Cold War and the Net, and 9/11 too.

This is the third of fourth time I’ve read through the Adams article and I’m still really hung up on the open vs. closed system idea. At first, I think I pretty much bought her argument, although cautiously. I was thinking particularly about the flow of information and how in Pynchon’s world it is overwhelming and intrusive – this leads to paranoia and chaos; yet in Yamashita’s world it is “designed less to entrap both character and reader in a postmodern labyrinth than to evoke the dense networking of people and goods in an age of global interconnection.”

The more I considered this idea, the more I began to agree with Adams’ assessment. The concept of, let’s say, the Internet, would have seemed incredibly threatening to someone like Pynchon in the 60s, through the end of the Cold War. Consider the earlier reception of Sputnik – an informational satellite perceived as everything from spy to death-ray – instant and global information-sharing must have been a terrifying prospect to those alive during the Cold War. Flash forward to the 90s, after the Cold War, and in the heyday of the early Internet and society had a completely different attitude towards information-sharing networks. The paranoia was gone and people, for the most part, saw the approaching global interconnectedness as a positive, rather than something to be feared. People sought out information, and instead of information being chaotic and cryptic (Oedipa), it made lives easier (Wikipedia!!!).

My main issue with/question for Adams, originally was concerning the effects of 9/11 on the ‘new’ era of literary postmodernism. I originally figured that it would have been a Cold War redux situation…in that it would have increased paranoia and a fear of global information sharing. However, while paranoia was on the rise immediately following 9/11, I think people actually embraced technology and information sharing EVEN MORE. Sure there was some techno-fear (and considering the amount of fear-mongering…I think we all did pretty well..), mostly of the shoe-bomb/exploding shampoo bottle variety, but consider the boom of the 24hr news networks, the talking heads(not the band), the marketing. And here

We, instead of developing a legitimate fear of spies or technological home-invasion (at least not from the enemy…possibly our wire-tapping govt though), sought out every piece of “news” that we could get our hands and ears on. Information (the open system) was our friend, it was comforting, even when it was scary, to know that we knew as much as we could know. And the Internet was the biggest, most instant-gratificacious (not a word) tool at our disposal. We were not, as Adams says “entrap[ed” in any kind of “labyrinth,” but rather we reveled in our interconnection. So, indeed, it seems that the end of the Cold War WAS a major turning point, not just in literary postmodernism, but in societal understanding/comfort with information-sharing and global networking in general. Not even a trauma like 9/11 could make us turn our back on technology/information.

Sure, even Yamashita illustrates that “California (or the Net for our purposes) is a nodal point where globalization threatens to erupt into environmental and human catastrophe…..But she also hints that, as Adams says “[It can] also [be] where people find themselves creating unlikely coalitions that might work to remedy these problems.”

Horray.

Freeways, Highways, & Underpasses

As I read Tropic of Orange, I was immediately draw to the highway images.  Thanks to twenty-four hour news stations, I have seen many high-speed chases down 805, 1, or some other highway in LA.   While there are a few chase scenes in the novel–Gabriel and Emi after the woman and child in a taxi; the Jaguar and the bus–this wasn’t what attracted me to the highways . Rather, I was draw to the apparent use of the highway as map in the novel, albeit not one that is easy to trace.   

Yamashita is able to have her characters situate themselves in connection to the roads.  Sig traffic accidents happen, the “NewsNow” van arrives on the scene, cars pile up for miles.  Many homeless men and women, such as Manzanar, are described as living under it or compose music by it.  Goods such as oranges and body parts are transported along its veins.  Each character could be placed on or around the highway, thus creating a map of sorts.  However, I don’t think the map would lead the reader anywhere, but would be constricting in some points and expanding in others.  It was this idea that made me think of the staircase in House of Leaves that continually alters and changes on itself.   The highway, like the staircase, traps and confines characters to enclosed spaces.  Such as when Emi gets caught in traffic on page 58,  “Doing the Joan Didion freeway thang.  You know, slouching around L.A.  Sorry, babe, but it’s hard to feel exhilarated going five miles an hour.”  Other characters are situated and sometimes confined in cars–Buzzworm sets up a semipermanent headquarters in a gold Mercedes (186), Mara Sadat does a live TV broadcast from “the open hood of a rusting Cadillac” which is filled with dirt and to grow herbs and vegetables (191).  At other times, the highway seems to stretch in unusual ways, “Harbor Freeway.  It’s growing.  Stretched this way and that.  In fact, this whole business from Pico-Union on one side to East L.A. this side and South Central over here, its pushing out. Damn if it’s not growing into everything!” (189-190). These images seems to link with Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” essay that we read many weeks ago.  He could bring to the table a discussion of the highway as a public or private space.  (I think a case could be made for its functioning as both.) On page 23, Foucault says, “We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside  a set of relations that delineates sites, which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.” Couldn’t these “delineate[d] sites” be transfered to the way we view highways in the novel–a way in which to organize our lives?

Another way to look at the highways could be to see them as another character in the novel.  Adams briefly touches on Yamashita’s humanization of the highway, “The great flow of humanity [runs] below and beyond his feet in every direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great heartbeat of a great city” (35).  Adams contrasts Yamashita’s anthropomorphizing of the highway to Pychon’s passive description.  As I was reading Tropic of Orange, I found that not only was the highway given human qualities, but in some cases it served as another character making an appearance in almost every chapter.

Immigration and the Making of a Transnational Hybrid Identity

Even though Yamashita identifies herself as an “Asian-American” writer, her literary work Tropic of Orange defies any specific cultural and geographical associations implied in that categorization. More than any other novel this semester, Tropic of Orange effectively portrays characters that have a truly transnational cultural identity. In one of the more engaging parts of the novel, Arcangel moves the Tropic of Cancer to the north, over the border between Mexico and the United States. This shifting of national boundaries obviously disturbs our understanding of the various political and cultural borders separating continents and countries, but even more interestingly, it challenges our notions of what constitutes a certain cultural identity. As a result of this “shifting geography”—which in reality just represents the shifting of populations—the identities of the characters have become hybrids of all the different cultures to which they have been exposed.

Yamashita is making the point in Tropic of Orange that the United States, whose inhabitants embody the transnational hybrid identity more than any other country in the world, does not offer its population (especially its immigrant population) justice when it comes to the social services that are available to them and how many political and economic choices they have. In the novel, Yamashita repeatedly brings up the issue of immigration. When Bobby recalls Rafaela’s immigration from Mexico, he considers other immigrants who try to cross the border: “Places ‘long the border everybody knows, every woman don’t get raped, she don’t pass. The price she pays. Next up from the women, it’s the poor Indian types. They don’t know the language, don’t know the ropes. It’s gonna be the border rats robbing them. Cross the river. Make a run for it down Zapata Canyon. Lose their money. Their shoes. The clothing off their bodies. Maybe nobody gonna see these folks again. Bunch come floating up the river. It’s a fourteen mile zone…On the other side the migra arrests 1,000 per night…It’s high technology with a revolving door. If you lucky, Border Patrol chases you down. Puts you in a wagon and dumps you back. But maybe you gonna be one of them gets shot” (201-202). When people successfully cross the physical border, they then have to cross other barriers, including melding into the American culture and learning the English language: “ ‘Do you have a green card? Do you have a social security card? Do you have any money? When you get there, you will be unprotected. If you get sick, no one can give you care. If you have children, no one will teach them’…’Is it a crime to be poor? Can it be illegal to be a human being?’ (211).” In “The Ends of America,” Adams rightfully notes that the issues raised in Tropic of Orange—most notably “the human and environmental consequences of transformations taking place at America’s borders”—are easily recognized by students because they are so pertinent to the current contemporary moment.

In an interview, Karen Yamashita explains that while she used the metaphor of land that shifts in Tropic of Orange, it is really the people who have moved: “The geography has changed because humans have created this transition. I suppose it’s fantastic and more radical to talk about the land moving, in terms of the artistic or visual effects of the book. But the real message is that people are moving. And that has changed the landscape entirely, because they’ve taken their culture and their landscape with them.” (By the way, this interview was very useful for me to understand Yamashita’s motivations for writing this novelà http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v2i2/YAMASHI.HTM). I can personally identify with this topic—maybe that’s why it’s so interesting to me. As an Egyptian-American I consider myself a hybrid of both cultures, belonging to both entirely, but not to either at the same time. It’s a very postmodern thought—that most American immigrants cannot identify themselves as belonging to only one culture. Similarly, even people who have not immigrated have a hybrid identity, shaped by transnational cultural movement of Americanization that has spread all over the globe.

Globalization & Transnational Studies in Tropic of Orange

In reading Adams’ explanation of the distinction between postmodern and contemporary literature, I felt the following quotation best aided my understanding of her argument:  “Although Tropic of Orange is similarly complicated in terms of plot and narrative construction [as The Crying of Lot 49], its formal difficulties seem designed less to entrap both character and reader in a postmodern labyrinth than to evoke the dense networking of people and goods in an age of global interconnection. As Yamashita represents it, California is a nodal point where globalization threatens to erupt into environmental and human catastrophe, but also where people find themselves creating unlikely coalitions that might work to remedy these problems.”

If I understand this correctly, Adams suggests that while both books depict an interconnectedness (among people, events, things, and places) that is both complex and ambiguous, Pynchon depicts this interconnectedness as a conspiracy which ensnares both Oedipa and the reader, whereas Yamashita’s book uses interconnectedness to display humanity’s potential to work together to achieve solutions. 

I agree with Sarah that Adams has helped me to understand postmodernism better, but I must also say that it brings to mind a conversation we have been having in my other class this semester, ENG 551: Literary Criticism.  We have discussed a smorgasbord of critical views of literature, and more recently, we have discussed the section in our textbook entitled “Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Transnational Studies.”  I researched the distinctions and connections between these terms for a recent presentation on a Jamaica Kincaid piece called A Small Place (in which Kincaid suggests that the tourism industry in postcolonial tourist destinations like the island of Antigua exists as a sort of secondary colonialism in which the binary between tourist/native creates a tension not unlike that between colonizer/colonized).  Interestingly, Adams references the following statement by Michael Denning:

a central task of a transnational cultural studies is to narrate an account of globalization that speaks not just of an abstract market with buyers and sellers, or even of an abstract commodification with producers and consumers, but of actors: transnational corporations, social movements of students, market women, tenants, radicalized and ethnicized migrants, labor unions, and so on.

Of course, my “ears”/eyes perked up when I read the term “transnational,” and I found myself considering the economic reading of Tropic of Orange as largely important to understanding (anything about) the text.  In my used book, I have notes in the margins from a previous owner that are, by and large, not useful to me except one which reads: “Traded goods, but not people–people do not get in” (scrawled on p. 230 beside the following underlined pasasage in the text: “Cuz is staring at her new Nikes.  Made in China.  Nikes get in.  But not the bro.”)  What hypocrisy!  We will exploit the developing worlds for its goods and its services, but we gawk at the idea of transnational experiences which will allow people in the developing world the same liberties we have in the United States.  Of course, immigration is a very complicated and heated issue, but why isn’t commerce and consumerism more of an issue?

Transnational studies, I have come to understand, considers the effets of the spread of English throughout the colonies of the British empire, as well as what Adams considers the “globalization of American literature.”  We cannot deny that the United States has been equally successful in creating some kind of empire that has spread the culture and language we speak across many parts of the world.  That said, our job as contemporary critics, I am coming to understand, is to not only incorporate varying cultural perspectives, but to purposefully consider the ramifications of a postcolonial world and a world affected by the United States’ hegemonic status.

Yamashita’s contemporary novel Tropic of Orange brings together multiple cultural identities, with particular attention to the minority groups often left out of American literature before postmodernism.  I feel strongly that her choice to incorporate the perspectives of seven main characters over a period of seven days relates directly to the cohesive quality of the number seven: not only are there seven days in the week, but there are also seven continents in the world.  As Adams points out, despite a very organized chart entitled “HyperContexts” at the beginning of the book and “although this map locates the central characters in time and space, [this chart] also provides a deceptive sense of order to a narrative that ultimately refuses to come together in any coherent manner. ”  That, I gather, is part of Yamashita’s message here: there is no coherent, cohesive, or perfect way to mesh together a variety of people and cultures, but it is certainly necessary and reasonable (and even unavoidable) to do so.

Tropic of Orange and Cognitive Mapping

Tropic of Orange was a very accessible read for me, so right away I knew something was wrong. The use of magical realism was charming, but that didn’t seem to jibe with what I thought I knew about postmodernist style. Adams’ article was very helpful to me in defining postmodernism by defining what it is not. She made a good point that the label of postmodernist loses any meaning it had when it is applied so liberally. Part of the reason I think we all feel so confused sometimes about what constitutes postmodern (aside from the fact that no critics can really agree either) is that the adjective is applied to such different-seeming texts. One thing I liked about Adams’ article was that she framed both postmodern fiction and contemporary fiction in more positive terms. Not only did she define postmodernism by what it’s not, she defined it by what it is. The “post” terms for schools of thought are somewhat troubling to me because they seem to define the wave only as a reaction to what came before, not as something in its own right. Of course all trends in intellectual thought are reactions to what came before, so it seems as if postmodernism should be able to come up with a descriptive definition for itself the way that other waves have done, instead of a temporal placeholder of a name. Adams terms postmodern fiction as Cold War literature, and contemporary fiction as the literature of globalization, which seem useful definitions to me.

Although she says it would be premature to label aesthetic and thematic trends in the literature of globalization (Is that a cop-out?), she does identify multivocalism as one stylistic trend in Tropic of Orange. I found myself reminded of House of Leaves’ multivocalism, but when I stopped to think about House of Leaves in terms of her definition of a postmodern text, it did seem to have the requisite “preoccupation with paranoia and conspiracy, radical skepticism about foundational truth and authority of all kinds, deft mixing of genres, distrust of received historical knowledge, and confrontations with the sublime and apocalyptic” (Adams 3). Tropic of Orange does mistrust the government, the army, the police, the newsmedia, but at least there does seem to be room for change. In a world where such acts of magical realism are possible, attitudes and ingrained cultural processes can surely also be extraordinarily transformed. What’s more, I did believe that the characters in Tropic of Orange themselves believed in the possibility of change.

It would be interesting to view Tropic of Orange, The Crying of Lot 49, and Adams’ article in terms of Jameson’s cognitive mapping. He decribed the alienated city as “a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves” wherein cognitive mapping should work to “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” It was the beginning map of the character’s voices throughout the novel that reminded me of cognitive mapping, in addition to Adams’ focus on the geographical spaces in the novel. But in Tropic of Orange, at least some of the characters seem to have both psychological and metaphysical maps working and intact. Excluding perhaps Emi and Gabriel, Buzzword, Archangel, and even Bobby (with his barrio surfing) seem to be sure of their literal and figurative place in the world. Buzzword in particular seems to be an activist on behalf of cognitive mapping, wanting people to get outside and walk to connect themselves more intimately to the places they live in. Archangel as well was establishing a place for his people. Manzanar perhaps is with his symphony establishing cognitive maps for those who can hear, integrating the different voices of the city into a coherent living, functioning whole.

Family Life in Postmodern Literature

I think it’s interesting how the chapters in Tropic of Orange correspond with the characters. I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s clearly another expression of fragmentation, but it’s odd that she outlines it for us in the beginning. It almost seems like a key, in the way that some of the information in House of Leaves seemed like a key. Yamashita is, in a way, telling us how to read the book. She organizes the information, it seems, to help us make sense of the novel. Doesn’t this sentiment seem slightly anti-postmodern? However, I’ve never seen it done in another text, so it is an innovative technique. I wonder if anyone read the chapters out of order. I’d like to go back and reread this in a year, but instead of reading straight through, I’d read the chapters the way they appear in the outline. I wonder how that would change the meaning of the text.

I liked this book, in particular, because it gave me some ways to continue thinking about my research topic. Most of the books we’ve read don’t deal closely with family life. In fact, their seems to be a lack of families, or a tearing apart of families, in most of the books we’ve read. Pynchon doesn’t depict a family and gives very little weight to the one marriage in the text. In House of Leaves, the Navidson family is figuratively (and literally in the case of Tom) torn apart.  There is one marriage in the Lathe of Heaven, but it is also made to be a background issue. 

We do see marriage and family life in The Female Man, but it is completely different from the traditional idea of the nuclear family. In Belovedthere are families, but they are often separated by death and slavery. In this text, family members never seem to work as a cohesive unit, but instead stay isolated from one another. In Mao II, Bill, Scott, and Karen make up a sort of untraditional family unit.  However, this family is also torn apart by the end of the novel. In The Tropic of Orange, Rafaela, Sol, and Bobby are at the center of the story. Although family members, such as Rafaela and Sol, seem to operate in normal ways, their are various abnormalities surrounding them. In this case, the family life is altered, not internally, but externally as the geography around them twists and turns from its natural state.

 Sometimes the aspects that interest me most in a book are not what it says, but what it doesn’t say. There is an obvious absence of family life in the books we’ve read.  This lead me to wonder – where do families (especially nuclear families), marriage, and love fit into postmodernism?

Help.

I found Adams’ article, “The Ends of America,” really helpful in my (still feeble) attempts to form a working definition of postmodernism. She seems very confident in her definition of what we’ve admitted is a slippery category: postmodernism as the “dominant form of avant-garde literary experimentalism during the Cold War, a period marked by the ascendance of transnational corporations, the upheavals of decolonization, fears of nuclear holocaust, and the partitioning of the globe into ideological spheres” (Adams 2). Here, Adams is referring to the sixties through the late eighties (I would say it coincides with the formation and then fall of the USSR). However, stuff like the “upheavals of decolonization, fear of nuclear holocaust, and the portioning of the globe into ideological spheres” is sounding an awful lot like what’s going on today (I asked someone who lived through the Cuban missile crisis why they thought we don’t seem particularly concerned about the prospect of countries like North Korea or Pakistan getting nuclear weapons, and they said they think it’s because our generation has never had that much faith that the world wasn’t going to end, so there didn’t seem a point to panicking. I think they’re right.).

 

So anyway. If Adams is arguing that postmodernism was a reaction to the “containment culture of Cold War America,” (Adams 1) it would seem that the postmodern “moment” is over, as the particular historical moment that postmodern was a reaction to is more or less over as well. If so, I’d have to say that postmodernism seems to me to be the quickest-passing literary “moment” I’ve ever studied. (Is it possible that literary eras are speeding up? Why do I have to use so many parentheses?) Anyway, Adams argues that books like Tropic of Orange (and I would say also The Magical Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death-there I go again with the goddamn parentheses) are not postmodern per se but post-postmodern, or, in her terms, a reaction to the globalization of American literature. But do we agree that postmodernism has passed as its historical moment has passed?

 

But moving on, I thought I’d write a bit about my final paper and the issues I’ve been having and hopefully elicit some opinions and comments from other people. I wanted to take the discussion about Beloved and sort of run with it-I’d have to say it felt like the one book on the list that had the most to quibble about whether or not it was postmodern. But now I’m starting to feel like Oedipa, because it seems that each article or book I read just sends me ping-ponging from one position to the other. I’d like to make the argument that Beloved is a uniquely postmodern book. Here, Adams gives her list of what makes a postmodern work postmodern: “dark humor, themes of paranoia, skepticism, and conspiracy, preoccupation with close reading and textuality, and complex formal experimentation…[postmodern works] can be historicized as a response to and reaction against…the containment culture of Cold War America” (Adams 1). Given that Beloved has nary a nuclear reactor or conspiracy theory in sight, and it takes place in a history as yet untouched by the Cold War, is it still a postmodern novel?

 

Well, Adams goes on to write of Pynchon as the definitive postmodern author, citing his “preoccupation with paranoia and conspiracy, radical skepticism about foundational truth and authority of all kinds, deft mixing of genres, distrust of received historical knowledge, and confrontations with the sublime and apocalyptic” (Adams 3). Leaving out the paranoia and conspiracy part, I think a case could be made that Morrison’s work exhibits the same characteristics

A Lesson in Postmodern Disorder

In “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism” Rachel Adams writes this of her students’ responses to The Crying of Lot 49 and Tropic of Orange:

Their responses caused me to realize that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pynchon’s novel [The Crying of Lot 49] has ceased to read as a work of contemporary fiction, even though many critics continue to use postmodern and contemporary as synonymous term.  While my students find Tropic of Orange no less challenging, they are willing to grapple with its difficulties because they recognize its form, which evokes the internet’s polyvocality and time-space compression, and its theme–the human and environmental consequences of transformations taking place at America’s borders-as belonging to their own contemporary moment. (2)

Looking at these texts from an undergraduate pedagogical perspective, this seems to be a fairly onerous lesson.  Even if pairing these two texts together produces a distinction within literary postmodernism, it seems more of a salvage mission than one of intellectual curiosity.  If The Crying of Lot 49 (or any text for that matter) only “works” for those experientially familiar with Cold War paranoia, “nuclear apocalypse, and newfound distrust of a government enmeshes in secrecy and conspiratorial activity” (2) then does it really offer a spring board for scholarly discussion (outside of: This text will inform the other texts we will be reading)?  Is it only possible for students to value the text after they have read a “relatable” contemporary text like Tropic of Orange?  Taking it a step further, are we merely teaching The Crying of Lot 49 for contextual/historical reasons?  Is it possible to make it more relevant to students?

Though I do not disagree with Adams pairing of the two texts, I am curious to whether she believes them to be short-term “cultural capital” or appreciating assets on the road to canonization.  Though either point could be argued, for the purposes of this discussion (as well as arguing for its inclusion in this course), I am more interested in the latter.  Though Adam’s experience with her students initially points to the texts as holding short-term “cultural capital,” this need not be the case.  First and foremost, a reader, even a reader as potentially resistant as a student, must have some sort of connection with a text.  Even if it manages to “generate a more precise understanding of literary postmodernism” (10) that lesson will be lost if it is not more than a simple history lesson.  Therefore, to make The Crying of Lot 49 relevant to an undergrad population, one must have an appropriate framework for discussion.  Adams seems to draw a connection between using The Crying of Lot 49 as a point of entry to discussing Tropic of Orange.  “These novels are an ideal pair because each translates the cultural and political dilemmas of its time into the aesthetic and thematic innovations of narrative fiction.  Any attempt to define what makes Yamashita’s moment distinctive will require different forms of literary, historical knowledge, and attention to emergent sensibilities that break from earlier understanding of ‘the contemporary'” (10).  I think she falls short in using the more remote text to inform the more “relatable” one.  Drawing from Robert Scholes, I would stay she demonstrates “the tendency to follow a line of ‘masterpieces’ until the end, [which] no longer serve their purpose.  It is not simply that the line is too narrow, though it is, but that this material does not reach student effectively because they do not know why they know why they need it. . . To put it simply, we much begin where we are, at the end, and start asking how we got here” (115).  Perhaps, it would be wiser to read the “relatable” Tropic of Orange first. Only then is it possible to spark the intellectual curiosity necessary to take The Crying of Lot 49 to task.

Works Cited

Scholes, Robert.  “A Fortunate Fall.”  Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter.  Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994.  111-119.

Databases as an even Newer Genre of New Media

I must say I enjoyed reading the Lev Manovich article, even though I’m not sure I agreed with everything he wrote. I think the examples of new media like the weather visualizer and conversation fit in pretty well with his description of databases as ever-growing algorithms of data that contain no narratives. While I can listen to people prattle on about products, there really are no elements of narrative, but certainly one would say there is something to these sites on a deeper level than just a list of links.

One thing I think sites like the “conversation” allow users to do is create their own narrative. An author is not weaving a carefully constructed story, but, rather, the user is allowed to take the elements that Jason Nelson provides and create their own type of story from it. This is much what Lev Manovich argues is behind databases as a genre of new media, but a lot has happened since Manovich wrote this article. I think video games have changed in a way so that they both serve as database and narrative, but what I want to explore here is how Web 2.0 has changed the way databases operate.

One good example of this is the “We Feel Fine” page. This is a database of sentences (and sometimes pictures) and it operates in much the same way that Manovich describes. However, in the current post-postmodern state of New Media, the user has become increasingly more important. The “We Feel Fine” database serves as more of a thief than an organizer of information. It requires users blogging out there in the world to write a sentence with the word “feel” in it, then it goes and steals that sentence for its own purposes. Not only is this cool, but the algorithm at play here would have little to work with if the Web was not increasingly user-generated. Manovich mentioned in his article that with the advent of the Web, people became data archivists for work or hobby. We Feel Fine is serving this role, but what about all the people out there blogging? Those people are not really archiving data in a narrative-free database environment. Blogs, while short, actually serve as a collection of narratives, like a collection of short stories, that is forever growing. Blogs may not always have character, conflict, plot, etc., but often have some of these elements, especially when people are recounting their day/week/month.

Nowadays, the Web thrives because people like us post to blogs and allow a site like We Feel Fine to continue populating its content. We post videos to Youtube and, in so doing, are as responsible for the growth of the database as the adminstrator who may be adding content to another site. While I agree that these types of sites still function in the way Manovich describes, I find a new and exciting element as well. Youtube can still be surfed out of order and the site as a whole lacks narrative, but each video posted is the narrative of someone out there somewhere. Whether you’re watching someone do a stupid trick or a mock trailer for Mary Poppins, these narratives do exist. And because of the increasing amount of user-generated material being posted, the sites now begin to show the human narrative. Youtube allows us to glimpse into all sorts of pockets of life and realize that the idea that there is no universal truth (a postmodern tenet) or one right way of seeing the world becomes pretty evident. I think this is what the Web does now. While each site may not weave its own narrative thread, we get glimpses of the smaller narratives playing out in the world around us every day. And in a sense, this is what books attempt to achieve. The Web is just going about it with a little more chaos and a lot more everyman participation.

Terrorism Vs. The Great Novel

I want to apologize for this late post.  I know some of these topics were discussed on Wednesday and some were exhausted but I would like to contribute some of my thoughts.   I thought that Mao II was one of the most interesting novels we have read so far and the most representative of what postmodernism is. 

Terrorism and its portrayal in the media is such a striking theme in Mao II.  Terrorism played such a prominent role, not only forming the novel’s plot, but also in influencing our society’s reception of art and stimulation.  The shift from traditional art, i.e. paintings, sculptures, novels, etc., to the media oriented “art” is an overarching theme of Mao II and a symptom of postmodernism.  I thought Delillo’s execution of this idea is insightful and impeccable, given that terrorism has become central to today’s media coverage.  I first thought that terrorism stood in as a metaphor for the utopian tendency to conform culture into a uniform society by way of unrealistic ideals.   I think Delillo is certainly suggesting that but I also think that terrorism is literally used as a social and cultural pervading revolution, no matter how disturbing and repulsive it may be, and that is pulling social thought away from traditional art and into a stimulated society.  People react to terrorism portrayed on the news more readily than say that of a novel.  The horror of terrorism overshadows whatever emotion tied with traditional art.   On page 200, Bill is thinking about the conversation he had with George on the terrorists, “When you inflict punishment on the innocent, you began to empty the world of meaning…replacing real things with plot and fiction.  One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself.”  This One fiction of the terrorist is recognizable as the utopian ideas that are wrapped up with modernism and other nonpostmodern ideas.  Bill sees this revolution as a form of subversion and a threat to the art that he represents.  However, at the same time I found that the terrorist achieve what postmodernists see as the end of the great novel and the beginning of the new media, the only force capable of changing social thought and beliefs – the revolution will be televised. 

Bill’s unfinished book is another aspect of Mao II that struck me as a poignant signal of postmodernism.  Bill is the reclusive writer, which as we discussed in class is a cliché.  Bill tries to separate himself from the society of spectacle, or the mass mind of today’s culture, but ultimately fails.  His book remains unfinished and modernism dies or at least stays unfinished.

I found the change of occupation for Brita to be the saddest point in the novel.  She has abandoned her work of photographing writers for the oversaturated and over stimulated culture of war correspondence and other bloated forms of media exemplifies the postmodern theme of Mao II.  She travels to Beirut to photograph the terrorist after Bill fails to communicate with them.  The irony of this scene is striking.  Brita accepts that the terrorist have replaced the writer, the traditional artist.  On page 229, “She does not photograph writers anymore.  It stopped making sense.”  Terrorism and new media have replaced the artist and have become the new art.  

Postmodernism and Video Games

I thought I would write about an unrelated topic to DeLillo and the criticism this week since they seem to be pretty well covered. I am thinking about writing my term paper on the video game Fallout 3 and how the game’s setting, gameplay, and story all immerse the user in postmodernism. This got me thinking about video games in general as postmodern art forms. Not all games are alike, but I believe that video games in general are a very postmodern tradition.

One of the first things about more modern video games is the mix of high and low culture. Games require brilliant coding and engine design from some of the top programmers in the field. Many computer programs, like the one I am using to write this blog, provide a service and others like encyclopedias and Microsoft Office applications allow knowledge to be assembled and disseminated. However, for the amount of brilliant programming that goes into a video game, the function, more often than not, is to allow the user to navigate his way through a virtual world killing just about anything he encounters. In a game like Bioshock, an incredibly well written story about a Utopian society gone wrong (complete with repeated imagery and themes like love, power, and family) guides the gameplay, which mostly centers around killing. I think that is one perfect example of what games are becoming capable of these days. They do not just provide stunning environments and the opportunity to kill Nazi zombies (Call of Duty: World at War) but some also weave fascinating tales, the likes of which previously only occurred in literature.

It is also worth noting that many of these new first-person-shooter games owe their creation to a game called Wolfenstein. This game combined two previous traditions and pretty much paved the way for an entirely new genre of game. Driving simulators frequently used the first person before Wolfenstein, but most shoot-em up games where third person. Wolfenstein combined the two traditions and some of the most popular first-person games ever (Halo 3, Call of Duty, Resident Evil) are members of that fused genre.

The technological aspects of video games are clear when one looks at the software and hardware design needed to create such complex worlds, but since the creation of online gaming (first with computers, now also on consoles) we have seen a new level of postmodernism come in. I can play a game with my roommate while we both sit in our own rooms because of online connectivity. Users across the world come together to play against each other and receive world-wide rankings in the process–a kind of constant Olympics where medals can always be lost. This has also allowed the video game space and time to become completely fractured. Games still have beginnings and ends when it comes to single-player campaigns, but with games like World of Warcraft the multi-player experience literally never ends. The game exists and the story just continues and continues. You may not always be playing in a game like Fable, but the time keeps ticking. So every time the user signs back in, their time frame has been fractured by however much time they have been away. They could leave a game after completing one mission, and rather than having the experience pick up again where they left off, they could sign back in a few days later to find a friend has robbed them of all their gold and items. A point in which they will actually move backwards in time because they now have to play catch up.

These are just a few of the things I’ve been thining about as I prepare to write my paper. Games have always been pretty postmodern, if for no other reason because of the inherent use of technology, but as games move online and become deeper and more robust, they are beginning to encapsulate more than just technology with thier postmodern tendencies.

-Jared

Writers and Dictators

Several years ago Don DeLillo archived all of his notes, drafts, manuscripts, correspondence and various other written material (up to 2003) at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, located at the University of Texas at Austin.

I’ll talk more about this archive in class, but I wanted to send you the link to a New York Times Book Review article that DeLillo had cut out and included in his research materials for Mao II: “Writers and Dictators” by Michael Levitas, then the editor of the book review. Presumably, then, the article had inspired some of DeLillo’s thinking about his novel. In particular, DeLillo had highlighted the closing paragraph:

A bleak prognosis, but perhaps no worse than that of a younger Argentine writer, Martin Caparros, who is 31: ”There’s a difference between the 60’s people and us,” he said. ”They thought the novel would change the world. We don’t know what will change the world, but it won’t be the novel.”

This pessimism — that the novel can no longer change the world — is something we’ll have to address in class.

“The darker the news, the grander the narrative.”

I think Mao II is a perfect example of postmodernist writing thematically albeit not so much in its form. While I do not think that Delillo uses a writing style or structure that is viewed as “traditionally postmodern” (sounds like an oxymoron because postmodern writing is supposed to be innovative and defy any restrictive rules of form and function), I do think that the subject matter of this novel is distinctly postmodern in that it presents the stories of characters who live in a postindustrial and postmodern world and are seduced by the metanarrative of consumerism, where media images are constantly idolized and accepted as representations of objective truth.

The novel’s recurrent allusions to news and advertisements on TV and the pervasive influence of the images they produce is really interesting especially as it relates to crowds and groupthink (in the end leading to a cult mentality). I also found the idea of writer as commodity both fascinating and frightening. Bill repeatedly shares his opinion of the “cult” of writers, and he admits to Brita that he is has “become someone’s material” (43). This view is substantiated by the fact that Bill’s identity is represented as a objectified commodity—in terms of what writings he has produced: “There were reviews of Bill’s novels, interviews with former colleagues and acquaintances […] stacks of magazines and journals containing articles about Bill’s work and about his disappearance, his concealment, his retirement, his alleged change of identity, his rumored suicide, his return to work, his work-in-progress, his death, his rumored return […] booklength studies of Bill’s work and work about his work” (31). With all this trouble that writers go through to publicize their works and yet remain reticent about their private lives, you would think that their influence extends far and wide and that they are respected and admired; however, Delillo argues the exact opposite.

In one of the most interesting discussions that takes place in the novel between Bill and Brita, Bill points to the destructive effect of the commoditization of the writer—writers no longer have the power to “alter the inner life of the culture” (41). Now, people can only be influenced by brutal acts of terror that “make raids on human consciousness [because] News of disaster is the only narrative people need” (41). Another really important idea in the novel) is when Brita discusses terror as “the only meaningful act” in a society where meanings and messages are superfluous and overwhelming in depth and extensiveness: “There’s too much everything, more things than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the one who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed” (157). In this seminal paragraph, Delillo points out to the reader a number of interesting questions that relate to this idea of terror as the only “real” thing in the context of media produced for the masses. As I was thinking about this statement and about the different characters’ journeys within the novel as a whole, it occurred to me that maybe Delillo is making a deeper statement about the existential nature of society as a whole—a person has to choose either to submit entirely to a higher power, or to a painful and reclusive life alone void of any moral direction. Bill Gray, represented as the antihero in the novel, clearly suffers from this lack of guidance as well as Karen who never successfully breaks free from cult; they both represent the resulting loss of a society that has abandoned this idea of objective truth. Hence, by focusing specifically on the metanarrative of consumerism, Delillo is emphasizing its futility and meaninglessness especially when placed within the grander and darker narrative of life and death.

The Writer and Death

I cannot help but think of Bill Gray as the ideal or romanticized representation of the writer.  As in Mark Z. Danielewski’s interview (where he told some story about beginning his magnificent first novel on a Greyhound bus in the dark with a flashlight on the way to visit his dying father), there are echoes of the stereotype (or perhaps recurring theme in history) of the author shaped by painful experiences.  Gray is reclusive (a trait associated with many famous authors: Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Salinger) and this sense of remoteness contributes to an aura of loneliness and exhaustion.  During his photo session with Brita he talks about the exhaustion of keeping up this writely seclusion.

“Maybe I don’t want to feel the things other people feel.  I have my own cosmology of pain.  Leave me alone with it.  Don’t stare at me, don’t ask me to sign copies of my books, don’t point me out on the street, don’t creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt.  Most of all don’t take my picture.  I’ve paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding.  And I’m finally sick of it” (45).

The quotation shows how he is fed up with the certain aspects of the writer life he has designed for himself.  He makes a clear distinction between himself and the rest of the world, wanting to remain apart.  There are people who get their pictures taken and then there are other who don’t want to be photographed.  The interesting thing is that he gives in, he has his picture taken, in a sense killing the writerly image he has made for himself.  Image actually isn’t the right word for it because I don’t think he’s very concerned with image.  I think he genuinely wants to have his depressing solitude, but he sees himself  and his lifestyle as a writer as outmoded; photographers and terrorists can do his job better.  

In a sense I read his decision to do the photo shoot as a suicide or perhaps the prelude to one (I have heard that less civilized people believe that cameras can steal your soul).  Afterwards he leaves the country and tries to help the Swiss writer escape from his kidnappers.  He talks with George about a possible exchange that would endanger his life, which indicates a desire to die (George tells him to get a computer to replace his typewriter, further proof of how Gray is outdated).  Gray travels to Lebanon a place of conflict (more wanting to die) and steps off a curb to be hit by a car (still more wanting to die).  Then he actually talks to a group of veterinarians about his “accident,” I think, in part so he better understand his wounds and he ends up dying more because he thinks he has/wants mortal injuries rather than actually being seriously hurt.  

That being said, sadly, I’m not sure what to make of this suicidal writer other than he may represent the every-writer lost in a post-modern world.

Mediated Narrative

sara flood’s post about how our experience of the world is mediated through and filtered by a biased visual news media reminded me of Googlezon’s EPIC, the concept of a future where there would be no pretense to impartiality and generalized information.  Such increasing specialization in the news and media we consume would seem to lead to increasing fragmentation of geographical societal units in terms of the cultural references we share.  Yet it also leads to bridging of cultural gaps among people in many different geographical areas.   Of course the internet has enabled some progress along these lines, but even Mao II, which is set before the internet became a part of people’s lives, foregrounds the distortion and authorship present purely in the medium of still photography.  Reality is filtered through Brita’s lens, through her decisions made in a single moment. In addition, DeLillo implies that reality is created by its mediation, that the hostage’s freedom “is tied to the public announcement of his freedom” (129).

Complicating the authorship and ownership of photographic images, however, is the chance that is always an aspect of their capture.  Especially before the days of digital previews and easy photo editing, when a photographer clicks the shutter, s/he is never quite sure how the picture will turn out, and has no opportunity for the constant crafting and revisions of an author of written media.  Gray thinks that “a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning” to “reply to power and beat back our fear” (200).  So if written fiction (and all narrative can be called fiction) is meant to add meaning to the world (although Osteen thinks Gray is being disingenuous), what is the purpose of photography?  Does the chance inherent in photography leave more room for a plurality of meanings than writing does?

With the addition of the internet and 24 hour news, has society been reduced to “blur and glut” where we don’t know whom to “take seriously” among the cacophany of specialized voices – and is the only one we take seriously the “lethal believer,” as George asserts? (157)  Gray states that on the contrary, the terrorists themselves are just as implicated in the aims and narratives of their own backing groups and do not stand outside the crowd at all, and Osteen adds that terrorists are not individual authors but dependent upon the media for shaping and conveying their message.  I was intrigued by the “mass mind” that Osteen identifies Brita as being a part of, how Brita notices that “everything that came into her mind […] seemed at once to enter the culture” (165). Terrorism was linked to both narrative and brainwashing, but what is its relationship to the mass mind?  Is the mass mind simply the consequence of our certain globally shared cultural references?

Osteen identifies Gray as representing the individualist in combat against the mass mind, and I thought maybe this is where his strange focus on bodily excretions comes from.  The workings of his individual body are uniquely his creation and possession, as “He urinated.  He shook the last drop of pee off his dick.  This was his life” (212).  Earlier Gray muses that a real biography of him would be a catalogue of his bodily workings – with a catalogue instead of a narrative, there is less room for others to insert their own meanings into the text.

Overall, Mao II seems concerned with different media of narrative (writing, photography, terrorism, brainwashing) and which is the appropriate one for our current society.  The arguments about the different forms of course expose the assumptions of the speaker about what narrative should accomplish.  To Gray, it should be the art of a novel, something “so angelic it makes your jaw hang open” (159), to George it should be the political change of terrorism, a “model that transcends all the bitter history.  Something enormous and commanding” (158), to Rashid it is the extension of the great leader by brainwashing to give people “identity, a sense of purpose” (233), to Brita it is a record and a clue to the mysteries she can’t grasp, and for Osteen it serves the goal of remaking social order by operating within that social order.

Jonestown

I’m fascinated by cults–namely what drives people to join them.  In high school I remember  seeing images on the news of bedrooms full of hooded dead bodies wearing new sneakers in a compound in California.  The participants of the Heaven’s Gate cult were instructed to take the “Kool-aid” when the Hale-Bopp comet appeared, thus taking them off the earth before its destruction.    Also during my early high school years, the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas went up in flames, killing 75 members. What drives people to join these cults?  To forfit reason in service to a madman?  To hand over one’s future to someone who values the collective at the violent expense of the individual?  For whatever reason, time and time again people are sucked into cults.  

It should come as no surprise that I was drawn to the cult element of DeLillo’s novel.  The opening scene of Karen’s  mass wedding ceremony performed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon sets the stage for the many cult references in the play.   Even though Karen later leaves the cult, she still is described as a deeply religious person who is fanatically devoted to Bill Gray. “If  it’s believers you want, Karen is your person.  Unconditional belief” (69). Karen openly and even wistfully describes her past in a community, but appears as though she is still living in one with Bill and Scott.  Together, Karen and Scott share the responsibility of cooking, cleaning, and even disciplining Bill.  It is unclear to me why Karen is so loyal to Bill. Clearly she trusts what Scott does and says and he brought her to Bill, but why stay?  There is something unusual about the part where Karen has sex with Bill on page 86.  It isn’t passionate or forbidden, but almost as if there has been agreement in the community that that is what Karen should do for Bill.  

 “Does Scott know you come up here”  

[Karen replies,] “Is there anything in this house Scott doesn’t know?”

“That’s what I thought,” he said (86).  Karen’s devotion goes beyond her housekeeping duties and extend into the fanatical.

 I understand Karen’s obsessive devotion; it is Bill’s that I don’t understand.  The part that I continue to have trouble with is why Bill Gray would go to such great lengths to conceal his whereabouts, curb his media presence and precisely time his release of a new book in the first half of the book, only to wake up one day and be persuaded he should drop everything for a publisher/friend, leave the comforts of his home, and enter into the international spotlight.   I understand having a political agenda.  I understand doing it to free a fellow writer.  I understand doing this for personal gain.  But all of these seem out of character for the Bill developed in the first half of the book.  I appreciate Osteen’s argument that Bill was modeled after DeLillo, but I don’t think it entirely clears of the question of motives.  The best explanation I can come up with is that Bill too was sucked into a cult: a cult of terrorism.  He blindly followed Charlie, George and Rashid, when he rationally should have been able to pull away or not get involved in the first place.   

More on crowds, writers, and writing

While reading Mao II, I felt that I kept waiting for something to happen–for the pieces to come together, for something to “click” more than it was. I was initially drawn into the work, but then I began to feel that the novel was a never-ending exposition. Additionally, it took me a while to get used to DeLillo’s style. (This was my first exposure to DeLillo.) The writing felt very stiff and the dialogue and interactions felt unnatural, maybe even unbelievable. (For instance, the scene of Brita’s photo shoot with Bill seemed awkward and artificial in an unnatural way, if that makes sense.) I liked how DeLillo changed the “focalizer”, but I sometimes found it difficult to keep up with the dialogue changes and would have to frequently go back and re-read sections of dialogue. I am pondering the greater significance of this confusion. Was DeLillo intending for the dialogue to sound like one voice, adding to his commentary on individual identity vs. combined experience/identity?

Now, before it sounds like I’m bashing DeLillo’s work, I have to say there were things that I liked about the novel. Again, I liked the shifting point of view, and I did enjoy the bits of humor interspersed throughout the text. Additionally, I liked DeLillo’s use of the prologue and epilogue to shape the narrative. (I am interesting in discussing the greater significance of the epilogue, though.) While I didn’t feel as fulfilled at the end of the novel as I had expected I would be when I started reading, there are definitely things I like about the novel, and I definitely have questions!

Alyssa brought up some great points about the crowd/individual pattern seen throughout the book. This was a pattern that I, too, took note of starting with the prologue. As Alyssa pointed out, Bill fights for the individual. On the other hand, Karen wants to blend in. Obviously, she took part in the crowd at the mass-marriage. She also seems to be drawn to crowds in the news and photographs. And she seems to enjoy the city. At one point when Karen is in the park she “realized they saw her” and this realization was a “shock” (151). I’m not sure that we could say that Bill and Karen are complete opposites in this respect, and I’m not exactly sure where Scott and Brita fit on this spectrum of individual vs. crowds, but it is clear that DeLillo is making a statement about the individual identity and experience being consumed by the idea of the common experience and identity.

In addition to the identity motif, I was also intrigued by the references to writers and writing. Todd made some interesting observations about these references in his post. Throughout the novel, writers seem to be held high in society-everyone is wondering what has happened to Bill and rumors have been circulating; Bill is asked to read Jean-Claude’s poems because he will carry some weight as a writer; the veterinarians in the restaurant seem impressed that Bill is a writer. However, the text also speaks to the weakening influence that writers have in the world. I also found it interesting that while the text speaks to writers losing their influence in society, writing is what Bill blames for his decline, saying that “it was writing that caused his life to disappear” (215). Writing may not have the influence on the greater population, but it definitely impacts the individual.

I also picked up on the idea of images vs. reality and how they can become one in the same with technology. Brita speaks of the “authority” of images and how they can become reality when she tells Bill that “the moment [his] picture appears [he’ll] be expected to look just like it. And if [he] meet people somewhere, they will absolutely question [his] right to look different from [his] picture” (43). This passage stood out to me and stuck with me throughout the novel.

Overall, I noticed many things in the novel which we had discussed in class (images,/reality, media coverage, etc). I look forward to class discussion in hopes of a greater understanding of DeLillo’s work!

Faultlines

I recently read Alan Sinfield’s “Cultural Materialism, Othello, and the Politics of Plausibility” for English 551 and I feel that it contains several ideas that relate to Don Delillo’s Mao II.  Sinfield’s article deals with how literature was able to attack the dominant ideology in Shakespeare’s time, the type of attack ability that Bill Gray sees missing from current literature in the novel.

Sinfield states that the elites are the ones in society that shape the dominant ideology.  They are able to create ideology by telling stories that are “plausible” or that appeal to what would seem to be common sense.  Sinfield also writes that dominant idologies inevitably contain “faultlines,” contradictions or instances of weakness that are susceptible to being exploited.  Sinfield believes that literature is a means for society to examine and confront these faultlines of the dominant ideology.  In Othello the dominant ideology that is being attacked is that a white noblewoman would be able to willingly fall in love with a black man.  It is not seen as plausible that Desdemona would choose to marry Othello, and the venetian nobles make up lame excuses to try and fit the marriage into their dominant ideology.  Desdemona’s father insists that Othello must have used some sort of magic to entrance his daughter.  Iago is able to use the dominant ideology to his benefit by telling lies that seem more “plausible” than the truth.  Cassio believes Iago that Desdemona would be more interested in him than Othello because that is more in accordance with society’s beliefs.  Othello begins to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful because it is hard for him to situate their marriage in the “common sense” beliefs of the time.

This theory would be in accordance with Bill Gray’s belief that writers were at one time able to shape the consciousness of the masses.  However, in the world of Mao II, and maybe our world too, writers are no longer able to effectively challenge and exploit the faultlines in the dominant ideology in society.  Terrorism has become the medium in which we question the common sense notions of our society.  Sinfield points to one possible reason why Bill Gray, and Delillo for that matter, may not see literature as an effective way to shape  consciousness or challenge the power structure of society.  The rise of theory in the twentieth century has led to the questioning of many differnt previously held assumptions, including previously held assumptions about theory itself.  If we accept the idea that consciousness is constructed within a language created by existing power structures, then is it even possible to conceive, let alone organize resistance to that power structure using the language it created?  Words and language are owned by those who dominate and any attempt to subvert from within the existing power structure is bound to be futile.  Resistance had to move outside of language, mainly towards acts, and more important the representation and reproductions of those acts in the media.

One possiblity is the Delillo is not actually saying that it is hopeless for a novel to shape consciousness.  He may just be using the novel to expose a faultline in our dominant ideology, namely that the novel is no longer able to effect change consciousness.  Irony is pervasive in postmodernism, and it would certainly be ironic to write a novel about the ineffectual nature of literature to point out how effective literature can still be.  It is also entirely “plausible” that I have gone off the deep end and am seeing things that are not there.

You haven’t been married, until you’ve been mass-married!

Don Delillo’s Mao II begins with Karen and Kim’s “mass-marriage” in the center of Yankee Stadium. The event, written in present tense (perhaps to maintain resonance through the text), questions the commodification of human relationships and the consequence of this process on the individual. As the couples walk together in lines of two, they enter into a “sacramental” assembly line. The repetition of act devalues the individuality of each union. One party seems completely interchangeable with another. In fact, from the grand stands, parents, mothers and fathers of the brides and grooms, strain to identify their own child in the crowds. Even “[t]hey [the bridal parties] feel the same, young people from fifty countries, immunized against the language of self” (Delillo 8). The individual internalizes this commodification—embracing or surrendering to it.  Moreover, it seems, in many circumstances, it is the individual that improves on it. Though Karen does not immediately return to Unification Church, she continues to consider herself a commodity: “…Didn’t he [Scott] bring me here for you [Bill]?” (84). Her question demonstrates her lack of agency. She did not act, but instead was acted upon. In her mind, she was “gifted” like a toaster or a Saint Bernard.

In like fashion, other characters participate in commodification (self-commodification and the commodification of others). Scott seems unable or unwilling to separate Bill from his identity as a writer. He discourages Bill to publish his most recent creation, because it will mar his image or perhaps more accurately Scott’s image of Bill. Scott feeds Bill’s image, even if it is to the determent of Bill himself. Bill is an object that may be manipulated and controlled. As Mark Osteen points out, the bonds of commodification are strong. Resistance may thrust you even deeper into its grasp: “Like the real-life Thomas Pynchon or the fictional Bucky Wunderlick, his very resistance to celebrity has made him one. Gray now realizes that his isolation has allowed others to manufacture an aura for him larger than he will ever be” (Osteen 649). Any action, a publication or a picture, can damage the soft-focus of his writerly-persona, precisely because of its lines and detail. Scott, electing himself brand-manager, recruits Karen to join in his game. Soon the entire household is a willing participant. As Brita states to Karen, “‘Go back to Scott and stay with him. You people belong together, all three of you. I think it’s a strange and sad way to live in many respects but who am I to say that something is strange and anyway you desperately need each other. I don’t like thinking of Bill being off alone somewhere’”(Delillo 183). Until this point in the text, the characters abstain from commentary. Though all seem to understand that something is going on, that they are a party to something, they are incapable of confronting it. Perhaps it is the postmodern at work, but Delillo offers an observation of a problem and no hint of a solution. The reader must merely observe the happenings.