psychology – American Postmodernism

Going Back to Hassan

I think that House of Leaves more than any other book we have read so far invites us to consider what Hassan meant by what he called the “Rhetoric of Dismissal.” For Hassan the rhetoric of dismassal was related to the way that the establishment tried to keep down anything new or daring that was going on.

House of Leaves would be most easily dismissed as “The Fad,” which according to Hasssan is not accepted becaused it “implies permanance as absolute value. It also implies the ability to distinguish between fashion and history without benefit of time or creative intuition,” (9). I could easily see people writing this novel off as a fad. Or something cool to do once, but really not anything with any real future. Which would mean future works that are similar to House of Leaves would fall under the “The Safe Version” dismissal, which Hassan says claims “the entrance fee has been paid, once and forever.”

Anyway, my point is, I think Danielewski is daring us to dismiss his work. He wants us to put it down in disgust, or frustration. Look at how many times the book starts, then stops, then goes back to the beginning again, or just starts a completely new beginning. We start with the Truant letter, the first one which seems to lead us to believe that we will be reading a book about Zampano writing this book. Then we stop, go back, start learning about The Navidson Film, which begins to interest us. Then on page 18, we stop and go back and begin Truant’s story (and it is not like you can ignore it, Danielewski makes it long enough that you would have to skip 3 pages to get back to The Navidson Record, which no reader will do). Then with Chapter 3, we stop and go back and learn Navidson’s history and psychology. Think about how many times we stop and go start new somewhere else: learning the histroy of echoes, Truant’s mother’s letters, Henry Hudson, Magellan, Karen’s short, Lude’s List, Zampano’s poems, the Pelican Poems, Zampano’s Letter to the Editor, etc.. They all just lead to us stopping what we are reading and beginning again.

Danielewski wants us to get angry, he wants us to be mad. He is literarally daring us to come at him. I think he feels he is like Truant with the Gdnask man fight, he is going to let us come at him with all we’ve got. just sreaming “706 PAGES OF THIS? ARE yOU SERIOUS? AND WHAT THE F IS UP WITH THE FOOTNOTES?” then he is going to take our punishment and wait till we turn our backs and hit us in the head with a jack daniels bottle, and possible rape and murder our girlfriends.

Someone brought up that Danielewski may have put in all the Truant sex scenes because he wanted to be cool by proxy. I think there is something to that. Originally I thought it was purposefully absurd to point out the unreliability of Truant, but the nerd porn theory holds up just as well. Especially as I read the end of the book, I got the idea that Danielewski just thinks he is so cool, and it bothered me. But I do not want to give anything away, and I need something to talk about next week.

Oh, I actually liked the book by the way. It may not seem like it by what is above, but I dug it.

Reading House of Leaves against itself

The great paradox of House of Leaves is that the house in the book remains “virtually inviolate to interpretation” (60), while the book itself goes to great lengths to anticipate every conceivable interpretation of itself.

Therefore many of my interpretative approaches toward the text tend either to getting entirely outside the novel (e.g. the mapping project) or to reading the book very literally against itself. In the myriad of made-up and real intertextual references, for example, can we find some surprising framework that casts the novel in a new light?

I’m very interested in the recurring presence of anxieties and phobias in the novel. Karen Green, we find out, has a history of claustrophobia, and one footnote even references her “results on the Sheehan Clinician Rated Anxiety Scale as well as Sheehan Phobia Scale” (59, f69). These are, it turns, out, real clinical diagnostic tools. I’m toying with the idea that we could take something like these real-world rubrics and somehow use them as a lenses to look at House of Leaves. Below is a summary of the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS), which psychologists often have patients use to self-report their social anxieties. Does something like this have any interpretative potential, or is it just a false lead?

[scribd id=12694609 key=key-1efh2rnfipbnh0f8vuuv]

Quintessentially Postmodern, in Form and Function

The first thing I did when received this book from Amazon is flip through it. I was immediately struck by the drastically diverse layouts—some pages were dense with “typewriter style” text, some pages were extremely sparse with only three or four words, some had music notes, comic book illustrations, poetry, or letters. The text itself also eventually develops into a copy editor’s nightmare as the novel progresses: multiple fonts, strikethroughs, upside down, sideways—it’s one of the most exaggerated examples of spatial disorientation I’ve seen in a text. Something looked consistent, though: the word “house” was always blue. But this is my point: if that’s not a quintessentially postmodern text, what is?! If we’ve been unsure about classifying the previous novels we’ve read for this class as postmodern texts, we cannot be unsure about this one. Though I am unsure about many things regarding the meaning/theme(s) of House of Leaves at this point, I can say with certainty that this text is a postmodern one!

In addition to this, the postmodern concept of “layering,” as has been brought up by many fellow bloggers, is what seems to hold House of Leaves together. Danielewski interweaves multiple narratives within the book dexterously, and each tale is told with a distinctive style and unique purpose. For example, in terms of style, Truant’s text has the rambling intonation similar to Pynchon’s Lot 49, while the Zampano narrative sounds like a profound yet satirical account of academic writing. Finally, Navidson’s account has the style and tone that sounds the most like a traditional story. Intertwined in this way, the novel is relayed to the reader in rambling fragments, separated by footnotes and halting subject shifts. As I read through the pages, I found myself trying hard to resist the urge to follow a linear path, and as I adopted this mentality, the once-intimidating text slowly began to slowly reveal itself, little by little, very much like the ‘character’ of the house in the novel.

This is an aside: Did anyone else notice this right before page xi of the “Introduction”? –> “This is not for you.” It made me laugh.. :-)

But seriously, it brings up a whole slew of interesting questions: Why is this not for me? For whom is this written? If it’s not for me, why does Mark Danielewski dedicate an entire page at the start of his novel to reveal this to me and to everyone else who picks up his novel? Who is the “you”/”me” in this statement, anyway? Whatever it means, it definitely does the job of capturing the reader’s attention, and by working in the same way “reverse psychology” does, each reader immediately starts to believe that this work is significant for him/her (which is probably the effect that Danielewski had hoped it would have). I think the reader’s relationship with this text is meant to be dramatized, and Danielewski does this effectively by increasing the reader’s level of interaction with the text. What is the result of this increased level of interaction? Well, as opposed to any other genres of fiction, where you as the reader choose to escape into the story, the opposite happens with the postmodern genre: the text “escapes” into you, and changes the way you think about yourself—just as Johnny Truant assures the reader will happen: “For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.” Sounds creepy. And also very postmodern.

Harvey on Genre vs. Characterization in Postmodernism

In “The Condition of Postmodernity,” David Harvey attempts to define postmodernism in relation to modernism, and in myriad cultural contexts, including literature, architecture, psychology, and art. In his definition, Harvey discusses the blurring of genres, and specifically mentions the postmodern tendency to dissolve the “boundary between fiction and science fiction” (41). This is definitely true of The Lathe of Heaven, a novel that cannot fit into either/or category of science fiction/postmodern literature. LeGuin’s novel is most striking in its ability to use science fiction to cause disorder and confusion in reality as we know it. However, as opposed to the reality featured in Crying of Lot 49, which defies any sense of reason and is completely fragmented, the reality in The Lathe of Heaven is more believable, and also more ordered. Though George’s prophetic dreams do influence reality, this pattern is more noticeable, and therefore, expected in the novel.

Jennifer asks in the first post on this topic whether all science fiction novels can be considered postmodern. While it is definitely a valid and interesting question, Harvey posits in his article on “Postmodernity” that while “modernist literary critics do tend to look at works as examples of a ‘genre’ and do judge them by a ‘master code’ that prevails within the boundary of the genre, [the] ‘postmodern’ style is simply to view a work as a ‘text’ with its own particular ‘rhetoric’ and ‘idolect,’ but which can in principle be compared with any other text of no matter what sort” (44). If I understand this correctly, I think Harvey is specifically drawing attention to postmodernists’ attempts to eschew “genre” as we know it; therefore, we cannot really classify any postmodernist work as “science fiction” or any other genre. Though this seems easy enough to digest in theory, it becomes problematic in practice to shy away from categorizing literary works for the purposes of comparison and analysis. On one hand, postmodernism is fragmentation and chaos, as Harvey defines it; and on the other hand, in order to legitimize its impact, we need to understand postmodernism logically, and in terms that we can easily decipher and comprehend.

Leaving the genre debate aside, it becomes easier to think of postmodernism as a way to propagate equal representation: “The idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate is essential to the pluralistic stance of postmodernism” (Harvey 48). Hence, when discussing postmodern literary works, such as The Lathe of Heaven, it becomes apparent that issues of racial construction, for example, are called to be eradicated. Dr. Haber states that we should have “no more color problems. No question of race […] Nobody in the entire history of the human race has suffered for the color of his skin” (LeGin 129). Additionally, “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 in it? Which of the mysteries is to do it? Instead” (Harvey 48). This shift in focus from genre to characterization, and their influence on/perception of reality is a defining feature of postmodernism. The effect of this shift in focus is striking: “to break (deconstruct) the power of the author to impose meanings or offer a continuous narrative” (Harvey 51). Therefore, instead of the focus being on how LeGuin weaves the plot to create a work of science fiction, the focus shifts to how the characters—George Orr, Dr. Haber, and Heather—develop throughout the novel, and whether or not their respective dreams/ realities materialize and coincide.

Rejection of modernism

One of the possible ways of defining or categorizing postmodernism is by its rejection of modernism ideals. The Lathe of Heaven does this in several ways.

One is by its rejection of Freudian and Jungian ideas. Freud’s ideas of psychoanalysis and Jung’s archetypes figured heavily into modernist ways of thinking. Both obviously were also interested in dreaming and what it said about the human psyche.

Haber’s therapy sessions seem to reject basic Freudian ideas and techniques. At one point he says the only holdover modern psychology still has is the couch, but he uses it for patients to sleep on, which Freud very much opposed. For Haber, modern psychology is all about technology, not about the analysis that Freud and Jung practiced.

Haber also rejects the ideas of Freud and Jung that the unconscious was a dark and scary place:

Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That’s a Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the twentieth. Don’t be afraid of your unconscious mind! It’s not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity….. there is nothing to fear. -88.

For Freud and Jung and their patients, there was very much something to fear. They told us that our subconscious was full of dirty thoughts and secret motives and monsters that we were not even aware we had. The idea that there was a whole other layer of the brain that we could not tap into, yet was controlling our behavior to some point was a scary notion indeed.

Haber also is rejecting the Jungian ideas of archetypes, which was found throughout modernist literature. When he is trying to make George feel better, he rejects the idea that the aliens are some universal archetype that represent the fear of the unknown, and says that they were probably just influenced by sci-fi movies from the 70’s. George wants to stop before he brings out more monsters from his unconcscious, but Haber tells him he is being silly and that they must proceed.

Another way that this postmodernism rejects modernism is the “incredulity towards meta-narratives” that we discussed in class and that Harvey discusses in his article. The Lathe of Heaven definitely rejects meta-narratives in the fact that there is no consistent reality. How can there be one meta-narrative when reality is fundamentally altered every time that George Orr has an effective dream? A world with 7 billion people can not have the same narrative as a world with 1 billion. A world with racism can not have the same narrative as a world with no race. A world with aliens living among us can not have the same narrative as one that doesn’t. By rejecting the idea that the world has any singular, continuing reality the idea of any narrative to go along with reality is rejected as well.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve always imagined. -Henry David Thoreau

I randomly grabbed a bookmark from my desk for The Lathe of Heaven, and this Thoreau quote was on it, it made me laugh.