmodernism by way of a complex historical relationship between black protest and liberal academic discourse but doesn’t really say how, specifically. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand the connection–what difference, for instance, does color make when it comes to academic discourse? I mean, I get the part where Davis talks about Morrison “deconstructing and reconstructing” history so as to “tap the well of the African-American presence,” and I know we talked about this on the first day of class–about postmodernism rewriting history–but I honestly don’t see how this book, Beloved, does this. So, it’s not that I don’t understand what Davis is saying, I just don’t understand it in relation to the text… you know what I mean? Sure, Morrison is “filling a gap,” or writing about people that mainstream historians have neglected to write about, but for that matter, so did Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States. There, he wrote about the marginalized voices and people who, also, “mainstream historians” have neglected in textbooks. So, is Zinn’s book “postmodern?”

I think that’s it… if someone can explain to me how the retelling of marginalized history in Zinn’s book is not postmodern but the retelling of marginalized history in Beloved is postmodern, that might help in my confusion….

I really really enjoyed this book; I just feel like I’m missing something when trying to read it through a postmodern lens. Oh, I wanted to talk about the tree/back too… if someone else can write on that, that would be awesome–in the very beginning of the book, I thought “postmodern” at the mention of this tree sprouting out of her back but can’t explain why and now am not sure what the point of that was (metaphor?)…

Oh, and geez, this post is getting long… but what did everyone think about Davis and her connection with the newspapers in the book as example of the gap between representation and reality? Did anyone pick up on this and think of Simulations? And might this lead us to a better lens through which to see this text as postmodern? Or, was this example as much a stretch as my Beloved as “against interpretation” reasoning?

MZD Interview

As much as I enjoyed House of Leaves, paying as close attention as I could to all the details regarding Johnny, Navy, Zampano, Pelafina, etc., as well as paying attention to the dense layers of “reality,” there was one layer of the book that eluded me while reading it that now I realize, after reading the interview with Danielewski, should have been glaringly obvious. I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t think once of MZD the entire time I read HOL. But now I’m wondering… well, the story of Navidson gives us insight into the character of Zampano, the treatment of and reaction to Zampano’s text gives us insight into Johnny Truant, and by the same logic, this work of fiction (as all works of fiction, do to some extent) should give a lot of insight into who MZD himself is, and that has me wondering if that wasn’t the point all along. I don’t mean who he is as a writer, but who he is a person… his history, his fears, his hopes, and in particular his relationship to his father and how it has shaped him.

I’m almost tempted to reread the book (ha) with this new layer, the ultimately real (or “real” or Real) layer, firmly in my mind. Hearing about MZD’s father, his childhood, finding out that the Pelican Poems are as much  MZD’s  (insofar as MZD writing them years before when traveling in Europe as a kid) as they are Truant’s (or were these Zampano’s poems? I forget) , made me realize how much of the book is very much about MZD and makes me feel like he was trying to tell me that all along through the story within a story within a story device.

I also found it interesting that Danielewski didn’t expect the readers to read the letters to Truant from his mother until after. In other words, he thought that most readers would wait to read them rather than stop in the middle of the Navidson Record to check out the letters at the end. In the interview, he said that there’s two different entrances to the text based on what you choose.

By the way, I also just added La Strada to my netflix queue, to delve deeper into the character of the mysterious Zampano who may be transplanted from another work of fiction by a different author, which makes the character simultaneously more and less real at the same time.

Having no had no feel for who MZD really is prior to my reading this interview (except that he had a somewhat famous sister), I found the whole thing fascinating. It really read to me as a continuation of HoL itself.

Book within a book within a book… and an attempt at Baudrillard

When I’m reading, say, Vonnegut or David Foster Wallace, I’m aware that I’m reading their words throughout the book, often stopping to think how they wrote a certain section or how they might’ve decided on structure or how ideas in the book might go along with the author’s personality or life, like how Vonnegut often writes of WWII or secular humanism, and how David Foster Wallace typically incorporates technology, morality, etc. However, when reading House of Leaves, which I finished this past week while at the conference in Chicago (I skipped a bunch of panels and spent much of the week in my hotel room with the book), I didn’t once think of Danielewski. He had managed to hide himself as author of House of Leaves within the layers of authorship in the book. Of course, I know that it is Danielewski writing about Truant who is writing about Zampano who is writing about Navidson, but in all of this, as I was reading it, the source–the original author–was lost. I’m wondering if this is what Baudrillard is referring to when he talks about the simulacrum replacing the original. I might be totally off here, since I didn’t fully understand Baudrillard’s piece, but it seemed that he was suggesting that the original is lost when the copies become reality, or something to that effect. On top of all the layers of authorship in House of Leaves, you also have the editors and the fake critical sources adding up to a sense of reality, since we generally see critical essays as analysis of something real–why, for instance, would someone analyze something not real, unless the entire analysis is a fabrication… does this make sense?

Whenever Prof. Sample asks if we experienced anything postmodern in our lives the previous week, I never had anything to say, not because I didn’t experience anything “postmodern” but because if I did, I didn’t realize it or didn’t understand it as postmodern. However, when I was in Chicago, I felt for the first time aware of many “postmodern” occurrances. For instance, when my fiance, Lucas, and I first got to our hotel room, we noticed that we had two double beds (which looked more like two twin beds), which was weird for us because we didn’t know what to do with this extra bed. At first we joked that one would be the “eating” bed and the other the “sleeping” bed, but eventually, we each sort of nonverbally claimed a bed. That first night, he was on “his” bed and I was on mine, and we were watching television. There was this show on and in the episode, this couple was forced to sleep on separate beds.  Lucas, as we were watching this couple in their beds on television, said something about how weird it was that we were sort of in the same predicament. But, what was weirder, was that the couple on television turned on their television and saw an old black-and-white television series with a couple in separate beds (back when couples couldn’t sleep in the same bed on tv). So, essentially, Lucas and I, in our separate beds, watched a couple on television in their separate beds as they in turn watched another television couple in their separate beds. My point to this anecdote is that I immediately thought of this class, but it wasn’t until now, when writing this blog, that I made the connection between that experience and the person writing about person writing about person issue (and book within a book within a book) in House of Leaves.

Going back to the authorial tone insofar as the editors and critical writers in the book, there were times when I became so engrossed in the Navidson Record that I gave serious consideration to the footnoted critics and almost forgot that these critics were made up and that the Navidson Record as source material wasn’t real. Again, I’m not sure if this is what Baudrillard is saying when he talks about simulacrum but it seems to make sense, at least in my understanding of the article. Or maybe this could be the simulation, the difference between “imaginary” and “real,” perhaps? But that would be the book itself, too, correct? I think, like the post before me, I seem to have more questions than answers when relating House of Leaves to the other readings for this week. Foucault and Baudrillard aside, I have questions just on House of Leaves–like, for instance, the aforementioned authorship. It had seemed, in the beginning of the book, to be as I stated before–Danielewski writing about Truant who is writing about Zampano who is writing about Navidson–but toward the end this authorship is questioned in two specific scenes; I won’t mention the details of these scenes for those who haven’t finished the book (but for those who have: the song that the band plays and what Navidson uses the matches for), but these two scenes completely threw me off on what I had presumed to be “real,” to use that term loosely, and I almost, briefly, considered rereading at least the first 100 pages or so of the book again. I don’t believe I’ve ever consumed this much writing in this short of time–I’m interested in what others have to say about it! And hopefully someone can clear up Baudrillard and Foucault for me. Funny how when reading these two articles, knowing that they were assigned with House of Leaves and looking for connections, it felt like I was reading the critical writers writing about the Navidson Record.

Science Fiction/Postmodernism and Harvey

 After reading The Lathe of Heaven, I felt more confused about what postmodernism is because I would have easily classified this as science-fiction. Let me point out a few things first: I understand that a lot of different texts from a variety of genres can be postmodern (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) just like you can draw upon different schools of analysis (like postmodernism) in relation to one text. And I also understand, since we’ve been talking about it nearly every class, how technology is a huge part of postmodernism—it interfering with or transforming our lives, it being seen as an extension of our bodies, etc.  So, I’m not saying that I don’t understand how this book can be called postmodern.

 

What I’m confused by is this: A great deal of science-fiction deals with technology in some way, some in very similar ways to The Lathe of Heaven, so where does science fiction stop and postmodernism begin? Like, take The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This book is very similar to The Lathe of Heaven. In The Lathe of Heaven, a man’s mind can change reality, and with the aid of a machine (the Augmenter), this reality can be changed more often. In The Time Machine, a man invents a machine to change reality and subsequently does just that in the world he eventually finds himself in. So, is The Time Machine postmodern? Surely, one can argue that The Time Machine contains the same technological interference and perhaps even technological extensions of the body as does The Lathe of Heaven, not to mention a similar notion of rethinking/retelling history. But this book is widely considered classic science fiction. I mean, science fiction really is, by definition, a genre that has to do with envisioned futures and envisioned sciences and envisioned technology. So, wouldn’t most science fiction be postmodern?

 

David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity cleared up some of my confusion. He writes: “The postmodern novel… [is] a shift from the kind of perspectivism that allowed the modernist to get a better bearing on the meaning of a complex but nevertheless singular reality, to the foregrounding of questions as to how radically different realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate. The boundary between fiction and science fiction has, as a consequence, effectively dissolved, while postmodernist characters often seem confused as to which world they are in, and how they should act with respect to it.”

 

So, it’s been a while since I read The Time Machine, but if I’m remembering it correctly, the main character doesn’t grapple with the same questions and complexity that George Orr struggles with. I don’t remember enough of the exposition in The Time Machine to really comment on the main character’s mindset, but I do remember it being a straight travel through time to a future that he eventually saved. This is, of course, not the same in The Lathe of Heaven, where all of these potential realities, to use Harvey’s words, coexisted, collided, and interpenetrated. Later, Harvey reinforces this thought by saying that postmodernists can’t “aspire to any unified representation of the world” but rather, that the world is, for a postmodernist, full of “perpetually shifting fragments.” This, combined with his earlier notes on science fiction, seems to line up well when distinguishing between modernism and postmodernism and thus The Time Machine and The Lathe of Heaven.

 

Harvey also cleared up the genre aspect, insofar as modernists seeing works “as examples of genre” and postmodernists seeing “a work as a text.” In other words, then, echoing my thoughts in the first paragraph, lots of texts, despite affiliated “genre,” can be postmodern. Oh! And that list on the schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism was awesome. I think that was exactly what I needed—something visual or straight-up about the differences between the two. By contrasting the differences, I’m able to understand both what postmodernism is and is not much better than I had understood it previously.

Signifiers, Oedipa/Oedipus, and Postmodernism…

When reading The Crying of Lot 49, I thought about what someone said in class in reference to signifiers in Foer’s story. The thing with signifiers, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, is that they’re arbitrary, at least, as far as its connection to the signified. So, Oedipa Maas is seemingly lost in this world of detached signifiers, struggling with clues and trying to seek meaning in symbols like the muted horn, or meaning in words like W.A.S.T.E. and the Trystero. She even says at one point, “Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity,” as if she recognizes that the signifiers should have a signified. I’m not sure if this is a postmodern thing, insofar as having these detached signifiers; it was just a connection I made to the readings from last week.

I also thought about the names Pynchon picked for people and places in this novel, but considering the thing with the detached signifiers, I’m now wondering if he arbitrarily chose these names. Of course, when one see Oedipa written on the page, one thinks Oedipus. The only connection I can think of now, between Oedipa and Oedipus, is the blindness. This comes later in the book, when Oedipa is drinking bourbon and then “went out and drove on the freeway for a while with her lights out.” For those not familiar with Oedipus Rex, he blinds himself and says something like, “From now on, go in darkness!” So, maybe this is what Pynchon was thinking when naming her Oedipa (and maybe there’s more to it than the blindness), or maybe he was just “arbitrarily” naming her. If he did arbitrarily name everyone, you still have to wonder about the names. I mean: Mucho Maas (I think that means “a lot more” in Spanish), Dr. Hilarious, etc. These seem so telling. But maybe that’s just postmodernism: messing with what seems to be there, on the surface, or what should be there, according to what one expects. Or maybe I’m just making an unrelated mess out of all of this.

If put on the spot about why The Crying of Lot 49 is postmodern, I’d probably say that it’s because you can’t figure it out, at least, not right away and not in one way. This explanation would hardly win me an A in this class, but it seems like a right explanation for this text. If written in a modern manner, it would leave nothing unexplained at the end and would have an apt conclusion—maybe not a satisfying conclusion, but a plausible one. All the little threads would form some sort of picture, and the reader wouldn’t be left hanging. But postmodernism seems to always have the reader questioning if what he/she read indeed happened or if what was presented as reality wasn’t actually reality at all.

muted-horn

On Foer, DeLillo, and Link

I thought I’d post in regard to some of the short stories while they’re still fresh in my mind.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s short story, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” intertwines visual media with text in an attempt to simplify conversations he has had with his family. The symbols ultimately stand in for dialogue and therefore complicate rather than simplify these conversations, at least for the reader who, if he/she has as short-term of a memory as I do, must flip between pages in order to decode the symbols. Thematically, this story works in that it reveals the complex dynamics of communication (and the futility, I suppose, in attempting to simplify it). And, of course, post-modernly, the story makes good use of mixed media and substitution.

I read somewhere that Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Weekend, which I had seen once a couple of years ago (yay for Netflix). I don’t remember the film well enough to have made this connection on my own. If anything, the absurd fast-paced plot made me think of Voltaire’s Candide. In researching “The Uniforms,” I came across a passage in Marc Osteen’s American Magic and Dread that I thought the class might find interesting:

“The story dramatizes DeLillo’s recognition that, as Steven Connor argues, in postmodern culture ‘images, styles, and representations are not the promotional accessories to economic products; they are the products themselves’…DeLillo’s prescient vision of terrorist manipulation of the media anticipates the themes of Mao II as well as the media savvy of real-life terrorists. But the relationship between the media and violence works both ways: the bombardment of consciousness by images is itself a form of violence.”

Like Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms,” Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” makes use of lists in the text. It took me about ten pages into Link’s story for me to realize that I’ve read her before. Another of her short stories, “Stone Animals,” appeared in Best American Short Stories 2005. The thing is, it wasn’t the author’s name that made me recall this other work; it was something in the style of the writing. I disliked “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” for the same reasons I disliked “Stone Animals.” I’m having a hard time trying to express exactly what those reasons are; maybe they’re based in my aversion to fantasy, or, on a related note, maybe it’s the nonfiction writer in me talking. Or maybe those reasons are the same inexplicable reasons I have for being unable to sit through many of David Lynch’s films (most notably, Inland Empire). I think it’s just that, while I enjoy the absurd, the bizarre, I need it to make sense in the end (or at least some weeks thereafter, when I’ve thought about it enough). I had originally been excited to read “Some Zombie Contingency Plan,” solely because of the title, having been a fan of zombie films for a long time (I even own The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks), but the use of zombies (as metaphor?) in this story threw me off. I’m interested in what the rest of the class thinks. Oh, and check out this blogger’s post about Link’s use of zombies as metaphors:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006628.html