humor – American Postmodernism

Baby Nostradamus and the Mechanical Tortoise

I thought I would touch on something that hasn’t been talked about yet–the two characters whose words can’t be read. I am fascinated as to why Plascencia would include big blocks of black texts or binary codes in the novel. While the latter may actually translate into words or images, the black boxes are destined to go untranslated. Certainly this makes the novel look and feel postmodern to the reader. (However, I would argue that it still is postmodern even without these characters.)

I initially wrote off Baby Nostradamus as a (humorous) allusion to the prophetic 16th century seer and nothing more–a gimmick of sorts that Plascencia used to be provocative in style, but maybe not in meaning. Baby N. first appears on the bus with his mother. Little Merced makes an inquiry about him and his mother says, “At first I thought that he was brain dead; the doctors said that he was as dumb as a turnip” (23). On the same page, the solid black box appears under Baby N’s name. As a reader, I zipped passed each of these boxes assuming the baby had no thoughts. However, it wasn’t until chapter 23 that my reading of Baby Nostradamus changed. In this chapter, Baby N’s thoughts are written as he instructs Little Merced in how to conceal her thoughts. Ironically, even as he instructing her ,it is not done through spoken words, but “through telepathic lessons” (159). The reader sees Little Merced trying to use the concealment technique to varying degrees of success throughout the rest of the novel. Her examples are normally partially obscured by a circle, such as on page 209.

Now the black boxes have changed for me. It didn’t mean Baby N. didn’t have any thoughts, but rather it was that he was concealing his thoughts from Saturn/ Plascencia and the reader. I wonder if Plascencia wrote out the passages from Baby N while writing the book and then concealed them later on? It would make for a good creative writing exercise. Yet, the concealment strategy is destroyed on page 218 when there is an image of Saturn superimposed over the top of the black box. Is it a mistake on his part? Does he mean to conceal his thoughts about Saturn? Or is initially making the “mistake” Little Merced did when she is learning how to conceal her thoughts and ends up highlighting them instead. I keep returning to the question: what is his role in the novel? Is he more than just a soothsayer? At times he is humorous, foreseeing the last lines of the novel on page 166. But at other times Baby N. feels like a convenient way for Plascencia to incorporate the non-traditional structure.

I don’t have as much to say about the mechanical tortoises. Since the author never translates their “words” for the reader, they go largely misunderstood. With that said, on page 156, the escaped mechanical tortoise’s purpose is brought to light–when we discover that he is working against the desire of the mechanics and bringing Tijuana and LA closer together by moving the earth. Saturn goes on to say, “This is what machines did–they bridged the distance between cities” (156). A nice summary of the role of technology in the 21st century.

Alana mentioned Plascencia’s choice of Saturn, and I wonder if it has anything to do about the myth of Saturn eating his children so that they wouldn’t overthrow him. Seems to fit with Saturn’s/Plascencia’s fears about the characters taking over the story. I too wonder if there are further connections in Latin American culture.

Help.

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

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

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

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

Just a little on Pynchon’s parody (and an afterthought on Varo)

A large portion of my interest in Thomas Pynchon is with his sense of humor and the resulting parodic nature of his writing. Having already read The Crying of Lot 49, this re-reading allowed me to really focus on the “world” of Southern California that Pynchon has created, or more accurately, parodied.

Throughout The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon seems to be humorously commenting on American, and specifically Californian, culture. As stated by the narrator, “Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts–census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway” (13). Per Pynchon’s construction, it’s a culture lacking substance; California and its inhabitants are all image, which is often merely imitation. For example, the Paranoids, who “watch English movies a lot, for the accent,” are Pynchon’s American ripoff version of The Beatles (17). (Considering Oedipa’s increasing paranoia throughout the story, the Paranoids seem appropriately named. In fact, they periodically serve as the “Greek chorus” for the tragic (yet comical) unraveling of Oedipa’s life as she uncovers a potential conspiracy) Dr. Hilarius, Oedipa’s “shrink or psychotherapist,” is perhaps only best described as a psycho.

In his first novel V., Pynchon presents a woman who becomes increasingly machine-like as the novel progresses, and threads of this same metaphorical device can be identified in The Crying of Lot 49 (although not as ubiquitous). “[Oedipa] looked down a slope […] onto a vast sprawl of house which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she though of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit” (14). Here, Pynchon is reacting against the increase of tract housing suburbs noting their machine-like resemblance (if I’m not mistaken, the “cookie-cutter” suburbs first got their start in the 1950s, just a few years before the publishing of The Crying of Lot 49).

Continuing with Pynchon’s role as social commentator, I come to perhaps my favorite passage in The Crying of Lot 49: the initial description of Wendell “Mucho” Maas. “[H]e could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest” (5). To me, this passage evokes a couple of Pynchon’s concerns. First, the machine once again stands in for the human being, and in fact, the passage preceeding this quotation describes these used cars as “metal extensions” of their owners. Second, Mucho’s association of used cars/humans with “Endless, convoluted incest” reminds me of Pynchon’s recurring theme of entropy and/or entropic decline; if a system is closed, then that system will inevitably decline.

______________

On a somewhat random, separate note, I searched for and found the Remedios Varo painting referenced in The Crying of Lot 49: “In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind Remedios Varo Bordando el Manto Terrestre of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried” (11). In the context of the chapter, the painting refers to her personal relationship with Pierce Inverarity, but I can’t help but look at the painting and think of Oedipa’s journey as a “detective” through the Trystero conspiracy. In many ways, she is weaving her own tapestry with the threads of conspiracy, filling a void, creating a world with the jigsaw pieces she has discovered (or perhaps have discovered her).

Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Entropy

The Crying of Lot 49 has a plethora of information that was just as confusing to me as it was to Oedpia. But I think this was intentional on Pynchon’s part. Oedpia pursues clues and information that appear to be connected, but when looked at from an objective viewpoint, these connections are arbitrary and only bring up more questions with indefinite answers.

Entropy is symbolic and used in a broader sense than just the explanation of Maxwell’s Demon. Oedpia is constantly getting clues to the mystery of the Trystero. There are loosely connected clues that Oedpia encounters throughout the story, but one that really grabbed me was what leads her to Nefastis’s perpetual motion machine and its relevance to Trystero. This is completely arbitrary. Koteks is merely sketching the muted post horn on a piece of paper when she walks by and he tells her the story of Maxwell’s Demon and Nefastis’s machine. Oedpia takes this to be some sort of clue and seeks Nefastis out. When she meets him, Nefastis says, “Entropy is a metaphor, It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow” (85). I vaguely know what entropy is from merely the text and Wikipedia, so I spoke with my roommate, who is majoring in physics, and he tried to explain it to me a little better. He said that entropy is an actual measurable quantity in physics. The idea is that in a closed system, things tend to degrade into chaos. Without any force or loss in a system, that system cannot function (He gave an example of a boiling pot of water with the lid on and how the tendency is for the energy in the pot to push the lid off and escape). I think this idea is a prevailing one in the text, and entropy is used in terms of information and culture. All the information that Oedpia encounters during her journey in California does not fit together like she hopes. One thing leads to another and so on, and Oedpia becomes obsessive in solving this apparent mystery. While Oedpia is experiencing culture in 1960s California, she is trying to make sense of the world around her, or should I say, the world that seems to be hidden from her, but draws no logical conclusion. When Oedpia tries to formulate a conclusion and, seeing that the further she goes the more confusing things become, she loses the aspects of her life that were orderly and she becomes detached and paranoid: “They are stripping from me – she said subvocally – feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss – they are stripping away, one by one, my men” (126). In chapter 6 we really see her lose it as she wonders back to The Scope and her hotel started and meets with Mike Fallopian and Genghis Cohen again. The world that Pynchon created has caused Oedpia to descend into chaos.

Crying of Lot 49 is obviously more than a commentary on the monopoly of the postal service. It’s clear that Pynchon is making a greater point. Crying of Lot 49 is considered one of the definitive postmodern novels, and I think I’ll take a stab at the reason why. COL49 is reflective of the 60s culture of the time – music, drugs, promiscuity, and rebellion of authority – all these things are inherent in the plot (and rather cleverly mocked at). Elements of mystery, pop culture, history, counterculture, and science are combined in COL49 to form a pastiche, which is a symptom of postmodernism. Culture is mirrored and satirized in the text while realism is ignored in order to exaggerate culture. That’s the most I can make out of it for now.

Overall I enjoyed the novel and thought it had some fantastic sentences, like this one: “I am the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming from my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (62). With such a dense novel in so few pages it is obvious that Pynchon is smart, but with outbursts like this he also has a sense of humor.

Thoughts on Hassan’s “prophecy” and fragmentation characteristic

This week’s reading confirms that the list of attributes of Postmodern work seems varied and, in some cases, contradictory. In reading the works for this week’s class, it seems that the definition of Postmodernism has always been unclear, but Ihab Hassan’s essay “POSTmodernISM”, an attempt at defining Postmodernism, seems to have been somewhat prophetic. Additionally, it seems that along with the “fragmented” definition of Postmodernism, fragmentation is a key characteristic of Postmodern work.
Hassan states his belief that our world is headed for a “utopia indistinguishable from nightmare” (22), and he worries about the disasters of “Pollution, Population, [and] Power” (issues also raised in John Cage’s work). I can’t help but wonder—are we currently in that “utopia indistinguishable from nightmare” that Hassan predicted? Despite all our modern conveniences and advanced technology that seem to make our lives easier, we also live in a world fraught with problems, including those of pollution, population, and power. If Hassan felt that he was in an age of “runaway technology” in 1971 (24), I can only imagine what his thoughts would be now!
While Hassan says that “we dwell happily in the Unimaginable” (22), he also suggests that we need to “open up alternatives to the Unimaginable” (30). Not only do these assertions appear to be contradictory, but Hassan’s concept of the Unimaginable, a place that seems to be defined as a healthy balance between “Complacence” and “Hysteria”, is unclear to me. Is the Unimaginable bad in Postmodernist terms because it is a balance? Is the desire and goal of Post-Modernism to break balance? It would seem that our society is out of balance. It does not seem, however, that Post-Modernist works are attempting to fix this problem, but, rather, are reflecting this lack of balance through content and style, including fragmentation.
In addition to some of the motifs that seem to be present in Postmodern works, John Cage’s piece really highlights this fragmentation characteristic. I was intrigued, but also frustrated, with the style of John Cage’s work. I felt that the piece was like a puzzle and I tried to find a pattern, attempting to match up the various fonts and pieces of stories. The piece seems like it could be classified as stream-of-consciousness, but I’m not sure that the term is appropriate for Postmodern works. The story of the Duchess seemed to be the most consistent, and, not only did it add humor to the piece, it also pulled me into the piece and kept me reading until the end. I’m curious about Cage’s inclusion of the Duchess story. Is the story simply added to provide humor in the midst of the fragmented, but running, commentary on how the world is changing and declining? The story does also seem to show that, as the title states, by attempting to fix a problem you will only make matters worse.
Along the lines of fragmentation, the writing style of the pieces seems to be rather “choppy”, lacking variety of sentence structure and even including some awkward syntax. John Cage’s “Dear Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” and Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” all posses some degree of this “choppy” quality.
My hunch is that the fragmentation of the pieces, in content, style, and structure, mirrors the fragmentation of the world in which we live. However, not all authors demonstrate this fragmentation in their pieces. (For instance, I feel that Lethem’s “Super Goat Man” has a wonderful flow, much in contrast to the Cage and Link’s work.) I’m curious about these choices and how all of these pieces fit into the puzzle of Postmodernism.

“I like stuff that isn’t the same every time you look at it”

“I like stuff that isn’t the same every time you look at it” (spoken by Carly in “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”): It seems that this observation sums up a primary characteristic of postmodern literature and rhetoric, one which is evident in most of the short stories and passages assigned this week.

I enjoyed the short stories, particularly the pieces by Foer, Lethem, and Link. Foer’s piece was especially moving because it recounts experiences and emotions that are common to the human experience, yet are usually unexpressed. I wonder whether these emotions are untold because language as we know it fails to convey them, or because these emotions are not necessarily meant to be expressed, and should simply lurk in a person’s mind until other emotions take their place? Either way, Foer’s use of symbols and characters in place of incommunicable emotions effectively illustrates that language is significantly less sophisticated than we may think. Foer’s piece also displays another recognizable characteristic of postmodern texts: its focus on signifiers and the absence of a constant “signified.” If I understand it correctly, this characteristic resonates with Carly’s statement. Foer shows that though these symbols encapsulate unspoken emotions, these emotions are dependent on specific circumstances. Therefore, their meanings are fluid, changing every time they’re felt in a different context.

Link’s piece, “Some Zombie Contingency Plan,” does not have the easiest plot to follow, but it is enjoyable nonetheless. I’m not usually a fan of fantasy fiction, but I enjoy stories that have enigmatic and thought-provoking metaphors intertwined in the text. In response to Jennifer’s earlier post, I think the zombie metaphor is one that concerns the ambiguity and fluidity of identity. The main characters, Soap and Carly, repeatedly camouflage and change their identity throughout the story. Though Soap constantly presents the hypothetical situation of zombies invading as a fear-inducing scenario, I think Link wants the reader to think of Soap as a potential zombie, in a metaphorical sense. In other words, maybe Link is making the point that metaphorical zombies—individuals who are not necessarily dead on the outside, but are void on the inside—are to be feared more than the actual, fictional zombies. While attempting to escape from an “actual” zombie is certainly frightening, Link hints that individuals who themselves morph into metaphorical zombies can find no escape route (you cannot escape from yourself). Again, the postmodern statement above about things appearing differently in various situations also fits this storyline. The indistinctness of the characters’ backgrounds and personalities as well as the overall elusiveness of the plot collectively point to this postmodern notion of perpetual ambiguity and malleability of meaning within the text.

Finally, I found Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” an engaging piece to read as well. Though I found it initially difficult to immediately identify the theme or purpose of the piece, I was able to deduce a pattern in the text after a second read. Obviously, the structure of the piece is meant to be avant-garde, in order to capture the reader’s attention or unsettle the reader in some way. The title’s ironic humor has significant bearing on the meaning of the piece as a whole (I think): it seems that Cage is implying that human intervention—any attempts by humans to “improve the world”—usually fail and result in the opposite. Aside from technological advances, which are acclaimed in this piece (“Success for humanity lies in technology…), almost all other human attempts to change the world are useless or harmful. Among many other themes that I couldn’t decipher, Cage calls for the removal of government and politics (anarchy), the eradication of environmental pollutants, and the obliteration of “arthritic” language that is structured and lacks fluidity. Though no one can deny that there are meaningful messages within this text, they are still open for interpretation.

With Cage’s text as well as all the others assigned, the meaning of the text is never the same every time you read it. This indeterminacy is what makes postmodern, avant-garde texts unique—if they do nothing else, they will NOT fail to make you think. When the reader is given a chance to think, the result will likely be fruitful change. As Hassan points out in “POSTmodernism,” “What the avant-garde probably still needs to do for a time is serve as the agent of change, which is recognizable when still newer change is in progress.”