consumerism – American Postmodernism

Cultural Betrayal in The People of Paper

As I was reading The People of Paper, I found myself paying considerable attention to the indictment for Mexican females who choose to be with white American males in a sort of treason against their Mexican heritage. It is easy to consider all of the suffering and pain in this book, but I found myself aware that the empathy in this book is directed towards the “good” Mexican characters who stay true to their culture (and therefore, do not go outside the culture to look for love): Federico de la Fe, Froggy, Sandra, Julieta, among others. On the other hand, much criticism is directed towards Mexican characters who betray their Mexican heritage: obviously Rita Hayworth, Merced (Federico’s wife), and Liz– who we might assume has committed the ultimate betrayal which led to the writing of this book (and the creating of this world at all).

This brought to mind a recent news story about Obama’s brief exchange with Hugo Chavez at the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad this past weekend. According to reports, Chavez took the opportunity to hand Obama a copy of a 1970 Eduardo Galeano book called The Open Veins of Latin America, which has apparently shot to the top of book sales list as a result of the exchange. The New York Times article reads, “Whatever one thinks of its message (it denounces both U.S. imperialism and the ruling élites of Latin America from a Marxist-Leninst perspective), the book has a fascinating history. Galeano, who is Uruguayan, wrote it in the last three months of 1970, and was eventually forced into exile as the book grew in popularity. It has sold steadily ever since, in Latin America and around the world, with more than fifty Spanish editions, and translations into more than a dozen languages.” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/04/the-book-chavez-gave-obama.html

I see this news story as particularly relevant because, as much of the Latin American world struggles to find its new place in a postmodern world, books like this one by Mexican writer Salvador Plascencia remind readers that there is a strong sense of indignation directed towards Americans, but also at Latinos who “betray” their heritage by either assimilating too much or creating too much of a bridge between their own culture and American culture.

In Tropic of Orange, the “bad guy” is the body parts smuggler who betrays his own people to make a buck; in The People of Paper, it’s the women (several of them) who have left their Mexican lovers/husbands for American ones. “Saturn” is the angry Salvador Plascencia who creates this world of like-minded, betrayed Mexican victims who suffer so much emotional and physical pain that Plascencia even suggests that readers will do the same. Though we might say that there is some kind of healing by the end of this story, I find it to be a very, very angry story, one that some of us might write in the heat of a devastating breakup and then, some years later, be embarassed that we even considered to be literature. Plascencia’s saving grace is that his book is about more than just a breakup; it’s about paper, people, people made of paper, betrayal, multicultural relations and relationships, and of course its format makes it stand out as postmodern, with its metanarrative, self-reflexivity, careful use of columns and black squares, and other creative choices. But essentially, at its very core, this seems to be like a breakup story– and at the heart of the anger over this breakup is that these women (Liz, Rita Hayworth, and Merced) left their Mexican men for American men.

This anger is most clear in the heated conversation between “Saturn” and someone we may assume to be Liz in Chapter 10, in which Saturn says, “You are awful. Worse than Rita Hayworth. Too good to fuck us lettuce pickers.” And Liz responds, “That is not what it’s about.” Saturn says, “You sell-out. Vendida. You are worse than the Malinche, worse than Pocahontas. Fucking white boys and making asbestos fall from the attic.” Then Liz points out that “Saturn” has had his own white lover which he brushes off with, “She was after you. When you would not answer the phone or my letters” (118-119).

Though there is much else going on in The People of Paper, it has gotten me wondering whether one of the connections between many of these postmodern stories is the multicultural perspective which shows the victims and sufferers of American (and European) domination. This is not just a breakup story; it is also the story of a writer whose world, even the world he has created, is colored by anti-American sentiment, betrayal, and resentment. We could also have a field day considering some of the misogynist lines in this book, but I find more use in considering the complicated choice to emigrate to a place like Los Angeles to reap the benefits of American consumerism, education, and opportunity in general, and then the resentment many of these characters feel for the place and the people because they have to go there and be among these people to do just that.

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.

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.

DeLillo’s “The Uniforms:” Violence Mediated Through Film

War, terrorism, rape, murder…gauche boots? baseball? Lucky Strike? Luis Bunuel? Where and how do we connect the associative lines? In a world where terrorists carry Molotov cocktails “in a Coca-Cola sixpack,” these associations are jarring, yet feel somewhat natural (DeLillo 5). Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” is a crossroads of many things: sex, violence, and consumerism (perhaps accurately identified as the DeLillo-ian trinity), and this trinity is mediated through DeLillo and delivered to the reader; however, he is not the sole “owner” of the texts. As expressed from the lips of DeLillo himself, the short story “is an attempt to hammer and nail my own frame around somebody else’s movie (http://perival.com/delillo/dduniforms.html): Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend.”

In a sense, the story reads like a script for some terribly perverse action film (hence, Godard). DeLillo’s descriptions are limited to whom and how a band of terrorists rape, pillage, burn, and mutilate its victims, and like any good screenwriter, DeLillo provides detailed sketches of costumes and props; “Bradley wore Hassan’s red beret; a blue bandanna around his neck; buckskin pants and moccasins and a bright green football jersey with the silver numeral on the front and back. He put some lampblack under his eyes […]” (11). Amusingly, Bradley (or “Wheaties”) emulates the American jock turned brutally hard soldier, often associating what he sees in battle with sports (He thinks of Jean-Claude’s Molotov toss as “girlish” and un-baseball. He fashions his own grenade tossing as a Kareem-esque skyhook). This merger between sport and war is a theme that DeLillo experiments with a lot (most notably in End Zone).

Interestingly, many of the sporadic, anecdotal interjections made by the characters/actors reference directors and films:

“[Harlow] told them this was a trick she had learned in Algiers during the time of the filming of Pontecorvo’s great fictional documentary” (5).

“Jean-Claude asked the crew whether it was true or false that Resnais had faked the filmclips of the bomb victims in his movie about Hiroshima” (8).

“Jean-Claude had learned the lighter fluide trick from his father, who had been in the hills with Bunuel when the latter had declared that the days of the slow dissolve were numbered” (9).

And so on…

Jean-Claude, thinking like the filmmaker that he is, provides a mini-lecture on the importance of effective uniforms in war films/newsreels; “The revolutionary uniform must be tight and spare. Touches of color, individuality and personal fantasy are to be encouraged. […] We will shoot in color because color is the color of childhood fantasy” (7). Summarizing Jean-Claude’s remarks, the violence they commit becomes and image mediated through film and delievered to the masses. Thus, the lethal consequences of war/terrorism come to mean less than the emotions and reactions evoked from the audience viewing this product (Examples? DeLillo points to the Zapruder film in later works. Our generation? 9/11?). As Jean-Claude might suggest, in today’s world, history is often learned through (and altered by) media. (I’m reminded of the persuasive power of Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” or Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin.”) I think DeLillo is trying to illustrate this point for us. As we are reading through the story, Jean-Claude is filming all the horrific acts, ensuring that the violence reaches its potential as a visual media. Sadly, violence has been reduced to its prospect as images on a screen, losing its entrie connotation as lethal. In “The Uniforms,” life has become mediated through film, and the result is propagandisitic art for the anxious consumer.