American Postmodernism – Page 7 – ENGL 660 // George Mason University

Layering Signifiers, Space, and “Reality” in House of Leaves

Before I get into my fragmented points about signifiers, space, and “reality” (vs. simulation) in House of Leaves, I wanted to add to Sara’s point about absence in the book. I noticed that the “narrator,” if we can call him that, is named “Truant” which can be used (in the noun form) to mean “one who is absent without permission” or “one who shirks off responsibility” (www.dictionary.com). Obviously, both definitions incite conversation (given Truant’s sometimes less-than-responsible behavior), but in terms of a conversation on absence, Truant serves as both the signifier and the signified: he conveys the message, and he himself is the message. Truant tells Zampano’s story (which has Zampano telling Navidson’s story), so he serves as one signifer for another signifier. Then, his name reflects the absence in the story he is telling; the message of absence is, ironically, present in the narrator’s name.

Along with several other posts, I was fascinated by the layering of this story; not only is the narrator telling Zampano’s story who’s telling Navidson’s story, but also, the story is a fragmented novel about a fragmented story about a fragmented film. The layering of media, or signifiers, really strikes me as Postmodern. Foucault explains in “Of Other Spaces” that a train “is something through which one goes,.. something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by” (24). In the same sense, House of Leaves presents, what Foucault calls “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). The multi-layered signifiers demonstrate the relationship between each story, but interweave to create a fragmentary and, at the same time, mirrored experience. Truant becomes so engrossed in Zampano’s story (at least by p. 79, we know something of this) that he, too, becomes somewhat agoraphobic and paranoid; Zampano’s reality becomes Truant’s reality. (We can speak of “reality” next, in relation to Baudrillard’s article.) Even before the transference between the living Truant and the dead Zampano, we have reason to believe that Zampano has experienced some of the same obsession with space and reality that Navidson had. As far as I am in the book, I feel ill-equipped to go further with the analysis of transference and multi-layered signifiers, but let me try to assess Baudrillard’s argument on “simulation” and “reality.”

Baudrillard writes, “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible” and this: “Simulation is infinitely more dangerous [than transgression and violence] since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing than a simulation” (177). When I read that, I immediately considered what we know of the suddenly-appearing hallway in Navidson’s film. (I say “film” because I think we must always consider that “reality” is mediated by a signifier, and thus may not be reality at all.) I wondered whether, at page 79, whether we are right to question the reality of the story. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve already been terrified a few times by Danielewski’s story (let’s do give him a little credit since, really, it is his story, and not Navidson’s or Zampano’s or Truant’s), but it could be that we are really reading a “simulation” of reality. This is, after all, someone’s film; dare we remember the “true” story that was The Blair Witch Project. In any case, I think Baudrillard is relevant in reminding us, at this early stage of our reading, that there is no clear demarcation between what is real and what is imagined; in fact, there may be nothing that is “real” anymore. Law and order have been lost in 1/4 of an inch, or whatever the measurement turns out to be.

And yet, the imagined space is terrifying. We do not believe the “always” as little Daisy calls them could possibly open up and envelop Navidson as they do, and the “growl,” what is that? A monster? Come on now, Danielewski. And yet, and yet, I am shakin’ in my boots. The imagined has taken the place of the real, it has effectively inhabited multiple spaces through multiple signifiers, and it has done so in a positively disturbing way.

ISO Orphan Annie Secret Society Decoder Pin

When approaching a text as markedly enigmatic as House of Leaves, I am reminded of a climatic moment from “A Christmas Story.” To set scene, we find Ralphie racing into his parents home, package in hand. After weeks of fastidiously checking the mail, it (finally!) arrives. The Orphan Annie Secret Society Decoder Pin. Ralphie, rapt with anticipation at the prospect of decoding his first Orphan Annie secret message, scurries up the stairs of his parents’ home to lock himself away in the bathroom. He will need complete solace to complete the serious task at hand.

It could be said that reading House of Leaves requires a similar form of dedicated concentration and blind enthusiasm. 79 pages into the book there’s no telling what the message will be or if the efforts will be worthwhile. The dual texts intersect at (seemingly) random times, interrupting each other with hiccups, rants, and footnotes. The two narratives differ in tone, the former a confessional, the latter a journalistic/scholarly voice. In conjunction with the introduction, the layering of the two voices manages to both undermine and augment the authenticity of the story. The fact and fiction are used interchangeably, ad nauseum. Danielewski invents various citations, placing them alongside of actual documents. At one point in the text he quotes from Borges’ “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.” To this he appends another citation, citing Menard as if he were an actual person [he is not]. He then compares the real quotation with the faux one in an effort to support Zampanò’s echo theory. How are we to read this occurrence?[1] Is the reader to suspend belief throughout, marry fact and fiction and trust that the author will provide the tools necessary to digest the text? Or is the reader to look to points such as these and use them as evidence to dismiss/ignore the echo theory? Or does the author assume that the reader won’t recognize the inconsistency or, if he does, won’t place any importance on it? At this point in the text, there’s no way to know what the right answer is, instead we must pick a path and move forward. If we are wrong, we can only hope that the desire to understand the text fully will compel us to revisit it. As Borges notes, “Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”[2]

But will we reread? Given where we are at page 79, we must admit the potential necessity. Are the narratives compelling enough to revisit concomitantly or will we find ourselves skimming through passages looking for breadcrumbs? Will we end up scouring the internet in attempt to circumnavigate a tiresome task? Or will we find the drive to master the text, embracing it fully, perhaps even creating our own footnotes and appendices? Or, like Ralphie, will all our efforts be repaid by a simple: “Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine”?

[1] Must we send away for a Secret Society Decoder Pin?

[2] Borges, Jorge. “A Weary Man’s Utopia.” The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 2007

The Absence of…

Maybe it’s a copout to focus on absence, because what novel has everything? House of Leaves, however, seems to delight in its own absences, and furthermore build upon them. The absence of ¼”, for example, sets the obsession with space rolling. The whole phenomenon described is that of impossibility, that of the house being bigger than itself, or at least not easily contained.

And one of the biggest absences is that of a complete story. While the supposed narrators supposedly make every attempt possible to leave in everything and cite all sources, we can’t help but notice the absence of, say, the movie itself. Truant says plainly that many of the footnotes aren’t even accurate and that one of them is covered by an ink stain and others unintelligible. You get both the detailed analysis of a movie you’ll never see by an unreliable dead blind man, and the reactions of a slowly maddening Truant by way of disjointed footnotes. There’s this whole question of authenticity, noted upfront on page 3, which brings in the idea of artifice vs. reality. Even the introduction is written by a fictional person. The book seems to pretty much be a self-proclaimed fraud drenched in painstaking details to deny its fraudulence.

Here we have a photographer/moviemaker, a person skilled at manipulating light and space in order to “capture reality.” Someone in the book mentions Escher at some point, and I’m reminded of anamorphosis, that weird process of playing with perspective to create space that isn’t there. Take, for example, the St. Ignatius church in Italy, where the dome is painted so as to appear, when you’re standing at a certain point on the floor, to exist. Really the church ceiling is flat on the outside:

There is also the famous Ames room, an optical illusion where part of a room extends further than it appears, so when two people stand on either side of it, one looks tiny and the other like a giant. This is an illusion. Observe the creepy children:

Anamorphosis is a centuries-old technique (if I remember right, it started as a way to obscure political cartoons from kings), and has practical purposes (arrows and directions drawn on streets are distorted so as to look normal from a driver approaching in a car). It shows up in film, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Jim Carrey as a disproportional child under a table). It’s also used in sidewalk art:

Product placement!

Getting back to absence, I’d just like to point out there seems to be absence of feeling, especially with Karen (“she has no room for him” p. 12), and Navidson’s and Truant’s absent childhood families which supposedly lead to an absence of love and conflicted emotions later on.

There is also an absence of grammar. I realize that’s a bad segue. But seriously. Errors occur most often in Truant’s footnotes. For example, he keeps saying “I should of..” or “I could of”. While these seem to imply he’s just not a grammarian or that the “editors” hesitate to lose the contrived authenticity of the thing, there are also those which seem more intentional.

On page 31, Zampanó gets flowery about coffee spilling over until there is “nothing more than a brown blot on the morning paper” and then Truant footnotes it, saying the passage is unnecessary but left in so as to avoid absences, keep it authentic. However, Truant misspells morning, saying instead: “Easily that whole bit from ‘coffee arcing tragically’ down to ‘the mourning paper’ could have been cut.” Not only does the substitution of mourning for morning seem intentional, but it also serves to target Truant as unreliable (not that his drug-infused rants and ramblings don’t already do so).

There are at least two places where the word “pieces” is represented with “pisces.” What is this about? On page 41, Zampano’s talking about Echo and says Pan “tears her to pisces.” In the appendix of Johnny’s mother’s crazy letters, she says “such terrible news tore me to pisces.” (599)

There is also some discussion on page 45 of the substitution of “care” for “caves”. I wonder if these misspellings are meant to have the effect of echoes. Aloud, mourning sounds the same as morning. Later Daisy says “Always” is a game, which the narrator notes might echo “Hallways”. He also says: “An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it” (46). Maybe this has something to do with the hallways which constantly redefine and shift outside and inside of the house, carrying the person within them along.

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.

The Inside-Your-Outside Machine

House of Leaves has given me a lot to think about. Firstly, I see a kinship between the monstrous house and the book. The book is in a sense bigger inside than its outside, most obviously in the reams and reams of footnotes and the constant references to sources and people and art that exist outside of the book. It shares a lot of the aesthetic conceits we’ve seen in other postmodern works, namely, the cobbling together of difference voices and pieces of writing, the use of an interrupted format, the presentation of itself as a puzzle, and the voice of Truant that constantly jerks us out of the other narratives and brings us to Truant’s present, forcing us to share it with him, along with his difficulties regarding Zampano’s text. It reminds me of a hypertext article on the Internet, where every highlighted word brings you to another work, and theoretically that can proceed infinitely, from link to link to link without end.

The critical texts both deal with space, and as such remind us that we are dealing with a space that is breaking all of the rules. Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” argues that we are living in a particular age with a particular relationship to space that is not the same as the ages that proceeded it and hypothically will not be the same as the ages that come after. Foucault writes: “These are opposition that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public spave, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden space of the sacred” (Foucault 23). Yet Navidson’s placement of the Hi-8 cameras throughout the house collapses these distinctions. We can take this a step further with the Internet and the idea of simultaneously living “private” lives while also living the same life simultaneously in the most public and anonymous way possible. (In fact I think that cyberspace might be the metaphor in examining these works).

I found Jean Baudrillard’s piece much harder to understand (in contrast I’ve always thought that Foucault has a singularly clear way of writing) but I was also fascinated by his description of religious and religious iconography as one way of looking at the idea of simulacra. Having attended a Baptist church for a number of years, I heard many sermons on why the Baptist cross is an empty cross as opposed to the occupied Catholic crucifix-the argument being that Jesus was not in fact on the cross anymore, and portraying him thus in a sense “weakened” him. Really a ridiculous argument after a fashion but it aligns perfectly with Baudrillard’s argument about the substitution of the simulacrum for the real. The argument about Disneyland didn’t resonate quite so much as I’ve never been there and therefore have to imagine it, but his point that it is “meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere” (Baudrillard 172). In a sense then, are the adults pretending to be adults pretending to indulge their childishness when in fact they are pretending to be what they are already? And how does the idea of the simulacra relate to House of Leaves?

While this article leaves me with more questions than answers, it’s particularly helpful to use this paradigm to look at economic and political systems. I think it has a particular relevance today, when we are learning exactly how ephemeral, even imaginary, our concept of wealth has become-the vanishing of imaginary dollars that may never have existed in the first place, or the concept of “value” that fluctuates wildly and is completely divorced from any tangible value in the first place.

Harvey on Genre vs. Characterization in Postmodernism

In “The Condition of Postmodernity,” David Harvey attempts to define postmodernism in relation to modernism, and in myriad cultural contexts, including literature, architecture, psychology, and art. In his definition, Harvey discusses the blurring of genres, and specifically mentions the postmodern tendency to dissolve the “boundary between fiction and science fiction” (41). This is definitely true of The Lathe of Heaven, a novel that cannot fit into either/or category of science fiction/postmodern literature. LeGuin’s novel is most striking in its ability to use science fiction to cause disorder and confusion in reality as we know it. However, as opposed to the reality featured in Crying of Lot 49, which defies any sense of reason and is completely fragmented, the reality in The Lathe of Heaven is more believable, and also more ordered. Though George’s prophetic dreams do influence reality, this pattern is more noticeable, and therefore, expected in the novel.

Jennifer asks in the first post on this topic whether all science fiction novels can be considered postmodern. While it is definitely a valid and interesting question, Harvey posits in his article on “Postmodernity” that while “modernist literary critics do tend to look at works as examples of a ‘genre’ and do judge them by a ‘master code’ that prevails within the boundary of the genre, [the] ‘postmodern’ style is simply to view a work as a ‘text’ with its own particular ‘rhetoric’ and ‘idolect,’ but which can in principle be compared with any other text of no matter what sort” (44). If I understand this correctly, I think Harvey is specifically drawing attention to postmodernists’ attempts to eschew “genre” as we know it; therefore, we cannot really classify any postmodernist work as “science fiction” or any other genre. Though this seems easy enough to digest in theory, it becomes problematic in practice to shy away from categorizing literary works for the purposes of comparison and analysis. On one hand, postmodernism is fragmentation and chaos, as Harvey defines it; and on the other hand, in order to legitimize its impact, we need to understand postmodernism logically, and in terms that we can easily decipher and comprehend.

Leaving the genre debate aside, it becomes easier to think of postmodernism as a way to propagate equal representation: “The idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate is essential to the pluralistic stance of postmodernism” (Harvey 48). Hence, when discussing postmodern literary works, such as The Lathe of Heaven, it becomes apparent that issues of racial construction, for example, are called to be eradicated. Dr. Haber states that we should have “no more color problems. No question of race […] Nobody in the entire history of the human race has suffered for the color of his skin” (LeGin 129). Additionally, “characters no longer contemplate how they can unravel or unmask a central mystery, but are forced to ask, ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of the mysteries is to do it? Instead” (Harvey 48). This shift in focus from genre to characterization, and their influence on/perception of reality is a defining feature of postmodernism. The effect of this shift in focus is striking: “to break (deconstruct) the power of the author to impose meanings or offer a continuous narrative” (Harvey 51). Therefore, instead of the focus being on how LeGuin weaves the plot to create a work of science fiction, the focus shifts to how the characters—George Orr, Dr. Haber, and Heather—develop throughout the novel, and whether or not their respective dreams/ realities materialize and coincide.

Multiple Identities in The Lathe of Heaven

Everyone is mentioning the “Either Orr” symbolism of George’s name, but when I first read it, I thought of George Orwell. After that, I began to think of the novel as a dystopian/utopian text. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the author also makes a reference to a dystopian/utopian book by Aldous Huxley. On page 87, she calls the altered reality a “brave new world,” which also happens to be the title of Huxley’s book about a dystopian/utopian society. I think this a reasonable connection to make considering that a large portion of the text is preoccupied with creating a better world and failing. However, the farther into the book I got, the more I felt that my attempt to make sensible connections were a waste of energy.

I think that Le Guin intentionally makes references and symbols that don’t add up. This seems to show some deconstructionist sentiment. She uses a collage of different images, identities, and realities to create a very complex text, totally breaking down the notion of a “fixed sense of representation” (Harvey 51). Someone mentioned the various different animals that Orr is compared with. These animal comparisons are the types of symbols that don’t add up as the text progresses. In fact, she seems to take great efforts to portray each character as having multiple identities, rather than giving them a consistent identity with consistent symbols.

Her portrayal of the different characters as having multiple identities answers one of Harvey’s questions about postmodernism: “But if, as the postmodernists insist, we cannot aspire to any unified representation of the world…then how can we possibly aspire to act coherently with respect to the world?” (Harvey 52). Her answer is, we can’t. We develop fragmented identities just like the world around us. Heather is both a wife and not-a-wife. She is both black and white. She is strong, yet vulnerable. Haber describes George as “feminine or even childish” (18). Whereas Heather describes him as “the strongest person she has ever known” (96). Haber is also a contradictory character, who is often described as “benevolent,” but is also called “power hungry.” The fragmented world produces fragmented identities.

One last connection that I’d like to explore is the idea of the “center.” Le Guin’s use of “the center” confused me a little, because I remembered reading something about the center in one of Derrida’s essays. From what I remember, he said that the center was something that does not exist. We can keep deconstructing all day, but we will just come up with more double readings and never get any closer to a center or an inherent truth. Le Guin talks about a “center” for both George and Haber, but I’m not sure if it relates to Derrida in any way. She describes Haber “like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality…no center to him” (81). George is described as “he could not be moved away from the center” (96). I’m not really sure what to make of this, or if I should even be trying to make anything of it.

Order vs. Chaos…A Draw?

Early in his book entitled “The Condition of Postmodernity,” David Harvey addresses a key identifier of the movement from modernism to postmodernism. Paraphrasing from McHale, Harvey explains that the postmodern novel “is characterized by a shift from an ‘epistemological’ to an ‘ontological’ dominant. By this [McHale] means 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” (Harvey 41). While reading this section of Harvey’s argument (and a number of other parts), I was continually brought back to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Indeed, her novel deals with the very basic concept of reality, and its subsequent manipulation. George Orr, the appropriately named protagonist, has dreams, and these dreams tend to alter his and the world’s reality (or perhaps the world is stuck in a cycle of Orr’s dreams). Whichever the case, Le Guin is reasserting the common question of dream vs. reality. What is reality, and what is dream? If these dreams alter reality, then is the new reality merely a dream? etc…until confusion ensues for both the reader and the characters in the novel.

The juxtaposition between George and his psychiatrist, William Haber, further illuminates the postmodern qualities in Lathe of Heaven. If George Orr’s mind represents a sort of fragmentation and chaos, Dr. Haber serves as the overarching orderattempting to ‘right’ the ship. According to David Harvey, however, “postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is” (Harvey 44). Quoting Foucault, Harvey’s argument suggests that postmodernism “prefer[s] what is positive, and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (44). And indeed, it is with a representative image of this ‘nomadic flow’ that Ursula K. Le Guin chooses to begin the novel: “Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. […] in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways;” (Le Guin 1). When re-reading this opening passage, I am reminded of George (or perhaps more specifically, his world-altering dreams). Throughout the novel, George and his ‘power’ are continuously at the mercy of Dr. Haber, whom strives to use Orr’s dreams as a tool (or lathe) for sculpting a sort of Utopian society. George opposes Haber’s manipulation of his dreams, and also opposses Haber’s desire for perfection. Perhaps this opposition is better understood through George’s role as a postmodern character. George (chaos) rejects Haber’s plans (order) because his Utopianism is a kind of meta-theory, and this “broad interpretative schema” like all meta-based ‘pratice’ is rejected by postmodernism.

Thus, in the end, does Le Guin suggest chaos over order? I don’t believe so. Consider George’s life pre-Haber; he was unable to function. The chaotic dreams had consumed his life and affected the lives of those around him. Instead, George settles for (or is given) a compromise through synthesis. As Harvey might suggest, this synthesis comes in the form of collage, or a jumbled patchwork of the varying realities created by Haber through George’s dreams, and at the end of the novel, both George and Heather are left to live life in this synthesized reality.

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On Harvey

“The Condition of Postmodernity” was not the easiest read, but there were several elements of postmodernism that harvey addressed in his article. Since Harvey writes about art, architecture, literature, etc. it is hard to make any one statement about the condition of postmodernism. However, after reading this article I can’t help but feel that at least as far as fiction goes, one underlying element to almost everything is the element of distrust. Harvey writes that “characters no longer contemplate how they can unravel or unmask a central mystery, but are forced to ask, ‘Which world is this? What is to be done it it? Which of myselves is to do it?’ instead” (48).

An element of Marxism, which Harvey evokes often in his article, is the need to ask a continuous string of questions to find what is hidden underneath. One question is asked, and the opposite question must be tackled before you can move on to the next question. This is what shows us the hidden elements that define culture like religion, politics, laws, etc. There is also the concept of alienation, brought up as well by Harvey. This also cuts to the heart of distrust. Rather than continue asking questions until they reach definitive answers, it seems postmodern writers ask questions and very early on become distracted when they ask “why am I asking so many questions?” This sense of distrust for the past, and for dominant social norms permiates much of the fiction we’ve read so far.

In The Crying of Lot 49, there are numerous examples. One example that comes to my mind is when Fallopian is describing the Peter Pinguid society. In the description of the society, it becomes clear that there is little in the way of an underlying message or truth. First Fallopian get lost in the details of the very naval battle that the Peter Pinguid society is based upon, only to say “Who cares…we don’t try to make scripture out of it” (36). This, to me, signifies a deep mistrust of religion. Especially its reliance upon translated scripture as a moral guiding post. The Peter Pinguid’s foundation myth is incomplete. The Peter Pinguid society also shows a distrust for economic systems when Fallopian later says, “good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn’t it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror” (37). While modernists tended to take sides in this debate, we see a very postmodern stance in Fallopian’s approach: who cares, they’re both effed anyway. Rather than investigate the deeper implications of each system, Fallopian stays on the surface and takes the stance that both are corrupt. He offers no new, better method, but leaves it at that. I believe this to be a clear sign of distrust: nothing can be fixed, so why bother. It’s more fun to observe how messed up things are after all, it seems Fallopian is saying.

In The Lathe of Heaven a more subtle distrust takes place in the character of Orr. His distrust lies in a fear that he will literally change the past. In the Harvey article, he describes the postmodern relationship with the past as one “eschewing the idea of progress, postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity and memory, while simaltaneously developing an incredible ability to plunder history and absorb whatever he finds there as some aspect of the present” (54). This is exactly what Orr does. Not only does he created a fractured version of the present, because to him, two versions of the past exist each time he alters it, but he literally abandons any hope for historical continuity. His dreams change the past–continuity is not possible.

While Harvey never mentions distrust, I believe that many of his points lead to this feeling. Youth in the 60s rebelling against forced consumerism as a result of tv, ideas of “the self without God,” and alienation all point to a generation–or generations– of writers whose distrust causes them to focus on the surface and avoid making any statements of grand meaning–after all, if they can’t trust, can they be trusted themselves?

Not to step on my own toes, as I present next week, but when I think back on House of Leaves, I see a novel littered with distrust. The setting can’t be trusted, as it has a tendency to mess with the occupants. The first historical record, Navidson’s, is also untrustworthy. At times, so is Johnny Truant’s account. In this way, the novel questions its own trustworthiness and at times hints at the fact that it could all be a fabrication. It does all of this in many different forms, but one is the oft-footnoted style of academic writing–a medium which may feature opinions we aren’t inclined to agree with, but that many of us probably trust as legitimate.

These are just some final thoughts on how this ties into our future reading, but at this point, I don’t know who to belive–and I’m inclined to just stop trying, because what good is truth without trust, anyhow?

-Jared C.

Against Meta-narratives

I think Todd brings up some valid points about The Lathe of Heaven presenting a view that contradicts modernism and goes against meta-narratives. I hadn’t even considered Haber’s incredulity toward Freud and Jung. Certainly, looking at the institution of psychiatry as a whole, the work portrays the field as misguided. Haber may not believe in the theories of Freud and Jung, but he creates his own belief system that has its own flaws. In The Crying of Lot 49, we say psychiatry represented in the absurd, cartoonish, unreliable, untrustworthy, and immoral figure of Dr. Hilarius. In Le Guin’s work, Dr. Haber appears more realistic, but also more controlling, manipulative, and negative (I feel there is a certain irony in my saying that Haber is a negative force because it means that I’m comparing my meta-narrative against his and if all meta-narratives aren’t to be trusted, then…oh never mind).

I tend to think of Dr. Haber as a modernist character, someone who has certain beliefs that cohere with a particular meta-narrative who seeks to bring about a world the resembles/better coheres with his own system of beliefs. I’ll admit that his intentions are noble; the elimination of war, overpopulation, hunger, disease, racism, and the invention of nine-foot tall turtles are all worthwhile endeavors. However, in bringing about his vision of the world, he condenses and contains life into a small package to fit his equally small view.

For me, the most horrible byproduct of his plans for his meta-narrative’s domination is the elimination of races with the elimination of racism. Le Guin makes it very clear that this lack of diversity is a terrible thing: “But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin, brown skin and wiry black hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull shoed like the curve of a bronze vase- no, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no!” (130). The very symbolism of the color gray, already a hue of somber connotation, now becomes a color of sterility and violence by associating it with a battleship. Dr. Haber essentially achieves Hitler’s dream of a master race, but instead of killing a few billion people he has Orr disevent them. I think that Le Guin is very aware of the connotation of Dr. Haber’s actions and how they relate to evil predecessors; she makes a point of writing near the end that after the Break there are still gray people and many of them reside in Germany.

I tend to think that had Orr not met Heather, then he might not have worked up the nerve to stand up to Dr. Haber and step away from the downward spiral toward one meta-narrative. Orr’s actions and feelings and the novel as a whole, I think, respect and revel in the many varieties of reality, the spectrum of meta-narratives, and the diversity of humanity, even in the midst of its chaos. The final scene of the novel shows a nine-foot tall alien armor turtle watching a black woman and a white man meet and reunite at once over a cup of coffee. What could be more uplifting, absurd, and positive toward the vast array of meta-narratives in existence and yet to be thought of?

Fragmentation, Ends vs. Means, and the Unexplainable

Before beginning my “official” post, I must apologize if I repeat what has already been said in previous posts. I’m still getting used to the idea of a blog and I feel the need to write and post my individual, uninfluenced response to the text before reading what others have written. Obviously, this method sort of defeats the purpose of the blog, and if I could do a better job of posting earlier in the week it would be fine, so I obviously need to work on posting earlier…or developing a new approach to the blog. J

Now to the real post…

I absolutely loved Le Guin’s novel! I found The Lathe of Heaven to be quite moving and incredibly beautiful, and it has earned a spot on my list of top favorite works. However, I do have many questions about the book, and I am struggling with the fact that it seems so very different from what we have read thus far in the course. (I also found Lethem’s “Super Goat Man” to be uncharacteristic of what I was thinking was characteristic of Postmodernism, so, as Professor Sample said, it seems that defining Postmodernism will be a continual puzzle.)

The fragmentation quality seen in other Postmodern works thus far is not as clear in the novel. Le Guin has a beautiful, poetic-like style. The novel does not have a fragmented style like Pynchon’s work. George’s dreams and their effect on the changing realities could be considered fragmentation, though. Through the dreams and the interchanging realities, there is also an element of surrealism. George is in the center of the variations of reality and true reality becomes confused. Heather even refers to him as “Either Orr” since he is stuck in the middle (90). (This nickname also represents Heather’s shifting views of George; at times she views him as weak and at others she views him as her rock.)

As in John Cage’s ”Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”, references to a deteriorating environment appear throughout Le Guin’s novel. (Le Guin also seems to criticize the hypocrisy of war in her work, another motif in Cage’s piece.) I found it interesting that Le Guin repeatedly refers to the 1980’s as a turning point in the decline of society and the environment. Also, George’s dream of the end of the world was in 1998, and the “true present” of the text is 2002. It seems that Le Guin’s work could be interpreted as foreboding danger, destruction, and decline to come, and, since it was written in the 1970’s, it seems she holds, or at least portrays, the belief that the destruction was fast approaching. While this message carries through the novel, there are also some conflicting views, such as the idea that “great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear” (121). Although it does not necessarily seem consistent with the novel as a whole or with the time, it seems that Le Guin’s work could be interpreted as presenting the fears of destruction as unfounded since she often shows the destruction as self-imposed. Also, she seems to oppose irrational fears of space by presenting the reader with kind Aliens.

Along these lines, Le Guin raises the question of whether the ends are more significant than the means. Haber seems to hold the view that the end justifies whatever means necessary to evoke the change (the end), whereas George believes that the means (costs) must be taken into account and individuals should not act as God to bring about change. However, the Alien seems to share Haber’s view in regards to work/production. Rather than provide the reader with a definite opinion or message on the debate, Le Guin seems to present us with the debate itself—the reader, and society, must weigh the cost of their actions.

It’s clear that Le Guin presents that idea that some things simply are unexplainable. George reaches this “high attainment” (26), this ability to leave things as unexplainable. However, Dr. Haber can’t let things be (as George repeatedly argues that they must) and he believes that things must not only be changed, but also explained. George warns him, that he is “handling something outside reason” (page 86). He may have good goals (ends), but he is approaching them the wrong way. George tells Haber he is “trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited to the job.” Dr. Haber is ultimately destroyed in the end whereas George, who is able to let things be, “survives” (105) So maybe Le Guin’s view of the ends vs. means debate is more clear than it originally appears…

I’d like to have a better understanding of how this idea of the ends vs. the means ties in with the commentary on environmental destruction. I also want to have a better understanding of the ending of the novel. I feel a bit unclear about Haber’s dream. Haber obviously placed his own self-interests first, but he did seem to have good intentions. What was that final dream? Why would he dream for such destruction…or did he? I guess I’m trying to match up where the dreams intersect and make sense of what would have changed when. But then I’m trying to give reason to what may be intended to be out of the grasp of reason.

The Signifier and Signified in The Lathe of Heaven

Let me start off by saying that I genuinely enjoyed The Lathe of Heaven. I was trying to verbalize to a friend just what it was that attracted me about this particular book, and I found myself describing my fascination with Le Guin’s complex layering of new worlds, especially since these worlds are both purposefully and accidentally created. This calls to mind the following excerpt in Harvey’s article: “Whereas modernists had presupposed that there was a tight and identifiable relation between what was being said (the signified or ‘message’) and how it was being said (the signifier or ‘medium’), poststructuralist thinking sees these as ‘continually breaking apart and re-attaching in new combinations” (49). Just as Haber attempts to control George Orr’s dreams and manipulate the present, he constantly fails (despite his confidence that he has succeeded) in creating a better world. In “reality” (which sounds so out of place when a describing a book like this), Haber is attempting to exert power through his own message (or “signified”) which he mediates through Orr’s dreams (which act as the “signifier”), and yet, the outcome is never what Haber intends. Postmodernism focuses on the continual “breaking apart” of what is intended and what is understood, and so does Le Guin’s story. Haber believes he can make the world a better place, but it is his medium, Orr’s dreams, which no one can control.

Orr himself realizes his own role in this complex re-working of past, present, and future. After killing off billions of people in an attempt to rid the world of “overpopulation” (60) and stopping the war on Earth only to start another between humans and aliens, Orr says, “Out of the frying pan into the fire… Don’t you see, Dr. Haber, that’s all you’ll get from me? Look, it’s not that I want to block you, to frustrate your plans… Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you’re trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it’s easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you’re handling something outside of reason. You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited to the job” (86).

The disconnect between the signified and the signifier is not the only important factor in this story; the fact is that the “new combinations” of what is meant to change about the world (the “problem”) and what actually changes (the “cure”) just creates another problem in its place. Orr understands that his dreams serve as the medium for Haber’s ideas, and he is able to see that the repercussions are far too vast to continue on this downward slope. In the end, Orr is able to settle happily into a much-adjusted world. Heather Lalache says, “I thought you could change the world. Is this the best that you could do—this mess?” (175), and though she is fairly unaware of how much worse it had been and how much worse it could get, the reader should sense that this is the best he could do. Neither he nor Haber really could control the medium, as it is an irrational unconscious which has created these multiple worlds, and so this end to the nonsense, the aftermath of all the horror Haber has done, is actually a gift. When postmodernism began to recognize a creator’s inability to control the received message, they also invited a whole slew of science fiction that toys with the more metaphorical meaning of a creator, its creation, and its reception in the world. This is especially true in The Lathe of Heaven.

As a sidenote, I wanted to point out that after reading Harvey’s section on technology, in particular the “the proliferation of television use”(61) after having also read about postmodern art, I could not stop thinking about a piece I saw last year at the Smithsonian American Art Museum which combines television and art in a way I have never seen otherwise. Nam June Paik’s “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii” depicts each of the fifty state proportionally with various sized televisions which continuously roll representative footage of each state. For example, “The Wizard of Oz” plays on the televisions that constitute Kansas and “Oklahoma” plays, obviously, on the Oklahoma screens. This piece really forced me to question how television can serve as an art medium in a more abstract and meaningful way than just as the way we watch “Lost” or “American Idol.” Check it out, either with this link or in person if you get the chance!

For a more interactive site & information on the exhibit itself, look here: http://americanart.si.edu/collections/interact/zoom/paik.cfm

For digital images, look here: http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM4438

Whats in a name? Im not really sure.

Coming off reading the Crying of Lot 49, I’m of course, obsessed with names in the Lathe of Heaven, but I’m having some serious trouble cracking the name of the protagonist. George Orr (which I actually heard as JOR-JOR before the alien said it, because I was listening to an e-book the other day and it sounded like a robot) has a complicated situation regarding his name – Orr, or Haber refers to him “Mr. Either Or” is a median.

Haber goes so far as to say something to the effect as “you cancel yourself out to the point that nothing remains” – this would seem that he is completely neutralized. If we are to understand that Orr is in fact, neutralized, then it would seem the plot of the Lathe of Heaven revolves around the fact that technology/science(or pseudoscience)/associations/un-or-subconciousness (or perhaps just the misuse of such) only serves to muddle and complicate our understanding of the reality and the world, yet we, or Orr have/has little effect…being neutral and all. The other possibility is not that Orr is totally neutral, just that he is neutralized by Haber.

Either way, my difficulty in accepting Orr as “both, neither, either, or,” lies in his full name, or as it sounds Jor Jor – a doubling. How can he be neutralized when at the same time he is double? Though, to complicate things further, I suppose to double zero is still zero..? Also, as some people have posted already, there is the idea that the Orr refers to the multiple realities created by his dreams.

Haber is just as interesting. There are two main (and not necessarily intentional, just intriguing) connections I made with Haber. One – Fritz haber, inventor (I think) of synthesized ammonia pre-WWI and “father of chemical warfare.” It is in part due to Fritz Haber’s work (nobel prize winning actually) that the death tolls of WWI were unlike what anyone had ever seen (think population loss). Two haber in Spanish is an auxiliary or helping verb meaning “to have”…ironically it is not used to indicate that one has or owns/possesses something, (that is tener, as in yo tengo) but rather haber is used in conjuction (unable to operate alone) with another verb in the perfect tenses (ie I have gone to the movies). So yes, that’s a huge stretch, but I thought it was at least coincidentally funny, as that kind of fits how Dr Haber is unable to do his work without George, and that his name means “to have” but not in a to possess connotation.

Finally there are some really interesting points made about the sub/unconscious and it’s neutrality by way of its irrationality. Not irrational in an insane way, just literally without rationale. The subconscious or unconscious mind (whichever we are really dealing with here…that might be up for debate) simply flows, like George’s “shortcuts” taking the mind from peace to aliens in one easy step. There is little logic involved in dreams, which makes Haber’s scientific method all the more interesting. Dreams, at their most basic functioning level, are to help us understand reality; REM sleep is a time to recharge and put all the library cards of our day in order, in an easily recallable and logical filing system -yet the dreams themselves, the picture of the process is often as chaotic and disorderly as the imagination can imagine. Reality molds our dreams, and to think that dreams mold our reality, is subversive and wonderful.

The Color of Battleships

The Color of Battleships: Racial Identity in The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven confronts the “problem” of racial identity and the implications of, what Toni Morrison terms, the “deliberateness of the construction, the conscious necessity for establishing difference” (Morrison 39). Le Guin uses two methods of exploration. First she intentionally racializes her characters, calling into question the role of racial appearance on perceived identity. Le Guin offers focused descriptions of George Orr from the perspective of both Dr. Haber and Heather Lelache. Haber describes George Orr as having “Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair man, slightly undernourished, good health, twenty-eight to thirty-two. Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional” (Le Guin 7). Heather Lelache, the “Black Widow” (42), finds him “A born victim. Hair like a little girl’s, brown and fine, little blond beard soft white skin like a fish’s belly; meek, mild, stuttering” (42). In both instances, Le Guin marries the physical/racial with the psychological/emotional. This marriage leaves the reader to ask: how much does race have to do with who we are and how we are perceived? How much does race have to do with identity?

To answer this question, Le Guin proposes a universe that “undoes” this racial construction. Dr. Haber suggests that there should be “no more color problems. No more questions of race” (129). Consequently, human beings become gray, “the color of battleships” (130). With memories of both worlds, Orr struggles to integrate his ideas of a racial identity with a non-racial world. He notes, “That’s why she [Heather]’s not there… She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born” (130). Orr feels that race is essential to Heather’s identity or his perception of her identity. Resigned to this new world without Heather, George encounters the arrest of a short man for the crime of cancer. Instead of racial persecution, disease is “other.” By doing so, Le Guin emphasizes the metaphorical implications of race as a “way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic then biological ‘race’ ever was” (Morrison 63). To demonstrate this point, disease and race become interchangeable. Just as one can produce a racial identity, so can one produce one based on a particular illness or good health. These identities are not inherently evil; rather, suffering comes from the appropriation and misuse of these identities to create difference.

Le Guin depicts racial identity as something that gives human beings shade and dimension. To further emphasize this point, Orr compares the racialized Heather to the gray one: “His wife had been a gray person, a far gentler person than this one… This Heather carried a big black handbag with a brass snap, and probably a half pint of brandy inside; she came on hard. He wife had been unaggressive and, though courageous, timid in manner. This was not his wife, but a fiercer woman, vivid and difficult” (182). Like Morrison, Le Guin finds race as an asset rather than a detriment. Racial diversity allows for a “deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly presented to us” (Morrison 66).

Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Scribner, 1971.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1992.

Either dream of world peace OR turtles from outer space

I also thought that Le Guin was nudging the concept of either/or with George’s personality and obviously his name. The first thing I thought of with the logical concept of either/ or is the Elliott Smith record (note a very postmodern pop culture reference), the other is Kierkegaard’s philosophical doctrine; the latter I think has a little more weight in this discussion so I’ll think I’ll pursue it. I don’t know too much about Kierkegaard but I know he typically wrote about concepts like fear and dread and doubt of religion. I searched Wikipedia for Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and found that the “Either” side of his argument is a worldview that adopts a purely aesthetic lifestyle such as drinking, casual sex, vanity, and any other indulgencies that satisfy the self. The “Or” side of the argument, which is given by a judge, purposes that in the later stages of life one adopts an ethical lifestyle, one that acts responsibly and morally. The doctrine attempts to answer Aristotle’s question “How should we live?” which I thought to be the question Le Guin purposes to the characters of The Lathe of Heaven.

Dr. Haber is an aggressive man but not evil; it is repeated several times, even by George, that he is benevolent: one page 83 “Haber wanted to make the world better for humanity.” However, Haber’s idea of “How should we live?” is presumptuous. He thinks that his idea of a world will be good for the people, but George knows that no one can possibly be responsible enough to make a decision that will affect everyone. George disproves Haber’s snake bit analogy by arguing that no man can make a decision for all of mankind: on page 156 George says, “Just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to be…in touch. Haber isn’t in touch…means are all we’ve got…he can’t let be.” And on page 140 George says to Haber, “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way…the world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be (one of several Beatles references).” In reference to Kierkegaard’s book, George Orr represents the ethical side in his decision to try and stop dreaming and stop Haber’s dream suggestions, hence the name – Orr.

I don’t think George is merely average and timid. I think that his discourse with Haber in chapters 6 and especially chapters 9 and 10 shows that George is really contemplating this power and showing the flaws in Haber’s dream suggestions. He is living in a world that is pulling him one way or the other, either with Haber’s ideology or Heather’s assertiveness. His passivity is certainly there, but it is marked by intelligence (most likely an average person with this ability would make his life not average).

I also had trouble seeing this text as postmodern when it had prevailing science fiction themes. But I think that the altercation of reality by George’s dreams is consistent with Postmodernism’s critique of reality. Portland is constantly morphing yet no one seems to question this bizarre reality, except George. The question of what is reality is brought into question which Postmodern text attempts to ask. Also, Harvey brings up the connection between postmodernism and science fiction in his essay, “The boundary between fiction and science fiction has dissolved, while postmodernist characters often seem confused as to which they are in, and how they should act with respect to it.” If anyone is confused in what world they live in it is George Orr.

Notes on Heather’s Character- Orr’s Name

Karin brings up an interesting idea when she mentions that Heather may be seen as Orr’s antithesis. While I was reading I thought Heather’s character was unexplainably inconsistent, but then I thought this whole book is based on inconsistencies. While the spider metaphor that first introduces her accentuates strength in her and shows her as aggressive and fierce as she’s described as predator and Orr as her prey, the portrayal of her character as Orr’s grey-skinned wife is more domesticated and she appears more vulnerable. The role reversal is certainly apparent when she becomes the needy one who seeks reassurance from Orr. As Orr explains it in his thoughts about his wife, her “brown” color was what made her who she was. Her history as one of mixed race and her struggle with issues of belonging seemed to have created that complexity in her character that had fed her strength. In the final version we get of Heather towards the end of the book, she’s even fiercer than Orr remembers her to be and is “vivid” and “difficult.” In a continuum where they never married but only knew each other briefly in a far past she grows more into the aggressive person she was when Orr first met her at her office. This may be an indication that her relationship with Orr seemed to have had an effect on her assertiveness as her color did or does. In the cabin scene we sense her weakness for the first time as she begins to have warm feelings towards Orr. This shows how her relationship had an effect on her character as it toned her down a bit and penetrated the façade of fierceness that she had maintained before she met him. I think this point really exemplifies Le Guin’s thoroughness in her depiction of character without dwelling on the minor details as a modernist writer would.

As to Orr’s name and its signification that’s been brought up by Sara Flood and Karin, I agree that his name suggests that his mundane character is the polar opposite of the typical science fiction hero. Further, I think it cleverly represents the nature of his super power: the ability to alter reality and create multiple options and realities. In his brief meditation of the Alien in front of him Orr explains, “It was not standing there… not in the same way that he would stand, or sit, or lie, or be. It was standing there in the way that he, in a dream, might be standing. It was there in a sense that in a dream one is somewhere” (178). While the repeated “or” is what made me realize the mentioned connection, this line, I believe, is crucial in examining Orr’s understanding of the realities that he creates. He’s beginning to realize that it is not actual reality that he alters but a reality that is existent only in dreams, and now he’s in another person’s dream and hence in a different reality. There is no actual reality but only coexisting, colliding and interpenetrating realities, which is a prominent characteristic of postmodern fiction, as Harvey explains.

Mr. Either Orr

George Orr is the most forgettable character I know. I was expecting invisibility, super-strength, flying, lightning fast changes into spandex and capes, but not banality. My expectations for a main character in a sci-fi / postmodern novel have been upended, and in their place is left normalcy. Our first physical description of him is ordinary, even boring: “haircut conservative shoulder-length, beard short. Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair man, slightly undernourished, good health, twenty-eight to thirty-two. Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed conventional” (7). Le Guin has decidedly chosen the most mild-natured man in Portland, or even the world to be suddenly thrust into the spotlight. I can’t help but wonder: why Orr?

Not only is he average–but the Le Guin goes out of her way to say just how average he his. Habor even justifies Orr’s averageness by confirming it with psychological test results: “Creative/destructive, on the Ramirez scale–same thing. Both, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point” (137). Why would a man so average and mundane be caught in the middle of these dream experiments? Maybe his name has more to do with him being caught in one reality or another. One dream or another. One experiment or another.

At one point, Orr wonders,”What kind of man am I?[…]I haven’t any strength, I haven’t any character, I’m a born tool” ( 74). He seems to want to take a stand against Habor, but can’t dream the right dream, convince the right attorney, or be in the right reality. However, there are a few moments of assertiveness in Orr’s overwhelmingly banal personality. For example, after the curious incident with aliens, Orr insists that Habor call the HEW Minister and explain the miscommunication. It is at this moment that Habor wonders, “Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool?” (124). Additionally, when Heather goes to the cabin to learn why Orr missed their lunch date, she acknowledges that “He is the strongest person she had ever known, because he would not be moved away from the center” (96). Since Heather is described as Orr’s antithesis, one can’t help but mark this unusual role reversal.

Even though Orr may be forgettable and mundane, I can’t help but think that this was Le Guin’s point. Haven’t all of the superhuman strengths been chronicled and the stereotypes of science fiction been established? So where does the postmodern novel turn to create a main character? The yawning averageness.

Lastly, I am not sure what to make of this, but there were all of these unusual references to Orr being similar to different types of animals: a monkey, an insect, a goose, a dead elephant, etc. What is a reader to make of these?

Rejection of modernism

One of the possible ways of defining or categorizing postmodernism is by its rejection of modernism ideals. The Lathe of Heaven does this in several ways.

One is by its rejection of Freudian and Jungian ideas. Freud’s ideas of psychoanalysis and Jung’s archetypes figured heavily into modernist ways of thinking. Both obviously were also interested in dreaming and what it said about the human psyche.

Haber’s therapy sessions seem to reject basic Freudian ideas and techniques. At one point he says the only holdover modern psychology still has is the couch, but he uses it for patients to sleep on, which Freud very much opposed. For Haber, modern psychology is all about technology, not about the analysis that Freud and Jung practiced.

Haber also rejects the ideas of Freud and Jung that the unconscious was a dark and scary place:

Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That’s a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the twentieth. Don’t be afraid of your unconscious mind! It’s not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity….. there is nothing to fear. -88.

For Freud and Jung and their patients, there was very much something to fear. They told us that our subconscious was full of dirty thoughts and secret motives and monsters that we were not even aware we had. The idea that there was a whole other layer of the brain that we could not tap into, yet was controlling our behavior to some point was a scary notion indeed.

Haber also is rejecting the Jungian ideas of archetypes, which was found throughout modernist literature. When he is trying to make George feel better, he rejects the idea that the aliens are some universal archetype that represent the fear of the unknown, and says that they were probably just influenced by sci-fi movies from the 70’s. George wants to stop before he brings out more monsters from his unconcscious, but Haber tells him he is being silly and that they must proceed.

Another way that this postmodernism rejects modernism is the “incredulity towards meta-narratives” that we discussed in class and that Harvey discusses in his article. The Lathe of Heaven definitely rejects meta-narratives in the fact that there is no consistent reality. How can there be one meta-narrative when reality is fundamentally altered every time that George Orr has an effective dream? A world with 7 billion people can not have the same narrative as a world with 1 billion. A world with racism can not have the same narrative as a world with no race. A world with aliens living among us can not have the same narrative as one that doesn’t. By rejecting the idea that the world has any singular, continuing reality the idea of any narrative to go along with reality is rejected as well.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve always imagined. -Henry David Thoreau

I randomly grabbed a bookmark from my desk for The Lathe of Heaven, and this Thoreau quote was on it, it made me laugh.

Free Will vs. Control, and the “Problem of Perspective”

The quote Jennifer mentioned from Harvey’s article describes Orr’s experience perfectly. Harvey discusses the coexistence of fragmentary “possible worlds” in an “impossible Space” superimposed upon one another (48), and says that rather than unraveling a mystery (the old detective story theme again), characters must simply ask which world they are in and what they’re supposed to do there. It’s interesting that the novel is told from multiple perspectives. If it were only told from only Orr’s point of view, we might start to doubt his reliability as a narrator.

Orr’s situation is unusual for a lot of reasons, one being that only he and others present at the time of his hypnosis register the shifting of reality. Not only does he realize it, but he also remembers all other realities as well. This forces him to feel at odds with the world and overwhelmed by his circumstances (like Oedipa and her many counterproductive clues): “He took it as it came. He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything” (126). I think this confusion plays off of the fragility of memory itself. Memory is already unreliable–no two people remember the same story exactly the same way with all the same details.

Despite memory inconsistency, there is still this idea that linear history and memory continuity provides some frame of reference for our daily lives. But Harvey says: “Postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity and memory, while simultaneously developing an incredible ability to plunder history and absorb whatever it finds there as some aspect of the present” (54). Orr’s dreams completely disrupt his sense of the past, which makes for a disturbing, turbulent reality.

Throughout the book there’s this ethical struggle between Orr and Haber. At one point Orr wonders if other people have the same gift he has, and if so, whether everyone’s reality is constantly being replaced and renewed, to the awareness of only the dreamer. If so, he says it’s probably better that the rest of the world is ignorant to these constant changes. This hypothesis would basically wipe out free will, even by the dreamer controlling the world (as dreams are typically uncontrollable). Their reality becomes like a dream itself, in which there is no free will anyway. The mind does what it wants, creates its own reality, and subjects that reality upon others’ histories.

Does this novel imply the absence of some sort of God or higher power, then, too? The whole premise is that of “playing God,” naturally and technologically, at the same time as hesitating to do so. Orr is a draftsman. He understands the logical design of elements, but believes that “it’s wrong to force the pattern of things” (82). Haber, who seems to believe he is truly doing humanity a service, overlooks the wiping out of thousands of people as well as all historical significance. (History, by the way, threw me off at the part when Orr enters the Antique shop. For example, why was Eisenhower still there in photograph form, and was he gray too?)

One last thing I wanted to bring up is about human complexity. Orr, whose name is pretty overtly used as symbolism (he’s Either, Orr, the perfectly average human, not a superman despite his immense power), is pretty wishy-washy almost always. Yet he is the one experiencing the most humanlike questioning of ethics (at the same time as being used as an object, a tool). Heather is supposedly nonexistent in the gray world solely because her skin had once been brown. And Haber is often seen as the most complex and powerful of all of them, although he becomes quite vegetable-like at the end. Actually, he’s compared to an onion, too: “slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him. Nowhere that he ever stopped, had to stop…No being, only layers” (81). There is no person under the onion, just like Oedipa and her millions of clothes. How is it that these two contrasting people can exist in world after world, but Heather disappears?

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.