Tag: commodity

Broad spectrum, closed system

I can somewhat understand Adams’s argument about the differences between The Crying of Lot 49 as a closed paranoid space and The Tropic of Orange as an open space.  Still, as much as Tropic of Orange honors diversity and expresses a multi-national vision, there were a couple of images that struck me as Pychon-esqe and drew attention to the restraints of society that could lead to paranoia and anxiety like that of the Cold War era.  

First and most obviously, the contaminated orange scare, while not as devastating as a nuclear attack, is still far reaching in its impact.  Global markets are a wonderful innovation because they allow people to have fresh produce almost everywhere even when something is out of season.  On the other hand though, the different standards of health inspection in different countries and the difficulty of tracing where some imports come from can make a food scare as random and potentially as harmful and frightening as a terrorist attack.

The highways so prominently featured in Crying Lot and Tropic of Orange connect nations and people are a fantastic invention because they allow for greater freedom to movc about and provide for greater transparency and acceptance between cultures.  At the same time though, these paths often become blocked with congestion and accidents, which, far from liberating, can be confining, frustrating, and dangerous.  The character of Manzanar Murakami, the homeless music of the traffic conductor, reminds me of Pynchon and his novel V., which deals with the ideas of closed systems and entropy, the inevitable breakdown of order in any given closed system.  The highways in Tropic become closed, toxic, destructive systems when accidents occur and yet Murakami seems to accept this.  Personally, I hate traffic and traveling, even when I’m speeding along uninterrupted so the idea of someone watching traffic and watching traffic disasters and somehow integrating it into something beautiful, a work of art, is astonishing to me.  Murakami seems to voice Pynchon’s belief that the breakdown of order cannot be avoided so one might as well celebrate.  In the novel V., Pynchon creates a metaphor for the contemporary person, writing that we are all sailors on sinking ships, but we can still paint the ship as it goes down, a sentiment that seems reflected in Murakami.

Another detail in Tropic of Orange that seemed to change the setting into a closed system was the brief exchange at the end of chapter 20.  A woman in the restaurant says ‘”I happen to adore Japanese culture.  What can I say?  I adore different cultures.  I’ve traveled all over the world.  I love living in L.A. because I can find anything in the world to eat, right here'” (129).  The odd thing about this statement is that is takes ethnic diversity and reduces it to a commodity to be consumed, literally.  L.A. becomes a microcosm of the world, a concentrated mass of multi-culturalism.  If one believes that L.A. contains everything one could want from another culture, then hasn’t that other culture been simplified and restricted?

“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.