Tag: Jameson

Tropic of Orange and Cognitive Mapping

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

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

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

Relating some features of Postmodernism to “The Crying of Lot 49”

While primarily focusing on Detective stories as a genre and briefly tracing its origins and characteristics, Michael Holquist’s essay “Whodunit and other questions: Metaphysical detective stories in post-war fiction” tackles the issue of the fusion between high and low art as a prominent characteristic of Postmodernism.   I think his argument about the “pattern of reassurance” as a sophisticated form of a happy ending is interesting.  From the way he describes it, it appears to be a common denominator in the different forms of literary kitsch.  Another tendency is the shortcut they take to the “catharsis,” by skipping the “pain” and “tragedy,” which denies the reader a full experience and possible meaning.  These features render such works as merely quick and easy crowed pleasers, as opposed to high art that may not be accessible to the majority.  Taking this into consideration, the “red herrings” that have been used in the “The Crying of 49” begin to make a little more sense to me. Similar to Oedipa’s confusion in her search for clues and their meaning, the novel suggests allusions that can be misleading to the reader who is expectant of an easy answer.  Also the toying of the author in his dealing with the relationship between signifier and signified is an effort to mislead the presumptuous reader; while the names can be telling of character as talked about in a few of this week’s posts, there are some names like “Dr. Hilarius” that seem to me sort of pointless, or maybe I’m being too cynical.

In “Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism,” Jameson describes the canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement as a plausible explanation of the emergence of postmodernism.  Postmodernism subsequently rejects the complete focus on what is thought to be high art by creating a bridge between high art and popular art, as Holquist mentions.  The inclusion of the polar opposites is evident in “The Crying of Lot 49” as we are introduced to “Paranoid,” a pot smoking band who write songs like, “Lonely girl in your lonely flat, well, that’s where it’s at, so hush your lonely cry,” and later an opposite representation is seen in the play Oedipa attends that causes her to visit a university professor for clarification on the play, which reinforces Jameson’s statement about the control of institutions on art.  

Calisthenics of Perception

In The Crying of Lot 49, toward the end Oedipa lays out four choices to try to make sense what is going on around her.  She has stumbled upon real Tristero, a vast underground network; she has hallucinated “it”; she is the victim of a plot to deceive her; or she is insane.  When she considers the first option, she equates with the reality of Tristero “a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie”.  It’s interesting that she does not equate hallucinations with insanity here, and jkathrynfulton’s point about Oedipa’s perception divided into perhaps real or perhaps dreamed events highlights the inability or unwillingness on the parts of both Oedipa and the narrator to clearly differentiate between the two for the reader.

But of course, just at the climax of a traditional detective story when the “crime” and “criminal” are about to be revealed and explained, the novel ends.  We never do get an answer from the story about which of the four options it was.  In Holquist’s exploration of The Voyeur, he points out that the detective story cliché of the power of the rational mind to conquer all is reversed, and that the reader becomes a detective only to discover the cipher zero of the poster title, which parallels the crying of lot 49 – something unheard, unfinished, which the reader must perform.  The solution lies not in the book, but “in the experience of the reader himself” (151).  “It is not a story – it is a process,” Holquist asserts (153), and this process of “strangeness” (155) is a “kind of calisthenics of perception” (153).  This wording recalls Jameson’s exhortation for the experience of art to alter our outdated “perceptual habits” so that we are able to comprehend the global capitalist reality (80).

However I am still unclear on exactly the crime or mystery that is to be solved here.  Holquist references “cosmic detectives, who wish to solve the crime of their own existence” (154) and says that in metaphysical detective stories it is life rather than death that is to be solved.  Jameson cites a “breakdown of temporality” and breakdown in relationships between signifiers creating an overwhelming sensation of the signifier in isolation (73).  This description of the signifier in isolation echoes the Word that Oedipa can never quite get a grasp on, as well as her hallucinatory states.  Failure of communication is a recurring theme in The Crying of Lot 49, but I was never sure what exactly is trying to be communicated.

When I was talking to my friend about Jameson, my friend retorted that he personally had no void to be dramatized, no gap in perception.  I reflected that I didn’t either – that I knew of.  And how could people living in the postmodern age ever know anything else to compare our lived experience to?  Even the seemingly idyllic past can supposedly never be accessed in the postmodern age as anything but simalcra, so is this comparison just a straw man?  Or is Jameson outdated and my friend now fully evolved into a perceiving being, plugged into his internet feed?  To what extent does the “violence to our flabby habits of perception” (156) exacted by the experience of postmodern art depend on the subject having perceptions formed in the modernist age?

If the problem is the overwhelming sensation of the isolated signifier, the description of that experience is reminiscent of medieval religious experiences, so does that sensation qualify as the new violence without that the violence within of the new art is supposed to protect us from? Jameson implies that this evolution of perception is part of a long historical process of humanity evolving to comprehend the changing world.  So why is this a problem now?  Why do we have to do something about it?

Oedipa “More”- A Postmodern Protagonist

I would like to address Pynchon’s choice of Oedipa Maas. Interestingly, Pynchon chose to center his story on the experiences and investigations of a housewife before the Feminist movement. Indicative of the time in which the story was written, Oedipa is a housewife; however, Oedipa does much more than the average housewife usually would. Yes, the story begins with her return home from a Tupperware party, but her role as protagonist serves as that of a detective, even an amateur scholar. Then again, she is the product of her experiences, in some ways, and so are others in the story, particularly women.

For example, Oedipa does not ask nor does she expect to be the executor of Pierce’s estate, nor does she choose many of her experiences in the book. Even the Remedios Varo painting in Mexico which makes Oedipa cry under “her dark green bubble shades” depicts “a number of girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void” (21). The women in the painting are stuck, prisoners, trying to “fill the void” that, one could argue, is their lives. This calls to mind the Jameson article and his assessment of Postmodern art, particularly Munch’s The Scream which Jameson says “deconstructs its own aesthetic of expression, all the while remaining imprisoned within it “(62). The same mediation occurs with the art within art in the Varo painting and in Oedipa’s interpretation of their hopeless attempt to “fill the void.” Both Oedipa and the women in the painting are, in part if not completely, helpless and powerless, but at the same time, they are working to fill some void or in Oedipa’s case, to deduce a potentially arbitrary and nonexistent mystery.

Todd Kelly and Professor Sample both commented on Oedipa’s name, and Professor Sample suggested we consider the implications of the last name “Maas” in terms of the Spanish term for “more” (“mas”). As Oedipa tries to make sense of the postal service, the stamps, and the horns, among other things, she is demonstrating her almost insatiable curiosity about life. As opposed to the passivity I discussed above, in most of the book, Oedipa exercises control and power over herself (and sometimes her surroundings) as she resourcefully attempts to make sense of the seeming senseless “mystery.” She is going out into the world, away from her husband in particular (and after her own mystery, her own role as the executor of the estate) and discovering a complicated set of connections that to others have often overlooked.

On the other hand, Oedipa’s encounters are often mediated by other associations, often seemingly random associations, a fact which indicates some passivity in her experiences. Furthermore, both we, the readers, and Oedipa are left waiting for the anonymous bidder of Lot 49. The story ends with Oedipa waiting, which can be interpreted as both passive and active, but also leaves a void, a mystery unsolved, for the reader which makes the experience itself almost seem fruitless.

I do not, despite what I have written, find the novel or Oedipa’s role in the novel to be depressing or desperate. On the contrary, I see Oedipa as revolutionary as a character; her curiosity and deftness in uncovering the traces of a mystery (though not the entire mystery) reveal a new kind of Postmodern female. I would argue that Postmodernism, as Jameson explains, has more to do with fragmentation than the alienation so important to Modernism, and thus, it is not Oedipa’s alienation as a character (though she is depicted as very lonely at times) or her inability to solve this mystery which holds her back, but rather, the fragmented story she is trying to piece together.  It is almost necessary to Postmodernism that the story remain fragmented rather than whole or complete or even solved; thus, Oedipa is left perpetually waiting for “more” or “Maas”, and her story is never quite finished.

I have much more I want to discuss concerning Oedipa, in particular, but I will save some of that for class.

An Unimaginative Use of Tapioca.

I quite like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The breathless narrative and endless lists of little fiddly things-stamps, letters, bits of graffiti-are quite appealing. Moving through the book gives me a sense of gradually sliding out of control, the slow development of a paranoia in which one starts to distrust one’s own perceptions when it begins to seem that the scheme (or swindle) that one is caught in is ultimately too big to see as a coherent whole. In that sense it reminds me of Ellis’ Glamorama at the point where even mundane objects-confetti, a black hat, a stick-on tattoo-become objects of dread and signals of a large system. The protagonist’s perception becomes more and more faulty as objects-photographs, pornographic videos-are manipulated to create a “reality” that is false but can’t be argued with.

Michael Holquist makes some interesting points in his “Whodunit and Other Question.” I find his inclusion of Poe in the canon of detective stories very fascinatingl; I wonder if he would also admit H.P. Lovecraft into the same group? But the question is, what does this have to do with postmodernism and Pynchon? Earlier we spoke about whether postmodernism was a break from modernism or a continuation (evolution?) of modernism. Holquist writes that “post-modernism…can best be understood as springing from a different view of man, and therefore a different view of art from that which obtained in Modernism” (Holquist 147). I suppose this can be taken as Holquist’s assertion that postmodernism is more of a break with moderning (or a perspective shift) than a continuation. Holquist goes on to say that postmodernism is “about things, not people” and mentions the 1930s “murder classics” by Wheatley and Links and The Voyeur as examples. I suppose an argument could be made for Pynchon’s novella that links it with Holquist’s argument, using the obsessive minutiae of objects in the book.

One thing that stood out for me particularly is the gradual revelation of how enmeshed Oedipa is in the unfathomable plan of Inverarity’s, the feeling that she cannot figure it out because she cannot get outside of it enough to do so, of being caught in a possibly malevolent system. The “clues” which we might expect to help us start unraveling the mystery only serve to further complicate matters. There is a sort of “meta” feeling I get when reading this novella and making connections to things mentioned in the novel with things outside of the novel, then eventually feeling as though I’m becoming paranoid along with Oedipa (for example-Maxwell’s Demon and “The Ballad of Maxwell Demon” from the fictionalized biopic of a character based on David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1y_PRuq7x0). The novella greatly puts me in mind of China Mieville’s short story “The Go-Between” from Looking For Jake, and Holquist’s article also brings Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”-really a stylistic mash-up-from Fragile Things to mind.

Holquist and Fredric Jameson both seem to put the burgeoning of postmodernism at roughly the end of the 1950s/beginning of the 1960s. Jameson also raises the question of whether postmodernism should be viewed as a break or a continuation of modernism, although from what I understand he presents both positions as plausible but mentions that the latter view does not “take into account the social position of the older modernism” (Jameson 56). Jameson also makes an interesting assertion that postmodern global culture  in the “superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world” (Jameson 57). Given that we have recently seen a rather dramatic re-structuring of the existing economic system and are poised at the brink of an unprecendented level of reorganization of the American economic system in particular, does this alter Jameson’s argument at all? Or are these changes rather superficial? Or is this possibly the sign that we are actually moving into the post-postmodern era? I do wonder about Jameson’s claim on page 57 that the “offensive features” of postmodernism have become institutionalized-I suppose he’s right-but I don’t consider a strong reaction to something an indication that the point has been missed; I don’t think the two positions have to be occupied simultaneously.