Tag: pastiche

Mao II and Optic Consumption

Mao II and Optic Consumption
Whenever two distinct cultures come into contact with one another, there is always resistance – either resistance to assimilate, resistance to acknowledge the other culture’s traditions, or whatever. Generally such an encounter results in consumption. One culture consumes the other, the other’s traditions/artifacts, or the other’s land. The bigger the gap between cultures, the messier the encounter seems to be, historically speaking – Europe and Africa, Europe/America with Native Americans, Brits and India, Spain and Anything South of Texas,…etc…add technology to the mix and things can get really out of hand.

 
Imagine, its like 1840something and you and your tribe are living somewhere in present day Idaho – your day consists mainly of getting food, taking care of your family, sleep, etc and a stranger, who looks nothing like you or your friends and has this crazy machine that flashes and makes your face appear on paper. How would you rationalize that? Sure it might seem primitive (though to be honest I still don’t understand the logistics of film and cameras) to conclude that said machine has somehow trapped or stolen your “soul,” but is the idea that a photograph or photographer can connote some kind of ownership, really that crazy?
The motifs of mass vs anonymity in Mao II are fairly evident and the consequences, or the “next step” inferences/reaction from/to such a situation – the inability to be recognized in a crowd, the desire to be isolated, etc – are present in the text. But more interestingly to me, is the focus on photography and its implications. Brit, a major character is a photographer…that’s gotta mean something right? Sure…but first let’s consider the “magic” of photography.

 
Sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke (2001: A space odyssey/the sentinel) offered the following statement as one of his “laws” of future prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So is it insane for the Native Americans to conclude that a photo can steal/imprison one’s soul? If we’re dealing in a world of “magic” that seems plausible. Or consider the practice of the voodoo doll – a likeness of an enemy can act as a sort of psychic remote control, giving complete ownership to the doll’s creator. Or more recently, whether it should be termed postmodern, or pop art, or pastiche, or whatever, consider the re-appropriation of images of Mao/Manson/Hitler, whoever – using his likeness to subvert/pervert/remake their being. It’s said that people don’t just read books or look at art, but rather they consume…with their eyes, rather than mouths. The act of photography (or other visual media) is the first step in a process of optic consumption.

 
Bill, fears his picture being taken much like he is hesitant to release his newest work – presumably for the same reasons, that once both are no longer solely his own, they can be remade, subverted, perverted, reappropriated as the consumers see fit. He consents to a photograph under his own terms to, effectively, take control (yes a split infinitive!) over the frightening situation. Now I’m not advocating that a camera actually captures some ethereal portion of our being, but if we look at other depictions of people via photograph, still or moving, we can see at least the political and social implications of reappropriation of another’s image. Exp: Karen in the bedroom watching tv (with no sound so that she is able to re-author the scene) when film footage of a crowd appears. She describes a horrible writhing of thousands of people pressed into a fence and when it pauses into a still image, she describes it as a fresco in a tourist church..only as a master of the age could paint it. She redefines the image in her own terms but still the characters in said “fresco” remain anonymous in the crowd –a girl…men…maleness…etc – and she never speculates upon the event itself.

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.