sex – American Postmodernism

Ownership and Fragmentation

In “Postmodern Blackness,” Davis explains memory as a hybrid version of history and time. She describes the cyclical occurrence of memory in Beloved, characters’ lack of control over changing the past, and the visually fragmented narrative that calls attention to lapses in memory. I like her reading of the text, regardless of whether Beloved is classified as postmodern. I also think many other factors are at work in Beloved, including internal conflict caused by lack of ownership, especially over oneself.

Most of the conflict arising throughout the novel seems to be directly connected to slavery or the aftermath of slavery. Unlike her relatives, who had been warned not to love their children as their own, Sethe becomes strongly attached to hers after leaving Sweet Home, so much so that she’d rather murder them than give them up. By the end she withdraws completely from the outside world because she feels that nothing outside her house belongs to her. Paul D also faces this dilemma, not only trying to hate beautiful things in the world because he feels they’re not for him, but also moving from room to room in Sethe’s house, ultimately relocating to the church.

Denver feels a sense of ownership over Beloved in the beginning, and Beloved, who at first has possession of the house she haunts, later takes possession of Sethe and her sanity. I wonder if the characters in Beloved exhibit tendencies toward claiming what’s theirs because they don’t really know what is theirs. Many have been forced to think that they don’t even own themselves, or that they aren’t even human.

Paul D, for example, remembers overhearing his dollar worth, and the pain and humiliation of wearing a bit. Sethe is compared to an animal several times – Paul D tells her she has four feet; the students classify her human and animal features; and later, in her horrifying stolen milk memory, a scene of both sexual assault and degradation, she is treated like an abused barnyard animal.

The process of using people as commodities or animals turns their lives into disjointed fragments. The haunted house is more human than those living inside. People are displaced. Nobody lives with their whole family, nobody knows quite where they came from, or the accuracy of the history described to them. No one is whole or in the right spot. Many of the characters don’t even know their real names. When Sethe, Beloved, and Denver finally experience a sense of unity at the end: “Beloved / You are my sister / You are my daughter / You are my face; you are me,” (255) it quickly dissolves to a breaking away from reality. Denver gets excluded from Sethe and Beloved, and Sethe and Beloved exclude themselves from the outside world entirely, spiraling into an ownership and retribution battle which affects their health and sanity.

I think the fragmented narrative literally represents the lack of wholeness many of the characters experience. At the end, Sethe lies under a quilt, appropriately, and wonders if Paul D will bathe her in sections. There is this feeling of helping one another become whole at the end, as he looks at Sethe’s split back and thinks of what Sixo said about the Thirty Mile Woman: “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order” (321).

Characters and Satirical Experiment

Like a couple people mentioned before, the J-characters in this novel seem to represent different aspects of the female psyche: Jeanine seems to play the role of want-to-be submissive housewife, Janet portrays a rational and scientific mind, Jael represents a violent rebel and would-be conqueror, and Joanna seems to be the contemplative observer. As the writer and a character in the novel, I think that Joanna’s sensibilities present her as the most fully human character in the novel; that is, she seems the most realistic, and while she does not always appear as an agent of action she seems aware of and has more access to other perspectives and possibilities (perhaps I’m attributing too much of Joanna, the writer and creator of the world and everything in it, to Joanna the character). All of the major characters, including Joanna, seem to be extremes: overly submissive, overly rational, overly aggressive, overly meditative. Their extremes make them more into archetypes than characters, inorganic representations rather than organic people.

These archetypes of female possibility, the fragmented structure of the novel, the intense interest in feminine and masculine identity, and the meta-fictional aspects of the novel draw attention to the work as an artificial construction. Science fiction does not always draw attention to itself as artificial; most times in sci-fi, we give ourselves over to willing suspension of disbelief and simply accept that the mechanics of the world are different. This novel draws does not disguise the fact that Russ is using the sci-fi genre as a platform for experimenting and investigating gender identity. I think that Anastasia and Alyssa are correct in reading the novel as a satire or parody since these forms of writing usually depend on generalizations. How can Russ not be poking fun at gender constructions when she lists in quick succession the names of women whose identities are imbedded right in the name? (“…Clarissa, who will commit suicide…” I think is a reference to the title character of the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, a modern writer and feminist (34).)

Anastasia and Alyssa’s comments remind me of the Toni Morrsion book Playing in the Dark, which I read an excerpt from recently in my theory class. One of the things that Morrison insists upon is that she recognizes that African American voices are marginalized in literary scholarship, but she does not want to trade a white Euro-centric perspective for a strictly African or African American perspective. Both white and black need to be acknowledged to understand one another, just as female and male are needed to understand one another (Janet Evanson might disagree with me, but in our world of two sexes, two genders, both must be incorporated in the whole of humanity). I think that Russ comes to a similar conclusion at the end of Female Man when Jael’s crusade to overthrow male domination comes across as extreme and just trading misogyny for misandry. While much of post-modern literature is inconclusive (I don’t think that Joanna formally allies herself with Jael and her war plans) I think we are right to question the anti-male domination view at the end.

Role Reversals

Going off of the points made in “a misandristic proposal,” I sometimes found it hard to side with the women towards the end of the novel. At the end, the book’s message seems more woman based than society based. Although I am a woman and can sympathize with the plight to become a less oppressed sex, I am also a humanitarian. The turning point for me, where this book stopped being about the possibility of a Utopian community where women are free of oppression, was with the introduction of Davy. Davy, until we realize he is a machine, acts as the perfect subject for Jael’s misandristically driven motives.

Throughout most of the novel men are the voyeurs, watching the women and objectifying them with their gaze. Joanna, Janet, and even Jeannine are often disgusted with the men that crudely attempt to court them. They do not enjoy being looked at by these men, because the often only looked at as sexual objects, rather than intelligent, meaningful humans. At the beginning of Jael and Davy’s sex scene, the previous roles of voyeur and voyee are totally reversed: “I passed into his room barefoot and watched him cured in sleep, unconscious, the golden veils of his eyelashes shadowing his cheeks…” (196). Jael objectifys him, seduces him, and uses him until she is satisfied and goes off to handle business with the three Js.

Jael refers to Davy with diminutive terms, such as “little Davy,” which is another illustration of a role reversal between the sexes. In our male-dominated society, diminutive terms are typically reserved for babies and women, to show small, weak, and insignificant they are. In Jael’s world, these type of word seems to be reserved for the male house-pets. To complete the role reversal, the sex scene is finalized with Jael’s actually penetration of Davy: “that time I made him com by slipping my finger up his anus” (197). So much for Frued’s idea of penis envy. The penis has been reduced to a pleasure tool, that will eventually be eliminated entirely for the vibrators found in Janet’s world.

Men in Jael’s land are machines that live to serve. Davy is a mere puppy, controlled by “the implants in his brain” (199). It becomes clear that Jael does not simply want equality between the sexes, she wants totality. Woman as the sole rulers of the world. But Jael doesn’t stop there. She doesn’t just want one world, she seems to want women to have all of them. Although the conclusion of the novel does not spell out Jael’s plans, it does appear that she wishes to have soldiers on other worlds, which would inevitably lead to new wars.

By the end, I wasn’t sure what to make of Jael’s intentions and the creation of Janet’s world. I had previously found Janet’s world appealing. Like Janet, I was disturbed by Jael’s new information about how her world came to be. In a way, all the Js are feminists, but in varying degrees and temperaments. Perhaps the novel is cautioning us against extremist views like Jael’s. If this is the case, then Janet would be our herione. She is a fair feminist who knows when it has gone too far. She walks away from Jael’s plan to destroy the men, possibly altering the future of her own world and ending her women’s eutopia.

Authorship, Cyborgs

“I am the author and I know,” Russ says on page 165. If, as Karin and Jael propose, all four women are the same woman, made different by their external circumstances, it seems to contradict the idea that women only appear to be the same because their circumstances repress them to the level of household objects. Maybe the four women are not the same person representing one-dimensional sides of a conflicted self, but they are just different possibilities of the same person, upon which each woman’s bizarre circumstances have shaped her so that other possibilities of herself are strange and horrifying to her (the murderous one, the lesbian, the repressed wannabe-housewife).

By claiming she is the author, Joanna Russ asserts her control over the text, but also shows the complications and uncertainties underlying that control. The alter egos filter through in interchanging blurbs. Jeannine says, on page 122, “Who am I, what am I, what do I want, where do I go, what world is this?” I think the multiple realities and personalities the J’s find themselves faced with represent the feeling of dissociation present in real life. This disjointedness and confusion is represented by the jumbled, fragmented structure, which Alana commented on earlier.

Also, as Anthony brought up, there seems to be an idea of self-criticism and self-deprecation, as well as multiple layers of authorship. There is the recurring question: “I know what I am, but what’s my brand name?” (174), and an unending search for self-identification in the midst of multiple dehumanized worlds. The book as a whole, which acknowledges its author and offers its own harsh criticism, is as self-aware, self-effacing, and confused as its characters are.

Examples of dehumanization are both literal and symbolic. Almost every conversation between a man and woman is infuriating and results in the complete ignorance or mishearing of the woman’s words. This happens, too, between women, as in the conversation on page 113-114, where Jeannine’s words are misheard but unnoticed anyway. Russ seems to grapple with how one can possibly be his/her own person, or even a person at all, in the face of oppression. And of course, the cyborgs are literally dehumanized.

Speaking of cyborgs, what do people think about the half-changed people in Manworld? And does anyone quite know what to make of Davy, the robot/sex toy Jael has? He’s this ultimately dehumanized man in the middle of a book where women are the ones who are constantly objectified. Thinking about it more, I realized that while women are the main characters, men are also dehumanized stereotypes. She kind of takes the humanness out of everyone, and gets away with it because she’s created all these alternate worlds. But men are so oddly one-dimensional, except maybe Cal, who is strangely complicated and conflicted, both generically repressive and oversensitive. And then here comes this beautiful objectified robot-man? What are we supposed to get from all of this?

Also, on the topic of women and technology in the news, here’s an article from the Washington Post yesterday, called “Limbaugh, the Vatican and a Woman’s Place”: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/georgetown/2009/03/limbaugh_the_vatican_and_a_womans_place.html.

The article is very short, but touches on a lot of nerves (women’s rights, Catholicism, political affiliation). Some passionate user comments follow.

Freud, Sex in the City, The Female Man, and Google

I am struck my the ever-shifting pronoun usage in this book. I can’t keep up–I, me, us, we. Who are these women? Clearly they have separate identities, but often they appear as one. In part three, Joanna takes Janet to a party; this section appears to be laden with one of the first instances of narrator disorientation. Joanna introduces Janet to her friends (whose names unexplainably all end in -issa) at the party as her Swedish cousin. Janet quickly enters into a discussion with the Ginger Mustache. From this point on in the chapter, the pronoun references are muttled. “She showed him all her teeth. He saw a simile. […] and he took us by the wrist.[…] ‘Let me go’ said Janet.[…] All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party.[…] enfolding us in his powerful arms (emphasis added 45). How can Joanna be observing Janet talking and then refer to her as part of herself?

After this section, I was left wondering if they in fact are just one woman inhabited by many. Come to think of it, Cal even acknowledges this morphing when he says to Jeannine on page four, “The vanishing woman [referring to Janet]. That’s you.” She doesn’t deny it. Just for the sake of experimentation, I can’t help but try out the theory that they are actually one woman. I have heard it said that the four woman on Sex and the City aren’t really four distinct women, but rather alter egos of Carrie: Miranda, the career-driven one, Charlotte, the uptight prude, and Samantha the over-sexualized woman. While the stereotypes don’t align perfectly with Joanna, the fiercely independent 1970’s feminist, we have Jeannine, the mild-mannered woman waiting to marry; Janet, the futuristic Whilawayean who challenges all gender stereotypes; and Jael the warrior. So instead of Sex and the City, couldn’t these women in The Female Man be parts of Freud’s theory of the id? If I had to label the id, the unconscious pleasure or need of instant gratification, it may be Janet in her sexual desires for other women, or her Jael in her animalist tendencies. The ego, whose job is conscious and ready to mediate between the id and superego, may be Joanna as she tries to explain society to Janet. And the superego, who seeks to act in socially appropriate ways, may be Jeannine confined by her expectations to her family, to herself, to society to marry, to make something of her life. Again, not a perfect fit, but it might prove to be useful in our discussions.

To the question about Women in Technology:

Here is a NYT piece on Marissa Mayer, 33 year-old first female engineer for Google and now VP of search product and user experience. I thought the angle of this piece was fascinating. It didn’t just report on her work, but dabbled into the personal, including what her apartment looks like, the talk shows on which she appears, her hobbies, her Yelp interviews, etc. Mayer herself seems to be spearheading her own publicity, but I find it fascinating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Here is another article about her from a San Francisco paper:

http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/adventures-marissa

After these articles appeared, Gawker ruthlessly tore Mayer and the articles apart.

http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-failure

Technology in the Female Man

In the Harraway article that we read she expresses hope in the possibility that we can be saved if we all learn to live as cyborgs, a blending of the human and the machine. Joanna Russ would appear to agree with this idea as her Utopian society Whileaway in The Female Man is made up almost entirely of cyborgs.

The people on Whileaway are trained to become one with technology from birth, and eventually it becomes a part of them. Although its description seems rustic and pastoral, the society of Whileaway is only possible through their use of and coexistence with technology. I have no idea what an induction helmet is, but it must be pretty awesome if “with their induction helmets on their heads, their toes controlling the green peas, their fingers the vats and controls, their back muscles the carrots, their abdomens the water supply,” (51). Not to mention that at some point they figured out how to not only have babies without any males, but to genetically modify those babies to an almost perfection.

My question is this: Is technology necessary to conquer nature? Not only trees and butterflies nature, but human nature, or more specifically female nature? Russ spends a great deal of time explaining to us that the idea of “female nature” or “maternal instincts” are just social constructs that are meant as a mode of domination by males (and other females as well). Men in the novel constantly assume that it is part of a woman’s DNA that she will be happy with pretty clothes, or that all she wants to do is sit on the couch and eat bon bons while her husband Climbs Everest (what is a bon bon anyway? I’ve always wondered that). So why is it so necessary that technology be so ingrained in her idea of a utopia. Women are only seen as strong enough to exist on their own on Whileaway, and only with the help of all their technology.

Janet would be considered the most advanced J, or most enlightened, in a way. However, her and the rest of the people on Whileaway are completely dependent on advances in technology to survive. Jael would be the strongest J physically, and the one could argue the toughest. However, she relies on her robot boy-toy for pleasure. Also, the women of Womenland are dependant on technlogiocal advances to survive using it as a means of commerce, namely baby farming and time travel. Jeannine seems to be the most connected to nature, with her cat (Mr. Frosty!) and her plant, but she seems to be the weakest of the J’s to me.

If Russ was attempting to get across the point that women can do whatever men could do and that the differences between the sexes is illusory, why this emphasis on technology?

I may have completely misread the novel. I am assuming that Whileaway is meant to be a utopia. It is possible that it was not meant to be and therefore everything I said above would be pretty much worthless.

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.

Mr Monster demands smut of the highest caliber

Note on the photo…i did an image search for “house of leaves” and eventually came across this photo…which goes to show, in a world of endless space (weather the house or the internet), youre bound to run into george clinton. at least thats what my grandma always told me.

I was going to write about something like instances of form and function in-and out-world (in relation to the text) or how seriously we can take the narration and subsequent notations, but it seems like thats been covered rather extensively. Then I was going to write about sex, but Alyssa did a pretty awesome job on that…still im out of ideas, so sex it is.

I particularly enjoyed her idea of the little death and how each subsequent sexual encounter is a loss of Truant’s self. I actually was talking to my friend in the writing center this morning and was wondering how a strung out jobless tweak with a broken front tooth got so many women in a successive string. We came to a few conclusions — one, the encounters are (intended to be, by danielewski) in someway fabricated or embellished as per the unreliability of said narrator. two , its LA and most of the women were in the kind of bars where jobless dentally-injured men hang out. 3 the author wanted to be cool by proxy. None of these previous ideas are particularly intriguing to me, but the situation just didnt make a whole lot of sense. Though, what does in this house?

..reasons 4 and 5(theyre kind of intertwined i think), however may give hint as to why these events are documented, or at least they may come close . Reason 4 was pretty much Alyssa’s conclusion, that each encounter was a narrative device to show a loss of self, or descent(further) ((i actually had a little bit to say about how both truant and navidson (potentially us as readers and potentially zampano if i learn more of him…im not done the book yet..) begin to model campells monomyth…’hero’s journey’ …in certain ways, from initial refusal to descent, threshold passing, etc (this chart is pretty okay for a refresher), but without finishing the book i cant make that argument stand up much beyond the “initiation” phase, or phase I.

Anyway, in addition to reason 4 (alyssa’s theorem, if she were old and greek), reason 5, which i cant decide if its entangled with or the exact opposite of reason 4… is that perhaps Truant has sex for the same reason Tom tells jokes to Mr Monster, and Navidson needs to be a savior, and Holloway shoots rifles, and Karen ignores….its an attempt to hold onto something quintessentially them..a “me-ness” or “them-ness” needed to be kept safe in the face of a place that erases or destroys the things not specifically held onto or enacted — like when, i believe its jed…or maybe wax…notes that the buttons and backpack have all but disintegrated..he says something like (rough rough paraphrase) “in this place, its like if you don’t think about something, it disappears/gets destroyed”…

That is to say that Truant needs something primally and concretely “Truant-y” ..something of his ‘old’ life to lean on so that he doesn’t disappear completely. Why the graphic depictions? perhaps the more in detail he recalls the events, the more real they are, and the more concrete “it” he has to hold on to. If he “doesnt remember/think of ” something, these things, perhaps they will disintegrate into nothing, and take him with them? maybe, theres no room for vagary in the house of leaves. maybe blur gets eaten.

Why so much sex?

It seems like Danielewski has been very deliberate about everything he uses in the text, which makes me wonder about all the sex. I’m thinking back to when Professor Sample discussed an interview with the author. Danielewski said that nobody could think of anything about the text that he hadn’t already thought of. So clearly, he is aware of most of the elements in his text and has used these elements intentionally. This whole mindset seems the opposite of postmodern, but I digress. Back to the point – if everything is so deliberate, then what is Danielewski’s intention with all the vivid sex scenes?

I don’t think that he is doing it just to be vulgar and off-putting, however a case could be made for that. Most of the book, starting from “this is not for you,” seems meant to stop the reader from getting through to the end. With all the lengthy footnotes, references to appendices, and switches in narration, it seems obvious that he has intentionally made this book a difficult read. So I think an argument could be made that the detailed sex scenes are just another way to hinder the reader’s progress. But the harder he makes it, the more I want to get to the end. I wonder if he anticipated this reaction in his readers (I’m sure that he would claim he did), but I digress again.

Anyway, although that argument could be made about the sex scenes, I plan to suggest something slightly different. The French refer to the refractory period after orgasm as “La petite mort,” which means “the little death.” This phrase is meant describe fatigue, spiritual release, melancholy, and other symptoms that result after orgasm. But it gets even weirder. A study published in the European Journal of Neuroscience found that this is actually a fairly accurate term: “To some degree, the present results seem to be in accordance with this notion, because female orgasm is associated with decreased blood flow in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is crucial for behavioural control.”

Keeping this in mind, what can we make of all the sex and, more specifically, after-sex experiences in the text? Well, to start with, I might argue that “the little death” represents a loss of self that happens during sex, which results in meloncholy. Death is the greatest representation of losing one’s self. If we approach the sex scenes in these terms, it becomes easy to see why Johnny gradually becomes more depressed and, well, lost. Just like the labrinth, the vivid sex scenes seem to work as yet another metaphor for losing one’s self.

Confusion of Authorship and the Gothic Novel

I know that as a literature grad student I am supposed to be able to step back and recognize fiction for what it is: made up stories about made up people ( I know that this definition is overly-simplistic, but whatever). That being said, what I have read in House of Leaves so far seriously creeps me out. I’ve only managed to read the first 80 pages that were assigned, but I am hooked, and may not get any sleep tonight because I want to know what happens next. The last time a book freaked me out this much was when I misguidedly read Stepehn King’s It in middle school, alone, at night, and constantly worrying that a killer clown was going to come out from under my bed and do terrible things to me. A coincidence I noticed was that Bret Easton Ellis offered a blurb praising this book saying that both Thomas Pynchon and Stephen King would want to bow down to Danielewski after reading this book. It is a coincidence because the three books that pop into my head when I read House of Leaves are It by Stephen King, The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, and Ellis’ Lunar Park.

Lunar Park is probably the book I most think of when I read this because it explores many of the same themes as House of Leaves (although admittedly many years later). The main two of these themes being the hiding/layering of authorship and the physical house itself as the sourc of terror. Lunar Park is a book written by Bret Easton Ellis, author of such works as Less than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, whose protaganist is Bret Easton Ellis, author of such works as Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho. The first sentence of Lunar Park is “You do an awfully good impression of yourself.” With this sentence, and throughout the novel Ellis attempts to hide/layer the actual authorship of the book by writing about the fictional Bret Easton Ellis writing this book. The blur between the fictional Ellis’ and the real Ellis’ life are purposefully blurred to the point that his fictional actress wife, Jayne Dennis (I think, I have not read it in awhile), has her own website ( on which she is reported to have formally dated Keanu Reeves……Whoa!). The novel includes enough actual facts about Ellis’ life that it is hard for the reader to know where the fiction starts and real life begins. Like many of my classmates, I am so completely caught up in Zampano’s/Truant’s story that I forget that it is all just coming from Danielewski. I keep feeling like if I stop reading and get on Netflix, I can put the Navidson Record on my queue, and I REALLY want to watch it. As where Ellis creates the fictional Ellis to hide/confuse authorship, Danielewski manages to completely mask himself and the reader forgets he even exists.

The other thing I noticed was that there seems to be something gothic about this novel’s treatment of the home. In gothic novels danger/otherness/creepiness shifted from coming from outside the house to coming from within or from the actuall house itself. This most likely had something to do with Victorian mores about sex according to some scholars, but that is neither here nor there, the house, home or living space generated the otherness/spookiness. I just thought this was interesting as we have discussed how postmodernism has been a reaction to other modes of literature. We have mainly discussed how it relates/ contrasts to modernism, but House of Leaves seems to be a postmodern take on the more traditional gothic novel.

Oh, and if anyone else out there is an Ellis fan, how awesome does the trailer for The Informers look? Spoiler: the answer, pretty awesome.

Layers and Reliability

I believe I mentioned in class that one of my students had the most bizarre reaction when I mentioned that I was going to be reading The House of Leaves. One day, when I told her I was going to start reading the book that night, she cried, “Oh no! Don’t read it at night! Read it during the day when you’re sure of yourself and the world around you!” Her reaction made me laugh, but when I did go to start reading the book later that evening I must admit that I was a bit hesitant. J Maybe it was the warnings of my student that got me, but I did find the style to be rather ominous. I kept waiting for the horror I might discover on the next page. Although I still feel that Danielewski has successfully created an eerie, foreboding mood, I’ve overcome that initial hesitation and I am very much intrigued by the style of the book!

Several people have commented on the many layers of the book. I find this layering just fascinating! We’re reading a book told from the point of view of a narrator (a “frame narrator”?) who is piecing together a book from scraps of writings about a film which, as others have mentioned, is also fragmented. Then there is the layer of false support and commentary found in the footnotes. Additionally, Truant’s compilation also offers him a chance to reflect in journal-like writings. Just like the house in the novel, these layers seem never-ending.

In addition to the layers of the novel, I’m also interested in the names Danielewski chose. Susanna discussed the significance of Truant’s name. I’m also intrigued by Truant’s friend, Lude. Lude is rather lewd, but, then again, so is Truant. However, by going through Zampano’s writing, Truant begins to think on a deeper level, to some level going beyond the lewd lifestyle of smoking pot, getting drunk, and having sex with multiple (and random) partners. However, Lude (or the lewd lifestyle) keeps interrupting his thoughts (50).

As others have mentioned, Truant’s lifestyle has other implications…he can be seen as an unreliable narrator. Sara mentioned that Truant’s errors make him unreliable. I had a very different view, though. I actually see Truant has a rather reliable narrator because he is presented as very “real”. Truant’s voice is very conversational. He apologizes for how he is expressing his thoughts, he uses clichés (which we’re all guilty of), and he does make mistakes. Also, Truant demonstrates an understanding that time distorts memory. Within the first few pages of his introduction he admits that a particular memory “isn’t entirely accurate” but states that he is trying to be (xvi). Sure, we might not be getting an accurate account of this fictional tale, but I believe that Truant is presented as a rather real, believable character trying to make sense of what he has stumbled upon.

Speaking of real…I was relieved to learn that I was not the only one who struggled with Baudrillard’s essay on the real and the simulated. (I honestly struggled a bit with Foucault’s, too.) I think there have been some interesting comments about the connection between Baudrillard’s piece and The House of Leaves. I particularly liked Susanna’s observation that “Zampano’s reality becomes Truant’s reality”. From what I could gather, Baudrillard seems to make the argument that, due to representation and simulation, the real and the imagined become intertwined, and the imagined (or, in our case, the seemingly impossible) becomes another sort of reality. This thought really came back to me when I was reading Truant’s introduction and he states, “Zampano knew from the get go that what’s real or isn’t doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same” (xx). I feel this statement really connects to the idea of constructed realities. At this point in the novel we’re also seeing Truant dealing with consequences from what is not truly real but has become real to him through his connection to Zampano and his work. (Did that make sense? J)

I look forward to discussing the novel and the articles in class tomorrow!

~Jennifer Kathryn Fulton

Either dream of world peace OR turtles from outer space

I also thought that Le Guin was nudging the concept of either/or with George’s personality and obviously his name. The first thing I thought of with the logical concept of either/ or is the Elliott Smith record (note a very postmodern pop culture reference), the other is Kierkegaard’s philosophical doctrine; the latter I think has a little more weight in this discussion so I’ll think I’ll pursue it. I don’t know too much about Kierkegaard but I know he typically wrote about concepts like fear and dread and doubt of religion. I searched Wikipedia for Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and found that the “Either” side of his argument is a worldview that adopts a purely aesthetic lifestyle such as drinking, casual sex, vanity, and any other indulgencies that satisfy the self. The “Or” side of the argument, which is given by a judge, purposes that in the later stages of life one adopts an ethical lifestyle, one that acts responsibly and morally. The doctrine attempts to answer Aristotle’s question “How should we live?” which I thought to be the question Le Guin purposes to the characters of The Lathe of Heaven.

Dr. Haber is an aggressive man but not evil; it is repeated several times, even by George, that he is benevolent: one page 83 “Haber wanted to make the world better for humanity.” However, Haber’s idea of “How should we live?” is presumptuous. He thinks that his idea of a world will be good for the people, but George knows that no one can possibly be responsible enough to make a decision that will affect everyone. George disproves Haber’s snake bit analogy by arguing that no man can make a decision for all of mankind: on page 156 George says, “Just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to be…in touch. Haber isn’t in touch…means are all we’ve got…he can’t let be.” And on page 140 George says to Haber, “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way…the world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be (one of several Beatles references).” In reference to Kierkegaard’s book, George Orr represents the ethical side in his decision to try and stop dreaming and stop Haber’s dream suggestions, hence the name – Orr.

I don’t think George is merely average and timid. I think that his discourse with Haber in chapters 6 and especially chapters 9 and 10 shows that George is really contemplating this power and showing the flaws in Haber’s dream suggestions. He is living in a world that is pulling him one way or the other, either with Haber’s ideology or Heather’s assertiveness. His passivity is certainly there, but it is marked by intelligence (most likely an average person with this ability would make his life not average).

I also had trouble seeing this text as postmodern when it had prevailing science fiction themes. But I think that the altercation of reality by George’s dreams is consistent with Postmodernism’s critique of reality. Portland is constantly morphing yet no one seems to question this bizarre reality, except George. The question of what is reality is brought into question which Postmodern text attempts to ask. Also, Harvey brings up the connection between postmodernism and science fiction in his essay, “The boundary between fiction and science fiction has dissolved, while postmodernist characters often seem confused as to which they are in, and how they should act with respect to it.” If anyone is confused in what world they live in it is George Orr.

Style and Reason

Pynchon’s novel was quite the journey. While reading, I felt like Oedipa, trying to put reason into a world of chaos. I was immediately struck by how bizarre the plot of the novel is! Chapter 1 is considerably realistic and believable as we’re introduced to Oedipa, Mucho, and Oedipa’s new position as co executor of her ex-lover’s will. But realism really goes out the window when Oedipa begins a relationship with Metzger. I felt that the tipping point over into the completely bizarre and unbelievable was the scene in which the hairspray can flew destructively around the room. After this scene, Pynchon creates a rather surreal atmosphere that would only be believable as a dream or hallucination. Among other things, the Paranoids performances and tag-along nature, the constructed history, and the intricate web Oedipa attempts to weave through to solve the mystery of the Trystero really make the piece seem like a dream or hallucination.

I found it very interesting that this style is very much in contrast to that of Lethem’s in “Super Goat Man”. As we discussed last class, Lethem sets up a rather believable, yet surrealist, plot. The characters do not question Super Goat Man’s presence in their society. As the characters are not phased by his existence and presence, the reader buys into Super Goat Man’s existence as well. However, Pynchon clearly sets up a storyline that is not believable and, although he includes touches of reality, it does not seem that he intends it to be so. Interestingly, though, like Lethem’s characters, Pynchon’s main character, Oedipa Maas, buys into the world Pynchon has created.

In fact, Oedipa seems determined to put reason into her world and make sense of the mysteries. While she does partake in the madness of her society (as seen through her affair with Metzger), she does “[dedicate] herself […] to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind” (147). Metzger accuses her of being a “lib, overeducated [broad]” (59), but Oedipa essentially states that she is conservative when she confesses that she is a Young Republican. Although she becomes immersed in society, Oedipa seems to have a higher standard. She does not succumb to a reliance on pills (LSD), and, although she has an affair with Metzger, she declines other sexual advances. She also does seem to have a desire to “right wrongs” (59), as Metzger accuses, as seen in her daydream about taking the old gentleman’s landlord to court and her anger at the shopkeeper selling armbands.

Oedipa’s desire for a reason and order is clearly seen in the scene in which she is pulled into a dance at a hotel. Everyone was dancing however they wanted and Oedipa wondered “how long […] it could go on before collisions became a serious hindrance” (107). Pynchon seems to be using this dancing scene as a metaphor for Oedipa’s world and, on a larger scale, America. Oedipa doesn’t understand how the dancers can continue in an atmosphere of randomness and chaos. With everyone doing their own thing there are bound to be problems. When Oedipa leaves the dance, she “feels demoralized”. Ultimately, Oedipa concludes that the mystery, “what Inverarity had left behind”, was “the legacy [of] America” (147). With this view it seems that Pynchon is commenting on the chaos of society by presenting the reader with a character who, unsuccessfully, attempts to make sense of the disorder. Oedipa reminds herself that she lives in America where “you let it happen. Let it unfurl” (123).

In the end, we’re still left to wonder whether the whole mystery was a scheme. Pynchon seems to hint that the whole story could, in fact, even be a dream. We know Oedipa has trouble with hallucinations, and the narrator tells us that “[l]ater, possibly, [Oedipa] would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed” (95). Is it then possible that the entire mystery, or at least parts of it, is imagined? Is the chaos of society a nightmare?

Response to first week’s reading

Foer’s narrative is probably the only one of the short stories that seemed relatively clear from the beginning. It draws attention to the importance of listening to what is unspoken and untold and cleverly frames the story through the narrator’s instructions on the uses of the “silence marks”:: with each explanation, we are given a piece of information about him that ultimately narrates his story. I’ve come across some writings in psychoanalytic criticism, such as Cathy Caruth’s “Unclaimed Experience,” that emphasizes the significance of reading into the silences that is particularly to be exercised with narratives that deal with trauma. I wouldn’t know how to approach this story in terms of psychoanalysis, at least not for now, but I get the sense that we are left with an opportunity of exploring the narrator’s silences more deeply and examining not only what he doesn’t say in his conversations but what he doesn’t tell his audience.

Don DeLillo’s “The Uniform” reminds me a lot of Joseph Heller’s novels in terms of its use of elements of absurdity and irony. It appears to me that this story follows the style of black comedy and I see the “cartoonishness” that Dr. Sample points to in the portrayals of the killing and raping that paradoxically makes the scenes all the more disturbing. This narrative style serves the purpose of depicting a grotesque image without the descriptiveness expected and with simplicity and flatness that makes it more comical in a way. But to understand the purpose of this use, I’m reminded of something Heller had said about Catch-22, that he had wanted his readers to laugh and then look back in horror at what the they were laughing at. There’s also the recurrent attempt to articulate a traumatic experience (Harlow and her history of sexual abuse) and not being taken seriously and not being capable of comprehending it that we also see in Catch-22. Is the excessive use of absurdity and hilarity a retreat from the futile attempts of expressing the horrific and the grotesque? Does that suggest the inadequacy of language in these cases?

Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” I liked the most, despite its difficulty and ambiguity. By taking the setting and the several references to horror films into consideration, the story seems like a mimicry of horror films of the 80’s and early 90’s that typically start with a group of unsuspecting teenagers gathering at a party where there’s music and beer, midway through the villain crashes and the slaughter begins. But in this story the zombies never show up. I’d hate to take this story back to psychoanalysis, too, but does that mean that the whole idea of zombies is just in the protagonist’s head? And why does he continuously slip into different identities as the narrator uses different names for him?

As to Hassan’s “POSTmodernISM” I was initially put off by its difficulty as I had trouble understanding what he was talking about, but reading more into it, I kind of get him. I think his article is interesting and useful. I especially appreciate the attempt he makes to compare Modernism and Postmodernism and show how they are different. It’s quite an interesting and ambitious attempt, and I mean ambitious in a good way, considering the time his article was published.

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.

The Experience of Postmodernism

Many of the previous posts have discussed this feeling that it is unsettling and seemingly impossible to try to deduce Postmodernism, and I wanted to say that while I feel the same way, I also think it is comforting to consider that the experience itself may be the point. I get the impression that these writings intend to unsettle us and that unsettling feeling can also apply to understanding the point of the pieces themselves and the point of the movement in general.

I, too, felt the inclination to look at the stories as an aggregate group. I concur with Alana that the first thing I noticed was “the element of something unsettling or something that doesn’t ‘fit’-that forces you to stop and think or retrace your step as it jars you out of the rhythm of reading.” I, too, was more than uncomfortable with the content in DeLillo’s story, and though we had no warning of the content, I think that is, again, part of the experience. While I had to tell myself multiple times to look past my own offense at the content, I can admit that the story effectively shocks, disturbs, and unsettles.

In fact, the dehumanization Sara discussed in her post as applied to Foer’s piece also pertains to DeLillo’s story; both the characters in the story and the readers themselves may be viewed as dehumanized. I went back, after reading “The Uniforms,” to find how many times gratuitous sexual violence occurs in the tale, and I found at least eleven examples. I am curious, having never read DeLillo before, whether he usually includes this kind of sexual violence and why. As I said, I think feeling unsettled is important in Postmodernism, or at least a little confused, but when I read this story in particular, the excessive mentions of rape and castration distract and offend so much that I feel more disgust than appreciation. Then again, I feel as if that may be the point.

Another common element in some of this week’s reading is the questioning. I have already mentioned the reader’s experience of confusion, but perhaps the same is true for many of the characters in the stories, as well as in Cage’s piece. For example, in “Super Goat Man,” after the superhero fails to save one of the frat boys from his six-story fall, the narrator asks, “Had the hero failed the crisis? Caused it, by some innate provocation? Or was the bogus crisis unworthy, and the outcome its own reward?” (73). The narrator questions, and probes those questions in the (confused) reader, what it all means when the bizarre hero does save the drunk college student. Likewise, in Foer’s piece, the misunderstandings which are carefully delineated for the reader almost all result from questions that the narrator’s family members pose to him, to which he cannot or does not verbally respond. For example, the narrator’s mother asks, “Are you dating at all?… But you’re seeing people, I’m sure. Right?… Are you ashamed of the girl? Are you ashamed of me?” (82). In this case, the mother cannot understand the son, but he tries, perhaps successfully, to understand them both.

And in Cage’s piece, almost every statement incites questions, though few are actually phrased in the form of questions. The questions that do appear tend to ask the reader to think through society’s logic, like this one: “Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don’t ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eighth (October), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?”( 204). This question reveals a logical fallacy and effectively pokes fun at what society would call “logic” at all.

The questioning in these pieces does not necessarily lead to answers, as is the case in much of Postmodernism, but it sure does make you think. What I am wondering, and I am guessing we will address much of this in class, is what it was in our American society which affected our literature so much? I can name a few triggers on my own, but I am very interested in the historical events and trends which triggered, in particular, the tendency to disturb and to question which is evident in this literary era.