Don DeLillo--White Noise (1985)

     A staple of “Intro to Postmodernism” courses (with sentences such as, “Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion?”), DeLillo’s 1984 novel is at times an amusing period piece, from a time when the concept of “Hitler Studies” and “Elvis Studies” were considered equally absurd.  However, the “fear of death” subplot which takes over at the end really fizzles for me; I would have rather the novel stayed in the realm of ironic academia, rather than the intrigue of sexual politics and stolen drugs.  Still, it’s worth reading, if for nothing else than the spot-on description of the annual arrival of new students on campus which opens the novel.

     The novel opens with the arrival of station wagons on campus in the fall and tabular descriptions of the objects students bring with them.  Not only does this provide an entertaining insight into the life of mid-eighties college students, but such repeated lists demonstrate how such assemblies of commodities function as tribal demarcations in postmodern America.  The scene is narrated by protagonist Jack Gladney, professor and chair of Hitler Studies at the “College-on-the-Hill,” a middle-aged man who lives with his wife Babette and their children from previous marriages.

     A primary theme of the novel is fear of death as the constant modern state.  From the beginning of the novel, the idea of death appears again and again, as Jack’s children and stepchildren volunteer to be victims in simulated disasters.  Early on, Jack and Babette discuss whether wealth might provide a defense against death: “Maybe there is no death as we know it.  Just documents changing hands” (6).  Even more significantly, Jack finds himself saying in a lecture that “All pots tend to move deathward.  This is the nature of plots” (26).  This theme reaches its climax at the end of the novel, as Jack confronts the inventor of the pill which is alleged to combat fear of death.  Babette had sex with the man in exchange for access to the pills: interestingly, the drug’s side effect is that it makes the patient unable to distinguish between signifier (the words “speeding bullet”) and the signified (and actual bullet).  This seems to support a Lacanian understanding of language, that individuation (and, by extension, understanding of mortality and fear of death) is a result of the realization of the difference between signifier and signified, as a result of the separation from the parent and recognition of the self as a separate entity.

     The novel also provides a commentary on the state of the academy at the time.  In 1985, the idea of “cultural studies” was avant-garde enough to merit parody in White Noise through the existence of disciplines such as “Hitler Studies.”  Academia here is still a very masculine enclave, as Jack’s department is composed primarily of men who wear “rumpled clothes, need, haircuts, cough into their armpits.  Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague.  The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion, and intrigue” (9).

      In this reading, I was quite struck by the attitudes toward women in the novel, especially with respect to Babette.  Here is the first description of Babette in the novel:

Babette is tall and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her.  Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond.  If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived.  Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness.  Ample women do not plan such things.  They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body. (5)

 Such “ampleness” is connected throughout to maternity, sensuality, and—as an outgrowth of these—a certain kind of ignorance and stupidity.  The description continues:

Babette, disheveled, has the careless dignity of someone too preoccupied with serious matters to know or care what she looks like.  Not that she is a gift-bearer of great things as the world generally reckons them.  She gathers and tends the children, teaches a course in an adult education program, belongs to a group of volunteers who read to the blind. (5)

Here, the tabular style gives Jack’s analysis of Babette—her guilelessness and lack of greatness—a certain tone of authority.  Babette is different from Jack’s former wives, whom he describes as “a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community” (6).  Change “intelligence” to “intelligentsia,” and you’d have a decent description of Jack himself.

      Jack is not alone in his condescension toward women: his friend and fellow academic Murray has a similar attitude toward women: “it’s not the bodies of women that I ultimately crave but their minds.  The mind of a woman.  The delicate chambering and massive unidirectional flow.  What fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing stockings as she crosses her legs.  That little staticky sound of rustling nylon can make me happy on several levels” (11).  Men of the mind seem incapable of seeing women as anything other than Woman-with-a-capital-W—when it comes to women, these men can only see the signifier, and not the signified.

Thomas Pynchon--The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)

“There was that high magic to low puns”(105)

This would be a fantastic novel to teach as an introduction to postmodernism.  The novel follows a postmodern parody of a conspiracy, as the main character, Oedipa Maas, pursues what starts as a simple will executor duty into a labyrinthine conspiracy involving underground mail delivery which dates backs to eighteenth century Italy.  Following clues in play, in stamp watermarks, and a mysterious symbol of a muted horn which appears in stamps, bathroom graffiti, and doodles, Oedipa is driven near madness as she attempts to find order in this chaos, attempting to discover constellations among the clues.  The meaning of the enigmatic title is not revealed until the novel’s end, when one of the “lots” being auctioned off in the estate of the late Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa’s former lover whose vast estate she has been put partly in charge of.  Lot 49 contains the postage stamps which contain clues to the conspiracy; the “crying,” or auctioning, of this lot may reveal the authenticity of the conspiracy.  The novel ends with the crying of lot 49, never revealing the ultimate answers which Oedipa has sought.

One of the most metatextual elements in the novel is the play within the novel, the production of the Jacobean revenge play The Courier’s Tragedy described by members of the Paranoids and attended by Oedipa and Metzger.  The ridiculously complicated plot, so typical of a Jacobean play, itself forms a commentary on the very nature of plot itself.  Until this point, the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 has seemed rather outlandish: with this embedded narrative, the novel seems less postmodern and more in keeping with a much longer tradition of story-telling—“It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse” (58).  More specifically, the description of a particular moment in the plot of The Courier’s Tragedy¸ when “an ambiguity begins to creep in among the words,”  could also be describing the novel at this point: “Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as a metaphor.  But now,…a new mode of expression takes over.  It can only be called a ritual reluctance.  Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, given the excesses of the preceding acts, what these things could possibly be” (55).

This is not my favorite novel I've read.  Part of the problem, I think, was going from Mango Street and Ellen Foster (not to mention Downton Abbey), all very emotional reads with well-developed characters, to this novel, where emotion and character are beside the point.  I kept wanting to read Flannery O'Connor--or Spider Robinson, whose books (at least the ones I've read, which are mostly in the Callahan's and Lady Sally series) have a similar Vonnegut self-consciousness about them but also usually have characters with some emotional depth.  I realize that emotional depth is not a literary requirement--and isn't always one for my enjoyment--but I think that this transition was a bit too jarring to be completely enjoyable.  (Though I still really like Cat's Cradle--it's very possible, though, that timing was involved in that as well.)

Kaye Gibbons--Ellen Foster (1987)

In her stunning debut novel, Gibbons creates the character of Ellen, who tells her own story of survival, escape, and courage.  Told in the first person primarily through flashback from the vantage point of her life in the “Foster” home with her “new mama,” she recounts her mother’s suicide and her father’s abuse and alcoholism.  Shuttled from her dangerous home to a brief respite with her art teacher, her dying grandmother’s home, her mean aunt’s, and finally to a home in which she’s finally safe, Ellen’s voice is so moving for its combination of honesty and hopefulness, even in the midst of death and abuse.

A primary theme of the novel is the idea of family, as Ellen continues to imagine what the word means.  She plays “catalog” by herself, picking out pictures of the things she imagines are needed to complete a real family, from cute babies to camping equipment.  She imagines coming up with a shopping list that she could take to a store “if they made such a store and say to the man behind the counter give me this and this and this. And he would hand you back a home” (94).  While she lives with her father, the closest to family she experiences is with her “colored” friend Starletta and her parents, who pick cotton for a living.  Though originally Ellen believes herself to be superior to them because of her whiteness, by the end of the novel she realizes that this attitude to have been a complete mistake, a realization which leads her to feel even more gratitude for Starletta’s friendship. 

Ellen’s coping mechanisms throughout the trauma that has pervaded her young life are astonishing, hilarious, and heartbreaking. After her terribly mean grandmother dies, she arranges all of the artificial flowers in the house in a circle around her corpse in an attempt to decorate her enough to make her pleasing to Jesus.  Explaining why she enjoys telling herself the same stories repeatedly, she says, “You see if you tell yourself the same tale over and over again enough times then the tellings become separate stories and you will generally fool yourself into forgetting you only started with one solitary season out of your life” (49).  Or when the school counselor expresses concern that she has started signing her name as “Ellen Foster” on her schoolwork, she explains, “That may not be the name God or my mama gave me but that is my name now.  Ellen Foster.  My old family wore the other name out and I figured I would take the name of my new family.  That one is fresh.  Foster” (88).  Ellen is quite frank about her struggling and suffering, but she is equally determined to survive.

Bobbie Ann Mason--Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)

In the title story, the coexisting layers of history have different meanings to different characters.  History—a connection to a sense of larger forces--is seen in opposition to ordinary life.  The events which are most important to people’s lives are not necessarily mapped onto history.

In “Third Monday,” the last story in this collection, a character observes that, “The twentieth century’s taking all the mysteries out of life” (226).  However, what this collection of stories show is that despite all of these changes, life is still full of the mysteries of life, love, and death.  What the twentieth century has in fact done is bring about enough change that the old answers—marriage until death do us part, job loyalty, and unshakeable job and family loyalty—are no longer dependable.

The collection contains several of Mason’s most anthologized stories, including the title story and “Residents and Transients.”  In “Shiloh,” truck driver Leroy is home on disability leave, which has thrown his marriage to Norma Jean off-balance.  Home again, Leroy sees the changes to his small Kentucky town, changes which he missed when he was on the road.  Unable to adapt, Leroy and Norma Jean take a trip to Shiloh, the Civil War battle site (and location of his mother-in-law’s honeymoon).  It’s at Shiloh that Norma Jean announces that she wants to leave Leroy. 

In what some critics refer to as “Kmart realism,” these stories depict a South (usually Western Kentucky) in which old referents—such as Shiloh—have lost their mythic hold, and characters struggle (with varying degrees of success) to find new symbols and traditions.  This is a South where children are used to divorce and adults buy pot in the Kmart parking lot; women undergo chemo for breast cancer; and family ties become complicated and are forced to stretch.  People marry outsiders and leave Kentucky, and the outside world invades the small towns and farming communities.  Despite all of this, however, Mason leaves the reader with the impression that the famous sense of place of the South will remain, though it might mutate.  Ultimately, she seems to come down on the side of family as the fundamental source of the South, as the ties between people are what she highlights again and again in these stories.  In Mason’s South, the farm may be gone, but the ties of family to the land cannot be undone.

Sandra Cisneros--The House on Mango Street

This lyric novel is a collection of vignettes describing life growing up in the Latino section of Chicago.  It is narrated by Esperanza, who describes herself as “an ugly daughter”:

“I am an ugly daughter.  I am the one nobody comes for….My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain….I have begun my own quiet way.  Simple.  Sure.  I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.” (88-9).

The novel is dedicated to “A las Mujeres / To the Women,” and it primarily describes a world of women, from girls who vaguely realize the fire they’re playing with when they put on high heels to girls married before eighth grade whose husbands won’t let them leave the house.  Each chapter builds on the ones which came before, creating a world in which these women are trapped by their names, their gender, and their families, despite Esperanza’s desire for a different name, a different home, and a different fate.  She says, “I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees.  Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X” (11); such a name might help her avoid the fate of women like namesake great-grandmother, who “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow” (11).  A new name might enable her to be of a place other than Mango Street, though by the end of the novel she has to some extent accepted the fact that she is not only of Mango Street, she is Mango Street.  Nevertheless, she will still escape, but will have “gone away to come back.  For the ones I left behind.  For the ones who cannot out” (110).

Cisneros’s beautifully written novel evokes a world in which women are doomed but still struggle to survive.  Her prose actually reminds me to some extent of Lynda Barry’s prose, which similarly describes worlds in which plain-spoken protagonists escape socio-economically fated traps.  Cisneros’s world has the added dimension of Latin America, as her characters are not only poised to fall here, but also live under the threat of falling back to Puerto Rico or Mexico.  As bad as the women in her neighborhood have it in Chicago, at least they haven’t been sent back to Puerto Rico.  In this way, Cisneros troubles and complicates the idea of the American dream.

M. Scott Momaday--House Made of Dawn (1968)

Winner of the Pulizer Prize in 1969, this novel is considered responsible for ushering in a renaissance of Native American writing.  Loosely based on real life experience on the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, it centers around the story of Abel, who returns from World War II drunk and devastated.  He was raised by Francisco, a hunter who instilled in him the traditions of his people, but now suffers from a lame leg and old age.  Back from the war, Abel stabs and kills a white man, whom he thinks is a witch.  Abel is sent to prison for the murder; once he is out, he is befriended by Ben and the social worker Milly, who try to help him adjust to the world and work outside, though they are ultimately unsuccessful, as his drinking increases and he is beat up mercilessly, to the point of hospitalization.  Ultimately, Abel returns to his grandfather, who tell him stories; the novel ends with Abel running in the race of the dead, a ritual Francisco had told him about.  Francisco dies at the novel’s close.

I read Leslie Marmo Silko’s 1977 Ceremony before reading this novel, which was obviously a huge influence on Silko’s novel.  I ultimately prefer Silko’s book, which elaborates on the structural possibilities that House Made of Dawn works with, particularly the non-chronological structure and the inclusion of poetry and chant within the novel; both of these are the kind of initiative texts which function as a form of reader initiation in the very act of reading them.  House Made of Dawn calls attention to both the significance and limitations of language within its narrative, not only in incorporating poetic language, dreams, and myth, but also through direct consideration of language.  My favorite part of the novel was Tosamah’s sermon on the significance of “The Word” at the Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission, as he acknowledges both that “in words and in language, and there only, [can one] have whole and consummate being” (83) as well as that the Apostle John had stumbled onto Truth when he wrote that “In the beginning was the Word,” but that he had “diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him” when he continued on that the Word was with God, and the Word was God (84).  This lecture speaks directly to the challenge of the novel, to convey ineffable experience through words.

Philip Roth--American Pastoral (1997)

This 1997 novel is a rather sprawling look back primarily at the generational conflicts of the 1960s.  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it is one of several of Roth’s semi-autobiographical novels to feature Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman.  In this novel, Zuckerman attends his 45^th high school reunion, where he meets Jerry Levov, brother of Seymour “Swede” Levov, who was once Zuckerman’s athletic idol.  This provides a frame story for Zuckerman to tell the story of Swede Levov, who built his father’s glove-making business into a strong, money-making endeavor, but whose homelife during the turbulent 1960s seems emblematic of the generational breakdowns of the era.

In earlier encounters with the Swede, Zuckerman learns that he has remarried and has three sons; his first marriage and daughter Merry is not mentioned.  In a letter to Zuckerman, the Swede hints that he might like the novelist to write his story, as a way of making sense of it all.  Though Zuckerman misinterprets this request to mean writing the story of the Swede’s father, he later realizes that he meant the story of his daughter Merry, whose political protests against the Vietnam War led her to set a bomb at the local general store and post office, which killed the local doctor, and to set subsequent bomb around the country, which eventually brought the death count to four. 

Seymour’s struggle to interact with and understand his daughter’s behavior (as well as his wife’ unhappiness and adultery, and the race riots around his Newark factory) are the primary focus of the novel.  It’s significant to me that Zuckerman frames his story around the high school reunion, as the framing device to a certain extent functions like a conventional novel, in that it allows a retrospective point of view which appears to give a certain amount of objectivity, but which ultimately can’t escape its own subjectivity.  This is the cause of my alienation from this novel—sure, I appreciate his disdain for Boomer self-importance, but while Zuckerman finds their confessional mode to be shameful in its performativity, I rather find it shallow in its narcissism.  I doubt that Zuckerman would disagree with me, but I have no problem with performativity—in fact, I see most behavior as having aspects of performance to them.  To think otherwise is naïve—though to someone of Zuckerman’s generation (or especially that of his father’s), there is still the belief in some sort of essentialism, some sort of essential identity or goodness that everyone should be able to access.  Failure to do so signals some sort of moral failing. 

At the end of the novel, Zuckerman’s revelation that the final dinner scene—in which the Swede has discovered his wife’s adultery, admitted to his own, and admits to his own failure to help his daughter—represents the modern American pastoral.  This to me did not seem as shocking a revelation as Roth seems to have intended—but again, my own cynical Generation X sensibilities were most likely keeping me from experiencing the full effect.