Ecstatic Consumption : The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature [1 ed.] 9781443848138, 9781443897969

Citation preview

Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature

Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature By

Pavlina Radia

Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature By Pavlina Radia This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Pavlina Radia All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9796-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9796-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Theorizing Ecstatic Consumption and the Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature Part I: The Spectacle of Consumption Chapter One ............................................................................................... 17 The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 51 Life in the Hills: Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 75 Posthuman Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It Part II: The Ecstasy of (Multi)Culturalism Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 101 “Dark as Chocolate”: (Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Crescent Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 123 Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker

vi

Table of Contents

Part III: The Global Appetite for Dystopia Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 149 Consuming the Holocaust: The Postmemory Re-Production of Human Trauma and the Fire of Formal Indigestion in Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 177 History as Spectacle: 9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Alissa Torres’s American Widow Conclusion ............................................................................................... 199 “The Zero Point; or, a New Beginning” Notes........................................................................................................ 203 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 215 Index ........................................................................................................ 233

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature first emerged as a fourth-year honours seminar topic. While the book is a departure from the many intriguing discussions held in the 2013 and 2015 honours seminars at Nipissing University, the drive to continue puzzling the complexities of our consumer culture and its impact on literature, specifically the ways in which the ecstasy of consumption, its dystopian impulse and emphasis on the spectacle affect contemporary society, was very much nurtured by English Studies students at Nipissing University. Special acknowledgments and thanks go to Alissa Torres who found the course description on the Nipissing University website and, excited to see her book in the honours seminar required readings, offered to Skype into the class for an interview with students. Her brilliant mind and soulful kindness are unparalleled. Only a small segment of the book has been published elsewhere: “Doing the Lady Gaga Dance: Postmodern Transaesthetics and the Art of Spectacle in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist” appeared in the January 2014 issue of Canadian Review of American Studies/CRAS 44(2) (pp. 194–213). My special thanks go to Maureen Anne Mahoney, the editor of the CRAS Special Issue, “Aesthetics of Renewal; or, Everything Old Is New Again,” for believing in the article and for her editorial comments. The article was seminal in the book’s overall trajectory. Special acknowledgments must be extended to the editorial board and reviewers of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Special thanks go to Kristy Lynn Hankewitz for her keen editorial eye, insightful advice, and proofreading skills. Last but not least, special thanks go to Nipissing University and the Nipissing University Research Grant (2015–2016) that made the completion of the book possible.

INTRODUCTION THEORIZING ECSTATIC CONSUMPTION AND THE SPECTACLE OF GLOBAL DYSTOPIA IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs. —Guy Debord (1983), Society of the Spectacle, p. 18 We are no longer in the drama of alienation, we are in the ecstasy of communication. —Jean Baudrillard (2008), Fatal Strategies, p. 92

If the 20th century was a century of simulacra, the new millennium is the era of the spectacle, or what Guy Debord (1983) defines as “the concrete inversion of life, and as such, the autonomous movement of the nonliving” (p. 2). The word “spectacle” comes from the Latin “spectaculum” (meaning a “thing seen” or a “show”), but it also refers to a “thing being capable of being seen” or a “means of seeing” (“Spectacle,” n.d.). From reality television and billboard advertisements to online elections, YouTube, and selfies, contemporary culture thrives on mass spectacles— whether they be displays of power or entertainment. Historically, the spectacle has been associated with various rituals—Dionysian rites, the Olympic Games, Gladiatorial Games, medieval mystery plays, sports, and theatre. The role of such rituals was to demonstrate the prowess of the state or to assert the authority of the sovereign, as well as to serve as a distancing device during periods of crisis and from the crisis itself (Fischer-Lichte, 2005, p. 90). The spectacle mirrored reality, but it also inevitably transformed it by putting it on display. Dionysian rites celebrated the dissolution of boundaries while simultaneously commenting on social violence. Similarly, medieval mystery plays delivered morals based on historical events and social or individual crises. From its inception, the spectacle was both a ritual and a performance. In the digital

2

Introduction

age, however, the spectacle has taken on a new dimension. What defines contemporary culture is the emphasis on mediation rather than representation. As Debord (1983) notes in his seminal study, Society of the Spectacle, contemporary culture relies on “a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual ‘having’ must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function” (p. 17). As critics continue to lament, postmillennial culture is the culture of the image, fed by the capitalist imperative to consume.1 This imperative is frequently mediated and enhanced by mass media, the ultimate purveyors of the “generalized sliding of having into appearing” as Debord (1983) suggests (p. 17). In the digital age, the spectacle is a means of being. Not surprisingly, fascination with the culture of spectacle also pervades contemporary American literature. Authors including Don DeLillo, Jane Smiley, Marge Piercy, Diana Abu-Jaber, Chang-Rae Lee, Shalom Auslander, and Alissa Torres question the ways in which literature has become complicit in the iconic drive for a bigger, better spectacle. As this book shows, this drive is frequently exemplified in the form of what Jean Baudrillard in The Transparency of Evil (1993) calls a “materialization of aesthetics” (p. 18), or in a lust for narratives of resistance that subvert but simultaneously reinscribe the consumerist drive for spectacle that packages anything from an intimate human experience to traumatic historical events as a commodity or a spectacle to be consumed. As cultures and borders become increasingly globalized, the world is not only shrinking, but the human subject is also teetering on the edge between life and non-life, as technology, the Internet, and cyberspace redefine the boundaries of humanity, ethics, and being. In the world of commodity, corporate logic, and cyborgs, the very notion of identity is frequently turned into a spectacle. Yet, it is also simultaneously mobilized by the search for what Jean Baudrillard (2008) describes as the “ecstatic” form that materializes aesthetics. The ecstatic, Baudrillard argues, is a particular kind of “immoral” ethic that commodifies the aesthetic in the name of “realer than real” and “more than more” (p. 10). What does such an ethic do to the aesthetic value of art? Why is there such a desire for staging consumption incessantly, or, to put it in Baudrillard’s terms, ecstatically? In what way does this drive co-opt dystopia as a new utopia? How does this co-optation inflect and deflect gender, ethnic, racial, power, and class relations? Why the preoccupation with ecstasy no matter how dystopian? Such themes and queries pervade this critical study. Through a close reading of selected works by contemporary American authors, this book examines how these authors’ narratives respond to these ecstatic dystopias, but it also considers how they challenge and exceed the generic

Theorizing Ecstatic Consumption

3

limits of form by blurring the line between poetry and fiction, cinematic production and fictional representation, and graphic novel and theatre. As the previously mentioned authors’ works show, the tendency to unify the world as a global village has had both positive and negative effects. On the so-called march to the global utopia, individual and globalized subjects are not only consumed but also encouraged to consume “ecstatically” rather than conspicuously. Although Thornstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which emphasizes the importance of middle class leisure as a driving force in the politics of consumerism, was applicable to 20th century North America, the new millennium encourages us to deploy commodity culture as a means of self-validation and authentication, but also to embrace consumption in all of its excesses—ecstatically. In 2007, Paul Virilio aligned “ecstatic consumption” with the 21st century’s push towards the ultimate reversal of private and public, national and global, personal and collective, “where the local is the exterior, and the global the interior of a finite world” (p. 51). As he noted, “By accelerating, globalization turns reality inside out like a glove. From now on, your nearest and dearest is a stranger and the exotic, a neighbour” (p. 51). Drawing on Paul Virilio (2007), Glenn and Kingwell (2008) point to the persistent, hysterical production of consumer appetite that promises to “take us beyond ourselves, towards the selves we wish to be” (p. 20), while noting the amplification of “ecstatic consumption” by the power of mediation performed by “the media surround” (p. 20). In their words, the new millennium is informed by the “conditions of hysterical commutation,” where “there is no difference between production and consumption” (p. 21).2 To put it differently, in the 21st century, consumption is ecstasy—the ultimate drug and the addiction to it. Before pursuing this argument further, it might be useful to explore the etymology of the word “ecstasy,” as its various permutations will be crucial to this study. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ecstasy comes from the Greek existanai, meaning “to displace, but also to astonish, entrance”; “to be outside oneself.” In Latin, extasis means “terror” or trance” (“Ecstasy,” n.d.). In both languages, ecstasy has a double meaning—both a positive and negative, utopian and dystopian connotation—as astonishment, on the one hand, and terror, on the other. This is similar to the pursuit of the global idyll: what is idyllic to some might be nightmarish to others. The increasing erosion of cultural, national, and geographic borders has unquestionably widened economic possibilities, but it has also generated new power asymmetries (Braidotti, 2006, p. 91). These asymmetries are reinforced through state and culture politics, which are further institutionalized by the cinema and mass media

4

Introduction

industry (Beller, 2006, p. 9). As Jonathan Beller (2006) has noted, the world of illusion has become another means of institutionalizing power disparities and class, racial, and gender hierarchies (p. 9). In his terms, “the overall effect of an ever-increasing quantity of images is the radical alienation of consciousness, its isolation and separation, its inability to convincingly ‘language’ reality and thus its reduction to something on the order of a free-floating hallucination” (Beller, 2006, p. 15). While modernity aspired to “fix” radical alienation through aesthetics by assigning an ethical value to narratives, contemporary literature and the arts are no longer immune to the impact of commodity culture amplified by globalization. In fact, they are equally susceptible to the consumerist imperative. In his seminal work, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson (1991) pointed out that [a]esthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), to ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. (p. 4)

The ambiguous nature of aesthetic production, particularly its complicity in commodity production, is reflected in the literary works this book examines—works that in many ways testify to the recent epistemological changes in American society while simultaneously asking questions about the increasing preoccupation with the commodity culture of which American society is clearly the ultimate embodiment. In exploring both literary and cultural narratives that depend on but also comment on the culture of the spectacle, Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature draws on Jean Baudrillard’s (2008) notion of ecstatic consumption as being no longer just excessive, but rather excrescent (i.e., growing out of itself) and immoral, in that it is no longer preoccupied with opposites but rather with superlatives. We want “realer than real,” “more than more”; we want the best, the fastest, the latest, and so forth (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 10).3 In Baudrillard’s terms, “The ecstatic form is an immoral form, while the aesthetic form always implies the moral distinction between the beautiful and the ugly” (2008, p. 10). What such an ethic does to the aesthetic is a prominent question that underpins this study. Why the desire for staging consumption incessantly, ecstatically? In what way does this drive co-opt dystopia as a new utopia? How does this co-optation inflect and deflect

Theorizing Ecstatic Consumption

5

gender, ethnic, racial, power, and class relations? Why the preoccupation with ecstasy, no matter how dystopian? Through a close reading of selected works by the above-mentioned contemporary American authors, this book examines how their narratives respond to these ecstatic dystopias, as well as how they challenge and exceed the generic limits of form by blurring the line between reality and fiction, cinematic production and fictional representation, and graphic novel and theatre. While the narratives of Don DeLillo (2001, 2010) and Marge Piercy (1991) explore characters who are part cyborgs, part human puppets, estranged by cinematic and cybernetic modes of production, Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills (2007) takes us to Hollywood’s finest parties, where bliss morphs into nightmare. How the great “Americana” is perceived and appropriated by the non-West is queried in Diana AbuJaber’s Crescent (2003) and Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995). Finally, Shalom Auslander’s mock-historical novel Hope: A Tragedy (2012) and Alissa Torres’s graphic novel American Widow (2008) further problematize how the media drive for the ecstatic co-opts historical atrocities as a global spectacle. In the past, literature has been aligned with an ethical, as well as an aesthetic, imperative; the postmillennial emphasis on “more than more” (i.e., the ecstatic mode of existence) suggests that even the literary arts are no longer safe from the culpability of revelling in the world of images and simulacra wherein the “surplus-value of the commodity” has been transformed “into the aesthetic surplus-value of the sign” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 17). This book investigates not only how this transformation affects gender, racial, and class relations, but also how it impacts the representation of historical events.

Contemporary American Literature and the Culture of Spectacle: A Brief Historical Context Contemporary American literature is frequently deployed as postmodern or, in other words, as a product of postmodernity’s break with modernity.4 A defining feature of postmodern narratives is the rejection of linearity and an emphasis on history and historical events as being subject to representation, obfuscation, and potentially commodification. In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon (1988) calls such narratives “ex-centric,” for they thwart teleology but also force us to acknowledge history as fiction or, in other words, as a sequence of events narrated from a particular (and subjective) point of view. If modernists are preoccupied with inner reality,—that is, with the characters’ interior stream of consciousness—then postmodernists emphasize the inaccessibility of reality.

6

Introduction

Reality for postmodernists is accessible only in its mediated form as an incomplete, fragmented, and multivoiced representation. From the 1990s on, the effects of globalization have inevitably redefined postmodern culture (particularly its counter-narrative, counterhegemonic aspect) as equally complicit in the increasing push for commodification and ecstatic consumption. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the preoccupation with the first and third worlds brought “global” concerns and realities onto the stage. With the persistent and increasing abrogation of national boundaries and their meaning, contemporary American authors are questioning what it means to be American in the 21st century while they investigate what remains American about contemporary American culture. Pop culture media and discourses of multiculturalism, both important venues of and vehicles for globalization, have had an extensive effect on contemporary writers like Don DeLillo, Marge Piercy, and Jane Smiley, and so have the discourses of terrorism and assimilation on the works of Diana Abu-Jaber, Chang-Rae Lee, Shalom Auslander, and Alissa Torres. As the works of these authors show, the tendency to unify the world as a global village has exposed discourses of resistance to be frequently complicit in perpetuating oppressive, neo-colonial ideologies. As these writers reveal, literature no longer provides a solid cure for the somnambulist culture of instant gratification, wherein “[t]he spectacle is a permanent opium” (Debord, 1983, p. 44). It entertains an ethical imperative while simultaneously reinscribing the very values of the consumerist culture it criticizes, be it through metafictional commentaries on sociohistorical events or through self-conscious intertextuality and intermedial references to cinema, TV, or the mass media industry. Narrative forms are thus not only subject to spectacle, but they also take on its very form. On the global stage, the body similarly becomes the ultimate commodity: the fetish of ecstatic consumption. In a world of commodity, corporate logic, and make-believe cyborgs, the very notion of identity is turned into a spectacle yet simultaneously mobilized by the search for ecstatic avatar (anti)forms. Whether these forms provide an escape into a utopian space or further enhance the dystopian ecstasy is a crucial query framing this book. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s (2008) notion of ecstatic consumption as being no longer only excessive, but rather “excrescent” (i.e., growing out of itself) and potentially unethical, this book investigates the implications of such materialized aesthetics on narrativizing human experience, specifically from a gendered and racialized perspective. Underlying the notion of the ecstatic form is not only a collective madness—a mass consumption—but also the irrevocability of reversibility.

Theorizing Ecstatic Consumption

7

This reversibility blurs the line between opposites but also generates paroxysms or complexities that delineate dystopia as a necessary roadblock on the way to utopia, an idea that underpins Fredric Jameson’s (2009) notion of utopia as replication. In his essay aptly titled “Utopia as Replication,” Jameson (2009) draws on the genetic theory of replication as “the like reproducing as like” but also as having the potential of the like reproducing as unlike. His argument is that “dystopia is in reality Utopia if examined more closely,” because when we “isolate specific features” as “a different system,” we end up seeing the negative as positive (p. 434). Similarly, Baudrillard (2008) argues that this “passion for intensifying, for escalation, for an increase in power, for ecstasy” defines our “time,” our century, while at the same time, it “ceas[es] to be relative to its opposite” and thus becomes “positively sublime, as if it had absorbed all the energy of its opposite” (p. 27).5 Such excrescence lies at the heart of the culture of spectacle, as Guy Debord (1983) has emphasized. But ecstatic excrescence also challenges the notion of the spectacle as defined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Adorno and Horkheimer align the culture of the spectacle with capitalism, mass media, advertising, and the increasing manipulation of the masses through formulaic narratives. Well-established formulas provide a means of escape while simultaneously strengthening mass deception. In his “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Adorno (1991) further elaborates on the conformist consciousness generated by the culture industry as “imped[ing] the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves” (p. 106). While Adorno and Horkheimer’s model of the spectacle suggests that the spectators are passive viewers who have no agency in the process of viewing, critics such as Jacques Rancière (2009) and Erika Fischer-Lichte (2005) have pointed out the active role that the audience plays in not only the consumption of the spectacle but also in its construction and coproduction. Digital media in particular have redefined the role that viewers as consumers play in the culture industry. With the rise of the Internet and the spread of self-publishing via social media and self-publishing outlets, consumers have become “prosumers” who co-produce both knowledge and its value (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 4). This “prosumption” has changed how knowledge is produced and interpreted. Moreover, it has redefined the relationship between art and value, commodity and consumption, and mediation and simulation, but also between culture and performance.

8

Introduction

Contemporary American culture is dedicated to intense dramatizations and visualizations of simulated realities, be they based on so-called “personal” experiences (as seen on reality TV shows) or imaginary representation of “events” (as expressed in cinema and literature). Jonathan Beller (2006) suggests that in the age of hypermodernity, the “cinematic mode of production” has become a cultural form codifying our perception of time and space (p. 3). Alienation and desensitization are two major effects of the visual economy driving the culture of spectacle. Both Debord (1983) and Beller (2006) note the ways in which the visual, spectaclist drive separates us from reality. The spectaclist drive not only alienates reality but also commodifies alienation and thus further fetishizes commodification. Furthermore, as Nadia Bozak (2011) notes in her recent study of contemporary culture, the 21st century is the era of the “end of editing” that advertises immateriality as its primary modus operandi (p. 141). Bozak (2011) suggests that the emphasis on providing access to the realness of reality or its excess is “an essential dimension of capitalism’s operative principle of creative destruction” (p. 146). While Bozak (2011) is concerned primarily with the cinematic medium, literary texts are increasingly striving to subvert the culture of commodification while approximating digital and film media’s supposed ability to capture the rawness and messiness of real life. For centuries, literature has served as an important counterpoint to the capitalist drive for commodification. Postmodern American literature from the 1960s onward was intent on questioning the ways in which the line between high art and mass culture was becoming extremely thin. Authors including Philip Roth, Robert Stone, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison have aligned literary imagination with the power to resist commodification while simultaneously exposing the consumerist ideology and its impact on culture, gender, and race. Since the arrival of the Internet in the 1990s, however, American writers have been wrestling with the impact of digital media on the very meaning of the word “narrative.” Literary critics Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury (1991) note the waning of postmodernism in the wake of radical capitalism. In an age of “cultural glut,” they write: The avant-garde is no longer avant, but our political, technological, social and artistic philosophies remain as perplexed as ever by the ironies, paradoxes, indeterminancies. … We are abundant in commodities, clever in the creation of systems; we multiply the technologies of information, … the channels of global interaction. (p. 392)

Theorizing Ecstatic Consumption

9

The spread of the Internet and the impact of mass media may have ushered us into “an age of no style” (Ruland & Bradbury, 1991, p. 392), but rather than bemoaning the lack of style, perhaps it is worth considering how the increasing spread of digital media blurs the line between literature and/as performance. This book asks how literature employs performance as an essential aspect of its fabric, and how it expresses or challenges its culpability in the culture industry that it critiques and/or celebrates. If conformity and deception are the primary goals of mass and digital media culture, what is the relationship between performance and mechanization? Is it possible to suggest that the performative function on which many contemporary literary narratives rely provides a means of not necessarily countering but certainly disclosing the ways any form of subversion or rebellion has been co-opted in the name of resistance? Indeed, as Marshall McLuhan (1987) predicted in the early 1960s, “the paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change” (p. 11). Scholars like Tapscott and Williams (2006) see the spread of digital social media as a positive shift towards a new way of taking part in society but also as a vehicle for creating new spaces of resistance to the commodity principle; meanwhile, the contemporary American literary writers examined in this study question whether narratives of resistance are not, in fact, co-opted by the commodity principle. Although their narratives promise to provide a way out of the global dystopia, they are not free from the consumerist drive; in fact, they frequently reinscribe it. The work of Jacques Rancière (2009) on the spectacle, and what he calls “the emancipated spectator” (p. 6), is particularly relevant to the discussion here. In his study of the same title, Rancière questions the limits of emancipation by suggesting that the gaze, no matter how subversive, depends on the “re-appropriation of a relationship to self lost in a process of separation” (p. 6). Such reappropriation, Rancière argues, is germane to the very nature of the spectacle, which rides on exteriority and self-dispossession, radical alienation and separation (p. 17). Rancière here returns to Debord’s (1983) notion of the spectacle as a “separation perfected within the interior of man” (p. 20). However, such a separation can be productive, if not a healthy gesture that allows for new openings and interpretations. If, as Debord (1983) emphasizes, the spectacle is a “tendency to make one see the world by means of various mediations” (p. 18), it is not surprising that the economy of visual politics—particularly its reliance on the proliferation of images or “promiscuity of signification”—is essential to,

10

Introduction

in Beller’s (2006) words, “languag[ing] reality,” (p. 15). The excrescence of the visual upon which the spectacle depends takes on an ecstatic form. The ecstatic form, in its essence, questions ethics: it is based on the logic of “going beyond,” reaching a “dead point” of reversibility where narratives, systems, and contradictions enter the zone of exaltation and noncontradiction (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 33). Although violence and destruction drive the ecstatic form, they also point to the ways in which the culture industry annihilates itself through the very mass deception and conformist consciousness it generates. The ecstatic rejects normativity. In this sense, it is not an ideology but rather a frenzied iconography that never quite means what it purports to mean. As icons supplant language, they turn into a pataphysical code where absurdity and reality become one.6 In other words, although promiscuous logic drives the ecstatic form, it also points to the zones where conformity has turned into a form of resistance and resistance into conformity. The individual chapters of this book explore how contemporary literary narratives not only respond to but also inevitably reinscribe this promiscuity through the very politics of resistance that their aesthetics strive to undermine. The chapters reveal that while emancipatory performance or an act of resistance promises to challenge stale perspectives and positions, these figurations cannot help objectifying these positions by co-opting and thus simultaneously renewing the very spectacle that it eschews in the first place.7 Part I of this book, “The Spectacle of Consumption,” sets up the argument of ecstatic consumption by highlighting the ways in which contemporary American literature mourns modernity’s emphasis on the redemptive aspect of literary narratives. Through close readings of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega, Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills, and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, Part I examines the increasing complicity of storytelling in consumer production but also in shaping public opinion about warfare and corporate intervention. In their narratives, DeLillo, Smiley, and Piercy ponder the challenges that art and humanity face in the age of simulacra, digital networks, and military warfare. Echoing Paul Virilio’s (2007) emphasis on the interconnection between the corporatization of warfare and its media simulation, these authors’ novels debate the impact that the media have on shaping the body politic, but also on individuals and their sense of identity. Questioning the spectaclist drive of the 21st century, DeLillo, Smiley, and Piercy critique the encroachment of the public, ever-seeing eye into the private sphere. Their works raise concerns about the constant collusion of emotion with cinematic, audiovisual interactivity, but also expose what Virilio (2007)

Theorizing Ecstatic Consumption

11

refers to as the “tyranny” of information overload and its “synchronization of mindsets” through “the broadcasting of real or simulated threats” (Virilio, 2007, p. 59).8 Chapter One, “The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega,” investigates the role that the ever-shifting, invasive gaze of the media plays in manipulating reality. The chapter explores how the media gaze encroaches on the private space and thus redefines the private as public, turning the corporeal into an ecstatic, hyperreal spectacle. Both The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) explore the ways in which literature undermines but also inevitably participates in ecstatic consumption by reinscribing—albeit for the sake of critique—mass media discourses from the Hollywood film to performance art. Mourning the end of the private sphere and exposing the glut of economic, political, and information warfare, The Body Artist and Point Omega comment on the disappearance of humanity into what Virilio (2007) calls “a groundless parallel world, where each individual gets used to inhabiting the accident of an audiovisual continuum, independent of the real space of their life” (p. 51). In both novels, the protagonists wrestle with this parallel reality as they are subsumed into the black hole of simulated realities that they strive to subvert and annihilate. Chapter Two, “Life in the Hills: Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills,” ushers the reader into the world of Hollywood parties of contemporary celebrity starlets, whose lifestyles revel in consumption, but whose lives are affected by the Bush government’s invasion of Iraq. While the war is looming outside, Smiley’s characters remain blissfully oblivious to the atrocities—except for Elena and Max, whose frequent pondering of the geopolitics of war provides a refreshing insight into the excesses of Hollywood. Juxtaposing Smiley’s characters’ rampant sexuality and drive for ecstasy with the dystopian reality of the American war in Iraq, this chapter questions the ethics of media culture that thrives on the ecstatic visualization of everything, from serious historical events to intimate, personal experiences. But it also exposes the ways in which Smiley’s (2007) novel indicts the drive for the ecstatic by dangerously reducing serious calamities like wars to what Jerome DeGroot (2008) refers to as “historical pornography” (p. 4). Chapter Three, “Posthuman Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It,” explores the increasing impact of digital media on the human subject. As Rosi Braidotti (2013) has argued, the line between humanism and posthumanism is becoming increasingly thin. Debunking what she refers to as “naturalist” and essentialist assumptions about what it means to be a human, Braidotti, building on the work of

12

Introduction

Donna Haraway, has become an advocate of a posthumanist approach to identity. In her 1991 novel, He, She and It, Marge Piercy not only anticipates these arguments but also imagines what our society will be like in a future governed entirely by genetic engineering and cybertechnology. Examining the link between the rise of global capitalism, genetic engineering, and posthuman culture, Piercy’s novel provides a cautionary note that problematizes the very tenets of the future of posthumanist society. Part II, “The Ecstasy of (Multi)Culturalism,” examines the global staging of American consumerism and its dependence on tokenizing difference, be it through the rhetoric of resistance or multiculturalism. Pervading Chapters Four and Five are questions concerning how this global staging of American consumerism affects cultural minorities and how their cultures are frequently commodified. Examining the challenges of multicultural politics through the novels of Diana Abu-Jaber and Chang-Rae Lee, Part II focuses on mapping what Sara Ahmed (2004) calls “affective economies [of difference],” which shape contemporary America’s national and cross-cultural politics (p. 8). Building on Ahmed’s (2004) argument that multicultural policies frequently revert to various forms of nationalism whereby the multicultural subject is socially and culturally marked as a potential “sign of disturbance” (p. 134), Chapters Four and Five discuss the exigencies of (multi)culturalism by highlighting the precarious and emotional terrains of Arab-American and AsianAmerican diasporic communities as they straddle various cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender divides. Chapter Four, “‘Dark As Chocolate’: (Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Crescent,” examines how media culture both represents and frequently tokenizes transnational subjects. Crucial to understanding the significance of The Crescent (2003) is the work of the postcolonial critic Sara Ahmed, whose acute analysis of postcoloniality and multicultural discourses as being trapped in and by the politics of colonialism is particularly useful in unpacking Abu-Jaber’s poetic yet complex commentary on the Arab-American diaspora. The chapter argues that Abu-Jaber’s novel interrogates the foreigner as food by countering the western appropriation of the foreigner as the Other whose difference must be policed, managed, or ultimately consumed by the global market. This chapter asks how diasporic communities participate in but also deflect western consumerism, while simultaneously exposing the ways in which the postcolonial rhetoric of multiculturalism co-opts what Ella Shohat (2006) calls “universalizing categor[ies]” of hybridity (p. 242).

Theorizing Ecstatic Consumption

13

Chapter Five, “Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” expands on the relationship between American and diasporic identity by exploring what Chang-Rae Lee (1995) refers to in his novel as “minority politics” (p. 196). Revealing the complex, intercultural, but also interracial complexities of being American, Lee exposes the ways in which the rhetoric of American multiculturalism as a melting pot of cultures merely perpetuates what Debord (1983) calls “the specialization of power” that encourages rather than dismantles class domination (p. 23). Lee’s (1995) novel thus brings attention not only to the assimilationist drive that continues to underpin American politics but also to its passive-aggressive potential to generate violence. Part III, “The Global Appetite for Dystopia,” shifts attention to the ways in which historical events like the Holocaust and 9/11 are no longer safe from the culture of spectacle, whereby every personal, intimate, or deeply horrific event is reduced to an aestheticized moment to be captured, staged, and consumed by the public gaze. As Geoffrey Hartman (2002) acutely points out in Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle against Inauthenticity, “the hyperreality of the image in contemporary modes of cultural production not only makes critical thinking more difficult but at once incites and nullifies a healthy illusion” (p. 84). How such nullification or reductionism affects our understanding of major historical events like cultural genocide lies at the heart of Shalom Auslander’s (2012) Hope: A Tragedy and Alissa Torres’s (2008) graphic novel American Widow. Chapter Six, “Consuming the Holocaust: The Postmemory ReProduction of Human Trauma and the Fire of Formal Indigestion in Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy,” exposes the ways contemporary culture reduces history to a spectacle that canonizes torment and suffering, a spectacle whereby the viewer temporarily identifies with the victim in the act of postmemorial-yet-sanitized remembrance. At the heart of Hope: A Tragedy (2012) is the protagonist’s inability to digest food, an inability that signifies Auslander’s rejection of the cultural appetite for formal canonization but also reveals what Giorgio Agamben (2002) calls a “lacuna” or an “impossibility of bearing witness” (p. 39). Chapter Seven, “History as Spectacle: 9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Alissa Torres’s American Widow,” on the other hand, examines the media exploitation of historical atrocities like 9/11. Focusing on the economics of the visual politics underpinning the spectacle and its emphasis on ecstatic consumption as exemplified in what Torres’s graphic novel (2008) refers to as the “economic value” of individual victims, this

14

Introduction

chapter examines the ways in which the media representation of 9/11 has been trapped in what Badiou (2006) refers to as the “spectacular staging of power” (p. 34). Through her emphasis on the commodification of loss and traumatic historical tragedies such as 9/11, Torres’s (2008) graphic novel exposes the American drive for ecstatic consumption, a consumption that has lost touch with ethics and has become a testament to the violence underpinning the consumerist drive for the ecstatic. Concluding Chapter Seven, the book comes full circle to the notion of the ecstatic gaze. It delineates the spectacle as the ultimate means of ecstatic consumption that sublimates through the process of identification and appropriation of personal experiences, public venues, historical events, or horrific traumas. While the literary texts studied in this book challenge the consumerist drive, they also emphasize that both the politics and poetics of resistance can become subject to commodification; what’s more, they can be and often are complicit in co-opting the very foibles they criticize.

PART I THE SPECTACLE OF CONSUMPTION

CHAPTER ONE THE ECSTATIC GAZE IN DON DELILLO’S THE BODY ARTIST AND POINT OMEGA

The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. —Guy Debord (1983), Society of the Spectacle

Don DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega opens with a prologue titled “Anonymity I,” in which an anonymous spectator contemplates the flood of images bombarding the 10×14 foot screen in front of him. Staring at this image-verse, he contemplates what it is he is actually seeing as he watches Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, an installation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho slowed to a running time of 24 hours. Leaning against the wall, the spectator contemplates “one thing’s relationship to another,” thinking, “the film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 13). As he watches Gordon’s installation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), DeLillo’s “man at the wall” ponders the unreality of the world beyond the walls of the art gallery, the frenzied pace of city life where time rushes forward and where life is “benumbed” by the endless flood of images (p. 12). This benumbed spectacle, however, is not just an endless proliferation of meaningless signs, a “collection of images,” as Guy Debord (1983) says, but rather “a social relation among people mediated by images” (Debord, 1983, p. 4). In Point Omega, DeLillo suggests that in contemporary society, the inversion of lived reality as unreality, facilitated by the obscene preoccupation with looking, is an “affirmation of appearance” and the “visible negation of life” (Debord, 1983, p. 5). In Fatal Strategies (2008), Jean Baudrillard argues that in the age of digital media, reality is hyperreal—no longer an illusion, but rather “more real than real” (p. 13). Time itself has become a commodity, frozen into the “subtle limits of reversibility … into its own exalted contemplation, into ecstasy” (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 33). As the act of looking increasingly trumps communication, or the need to verbalize

18

Chapter One

rather than visualize reality, historical events included, we no longer remain as passive participants in the spectacle we are consuming. But nor are we necessarily Jacques Rancière’s (2009) “emancipated spectators” who defend against the violent economy of images and its violence (p. 17). Like the eponymous speaker of Lady Gaga’s (2009) song, we are caught in a “bad romance” with our own gaze. Consumed by our own hunger for seeing, being seen, and seeing ourselves seeing, we want the “psycho” and the “vertigo shtick” (Lady Gaga, 2009)—the collusion of art and/as commodity. In Point Omega (2010), Richard Elster aligns this collusion with “some mystical shift” where “the mind transcends all direction inward” towards Teilhard de Chardin’s “omega point” (p. 72). The omega point, as Elster envisions it, is the inversion of the spectacle into an “exalted contemplation, into ecstasy,” to put it in Baudrillard’s (2008) words (p. 33). This inversion, however, generates a complete state of decorporealization and immateriality wherein the body disappears into its own contemplative state and/as art. However, such dematerialization is not entirely free of the spectaclist drive it strives to undermine; instead, it seems to be “caught in a spiral of redoubling,” where “art no longer creates anything but the magic of its own disappearance” (Baudrillard, 2008, pp. 27–28). Such redoubling continues to be DeLillo’s main source of contention. In The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010), DeLillo explores the art world as a universe that is progressively spinning towards its own disappearance. While DeLillo’s critics continue to emphasize the redemptive aspect of his aesthetics,9 this chapter suggests that such an argument merely focuses on DeLillo’s critique of American consumerism and ignores his exploration of the increasing complicity of not only the arts but also our own human psychology in the very politics of the spectacle and its commodification. Exploring what Beller (2006) calls the “cinematization of relations” (p. 14), DeLillo questions whether the tendency towards abstraction, traditionally associated with the arts and modernity in particular, is not in fact yet another extension of the exchange-value driving commodification through what Debord (1983) refers to as “reciprocal alienation” (p. 8). If the universe is increasingly defined by images, does the universe as its image-verse transform human life into cinematic “dreamworks,” a reel of “benumbed” life, where we become, as Elster puts it, stones (DeLillo, 2010, p. 12, p. 53)? Or can the spectaclist gaze have the very opposite function—can it invert into the “barricade” where “somebody stands and tells the truth” (p. 45)? If, as Baudrillard (2008) argues, “suspension and slow motion are our current tragic forms”

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

19

(p. 39), does the proliferation of dystopian literature merely point to the increasing nostalgia for utopian transcendence before its artistic reproduction? DeLillo’s two novels The Body Artist and Point Omega engage with the spectaclist gaze that shapes contemporary American culture. The Body Artist questions the possibility of what Jacques Rancière (2009) describes as the “emancipated gaze,” a gaze that resists the spectacle of ecstatic consumption (p. 17). Examining DeLillo’s text along with mass media texts such as Lady Gaga’s music video for Bad Romance (2009), this chapter argues that DeLillo’s works expose the ways in which the aesthetic value of literature is not only increasingly undermined but also dangerously co-opted by the culture of spectacle. DeLillo explores this cooptation of the visual drive for ecstatic consumption further in Point Omega (2010), in which the main protagonist, Richard Elster, dreams of a more poetic world—a world where the “cinematic reproduction” of time (Beller, 2006) becomes an “enormously old … epochal time” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 46). However, the novel problematizes Elster’s nostalgia for better days as an elusive, if not potentially destructive, gesture. By the end of Point Omega, it is not quite clear if the aestheticization of reality that Elster advocates as a means of surviving society is not what Jean Baudrillard (1993) calls a mere transformation of aesthetics into the “surplus-value of the commodity” (p. 17). This chapter addresses whether the tendency to celebrate aesthetics as a potential vehicle out of dystopia does not in fact reinscribe the consumerist drive with a vengeance, turning this aesthetic utopia into the 24 Hour Psycho movie-installation with which DeLillo’s Point Omega begins and ends.

From Doing the Lady Gaga Dance to the Spectacle and/as Transaesthetics in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist In Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, RoseLee Goldberg (2011) notes the undescribable impact of 9/11 on the world and global economics. She writes: “[after 9/11] the planet felt suddenly and profoundly changed. From then onwards, each subsequent year of the first decade of the twenty-first century showed an economy shaped by the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq” (p. 226). As Goldberg (2011) emphasizes, the 21st century has been a century of profound changes whose dystopian tenor continues to affect the arts. Accordingly, postmillennial America can be described as a culture decimated by tragic historical events like 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror.” With the rise and fall of “dot com” companies, it is a culture shaped by an endless

20

Chapter One

barrage of mass-mediated images that have turned these tragic historic events into a tasteless spectacle. The line between literal and figurative warfare is increasingly disappearing as phrases like “Twitter war” and ideas such as Kim Khardashian’s war on Beyoncé have become commonplace, a postmillennial vulgate of sorts. The art world has also changed, and radically so. In contemporary culture, anyone and everyone claims to be an artist; the line between high and low art no longer exists. Such “a general aestheticization of everyday life,” where art is “obliged to mime its own disappearance” through the very “materialization of aesthetics” suggests that an infinite inversion of meaning and meaninglessness is part of the daily menu (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 18). Performances by Lady Gaga, particularly her music video for the song Bad Romance (2009), highlight the way that postmillennial America’s preoccupation with spectacle relies on the very materialization of aesthetics of which Baudrillard writes. In such a space where aesthetics become life, the line between the seer and the seen is abrogated as the subject’s authenticity is not only questioned but also deliberately annihilated in order to pave the way for a series of image-driven simulations, whereby the physical body becomes a mask and the mask a body. Underpinning Lady Gaga’s performances is an emphasis on the ways in which the gaze becomes a public-driven or self-imposed zone of terror and destruction. Inscribed in this zone are the potentialities of renewal, where the subject’s sense of authenticity is paradoxically reasserted through a kind of singeing of the image, where the symbolic extinction of the subject simultaneously stages its own renewal. Ironically, such a notion also lies at the heart of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001), a novel that ponders the recuperative potential of spectacle; such potential delineates performance art as a means of challenging modernity’s blind spots. Through the lens of the grieving body artist Lauren Hartke, DeLillo interrogates body art (i.e., embodied performance where the subject makes a spectacle of herself) as a productive, yet inevitably commodifying, means of both personal and cultural renewal, whereby corporeal suffering is staged and thus inevitably reduced to a plethora of aestheticized, albeit ecstatic, crossings. Such crossings not only constitute what Jean Baudrillard refers to as postmodern “transaesthetics”—a translation of everyday life into an aesthetic whereby “art mime[s] its own disappearance” (Baudrillard, 1993, p.18)—but also expose the complex mythographies and dystopias underpinning America’s “bad romance” with its own cultural renewal. This section investigates Don DeLillo’s representation of postmillennial America’s penchant for renewal by simulation and asks whether this

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

21

spectacle masks while simultaneously staging the nostalgia for a modernity whose trace it so flagrantly tries to annihilate. Particularly useful to this inquiry is Jean Baudrillard’s (1988) definition of America as a “coup de theatre, … a utopia achieved,” which casts dystopian, thus intrinsically nostalgic, glances towards the European modernity it both courts and persistently rejects (p. 76).

“Bad Romance”: The Body Artist’s Dance with Spectacle Before exploring DeLillo’s The Body Artist further, it will be useful to contextualize what (to many a literary critic) might appear as a rather unorthodox pairing. What could Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance music video and DeLillo’s The Body Artist possibly have in common? This section suggests: a lot. If one of the drives of the postmodern is, as Linda Hutcheon (1988) suggests in A Poetics of Postmodernism, to “de-doxify our cultural representations” (p. 3), as well as to “expose the ways in which all cultural forms of representation—literary, visual, aural—in high art or the mass media are ideologically grounded” (p. 21), then such a pairing can provide further insight into what Baudrillard (1993) calls the “proliferative tendency” of postmodern transaesthetics and its dependence on “wild hyperbole and endless variations on all earlier forms” (i.e., a transformation of the “surplus-value of the commodity into the aesthetic surplus-value of the sign”) (p. 17). To put it in other words, the pairing exemplifies the ways in which the spectaclist gaze blurs the line between high and low culture art forms, exposing how they increasingly appropriate, rather than subvert, mass consumerism and commodification. The work of Jacques Rancière (2009) on the spectacle and what he calls “the emancipated spectator” is particularly relevant to the discussion here. In his study of the same title, Rancière (2009) questions the limits of emancipation by suggesting that the gaze, no matter how subversive, depends on “re-appropriation of a relationship to self lost in a process of separation” (p. 6). Such reappropriation, he argues, is germane to the very nature of the spectacle, which rides on exteriority and self-dispossession (p. 17). While emancipatory performance or an act of resistance promises to challenge stale perspectives and positions, it cannot help but to objectify these positions by co-opting and thus simultaneously renewing the very spectacle that it eschews in the first place.10 When Lady Gaga prances on the stage in her Bunraku-inspired masks, donning machine-gun breasts and over-the-top Bauhaus fashion, bemoaning the “bad romance” she has with the paparazzi, or suggesting

22

Chapter One

that she might become Judas any minute, or simply protesting, oh no, this is not a performance, she was “born this way,” her transformative aesthetic11 begs the question: is it divine madness or, to paraphrase Plato, an attempt to shake away all custom and convention by reinscribing the very same customs and conventions with a vengeance?12 Or is Gaga’s performance the kind of transaesthetic that, by means of exceeding the limit of one form or the other, “spills until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its pure and empty form” (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 10)? This idea of “spilling” not only defines Gaga’s over-the-top performances, but it is also further exemplified in her memento mori dance with America’s desire for cultural renewal, a desire that stems from the persistent need for bigger, better, and more excessive, or what could be called ecstatic consumption. In Baudrillard’s (2008) terms, ecstatic consumption employs the visual to stage its own disappearance by “pushing the pictorial act to its ecstatic form” whereby it will “creat[e] anything but the magic of its disappearance” (p. 29). While Baudrillard defines the ecstatic as “an immoral form” that is in opposition to the aesthetic or, figuratively speaking, that is “outside itself” as the meaning of the word “ecstasy” suggests (p. 26),13 Lady Gaga’s performances suggest that the kind of “transaesthetic world of simulation” of which Baudrillard writes is impossible without the enfolding of excess into an aesthetic. Accordingly, the body of an artist sets its own limits to the ways in which the very ecstasy of performance-turned-spectacle is performed and experienced. Such enfolding pays homage to the baroque “internalization of the outside” as “a unity that envelops a multiplicity,” which, as Gilles Deleuze (1993) explains in The Baroque Fold, is modernity’s way of employing the body in the service of realizing the soul (pp. 8, 98). This deadly dance is reflected in the juxtaposition of the body weighed down by the soul and is exemplified, for example, in Tintoretto’s The Last Supper (1594) or El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz (1586), but also in modernist paintings by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, or Jean Dubuffet, where, abstracted from the weight of corporeality, the body is given a soulful expression (Deleuze, 1993, pp. 29, 119). In other words, the abstraction singes the physical body in order to realize the soul as an essential element of physicality. Viewed in this light, memento mori then represents the infinite fold of life and death, the “conception of death as a movement that is in the present” (p. 71). This fold simultaneously points to the limitations of language to mediate between the present and the past. Christine BuciGlucksmann (1994) suggests that this “baroque signifier proliferates beyond everything signified, placing language in excess of corporeality”

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

23

by “bring[ing] into play the infinite materiality of images and bodies” (p. 139). Similarly, Baudrillard (1993) argues that “like baroque practitioners,” postmodern artists cannot escape their own iconoclasm, “manufactur[ing] images in which there is nothing to see” (p. 18). Contemporary preoccupation with the materiality of images and bodies has become consumerist culture’s memento mori, a dance with its own mortality. As a symbolic fetish of the ecstatic spectacle, this dance can be defined as an act of seeing and non-seeing, being seen and not seen—an act that proliferates in the postmillennial iconoclasm of performance artists like Lady Gaga. Performance art relies on the body as a means of expression, but it also emphasizes the ways in which the materiality of the body, how it is perceived and viewed, is constructed through the process of movement and theatrical performance, in which the purpose is to draw attention to what resists representation (Freeman, 2007, p. 49). In this context, the body’s movement as the creation of live art can be viewed as producing a means of communication that pushes the boundaries of language as well as perception, thus challenging the ways in which the gaze and language stage, but also inevitably commodify, the complex realities of human life and emotion. In her Bad Romance (2009) performance video, Lady Gaga mocks the ecstatic consumption of America’s celebrity culture by playing into the spectaclist gaze of not only the paparazzi and the celebrity pop star but also of the audience, whose emancipated voyeurism must be singed in the process of its own renewal. Gaga’s video is an orgy of iconoclastic scenes and images. The opening shot zooms in on Gaga’s postmodern pastiche of the modernist Bauhaus movement as her iconic minions exit the neon-lit “Gaga Bath House.” From the gyrating, heavily made-up yet sparsely clad bodies to Gaga’s own encounter with the internalized paparazzi gaze, the video performance deploys excess as an aesthetic means of mobilizing resistance through the corporeal spectacle, in which “the sexual body has been assigned a kind of artificial fate” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 22). Gaga’s orgiastic display of the body as a hypersexual site reinforces her critique of the gaze as “artificial,” but her final embrace of her singed corpse mocks, yet simultaneously appropriates, the fantasy of the body as an icon by uncovering what DeLillo calls “who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 112).

Don DeLillo’s Live Aesthetic as Con Art In the process of denaturalizing the corporeal while simultaneously aestheticizing the ecstatic, the final scene in the Bad Romance (2009)

24

Chapter One

video of Gaga embracing her own burnt-up and burnt-out corpse (i.e., the memento mori in situ) provides an interesting means of interrogating DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist as a text that similarly performs its own disappearance. More specifically, the novel stages its own consumption as it translates loss into an aestheticized and materialized ecstasy by posing as a performance while simultaneously mourning the potentialities associated with an ersatz literary text. Deploying postmodern America’s preoccupation with renewal as trapped within the capitalist “materialization of aesthetics,” DeLillo exposes performance art, primarily celebrated for its emancipatory and subversive capacity, as equally culpable in the so-called “general aestheticization of everyday” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 18). Given the role that performance art has played in the history of postmodern counterculture, DeLillo’s inquiry is not only incisive but also courageous and confronting. In this respect, The Body Artist can be described as a performance text that questions, rather than celebrates, the limits of the emancipated gaze by problematizing the rebellious spectacle produced by performance art as trapped in the materialization of aesthetics that it strives to challenge and immolate. Alternately, although the novel transcodes politics via an aesthetic, this aesthetic cannot help but romanticize the ecstatic through the very critical reflection it stages by peeling off the corporeal layers rather than by exposing the hidden (Freeman, 2007, p. 49). In New Performance/New Writing, John Freeman (2007) points to this duplicity by defining performance texts as “no longer necessarily concerned with providing evidence of an a priori concern with the words spoken in performance” (p. 49). “Central to this shift,” Freeman (2007) states, “is the idea that performance is not about the imitative duplication of human behaviour [or literary forms] as much as it is about focusing on aspects of behaviour in ways that ‘everyday life’ may disguise” (p. 49). In body art, which became a component of the 1960s and 1970s postmodern counterculture and has continued into the new millennium in its installation art forms, the body itself becomes a text. Freeman (2007) states that “in body art, the self is problematized. It is often doubled, idealized, made subject to acts of transgression and obsession, transformation and duration” (p. 81). In this context, body art embodies and exposes the tension that exists between art and/as commodity. This dynamic is what informs DeLillo’s (2001) performance text/body art novel. As critics including Osteen (2008) and Longmuir (2007) have pointed out, unlike DeLillo’s earlier novels such as White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997), which explore the dehumazing, disembodying effects of American capitalism, The Body

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

25

Artist (2001) takes this theme to a whole new level by returning us to the concept of the human subject as a living organism cum human art form, or a kind of living, breathing aesthetic. Through the character Lauren Hartke, a grieving body artist who mourns the death of her husband, a has-been film-maker named Rey Robles, DeLillo explores the ways in which the body can become a means of philosophical and artistic renewal by employing and simultaneously playing on the spectaclist gaze in order to not only undermine but also paradoxically reinscribe gender and social expectations. Exploring the relationship between art and loss, this minimalist yet performative novel deploys art as a means of estrangement whereby the artist confronts but, in the very process, inevitably objectifies the other within as a mirror image of his or her own (im)mortality. In this context, the novel also reveals postmodern counterculture forms such as body and performance art as equally caught up in the iconoclastic strategies that these forms strive to reject in the first place. DeLillo’s novels are well-known for their critique of the American penchant for spectacle and consumerist utopia.14 Hailed as a “chronicler of postmodernity” (Duvall, 2008, p. 2), Don DeLillo is venerated for revealing the culpability of aesthetics in becoming “nothing more than a form of commodity production” (p. 2). Critics including John Duvall (2008), Peter Boxall (2008), and Mark Osteen (2008) have noted DeLillo’s engagement with contemporary media culture, particularly its saturation in consumerist politics. Peter Boxall (2008), for example, stresses DeLillo’s “melting together of high art and consumer culture [which] serves not to cheapen the art work but rather to produce a new form” (p. 44). Given DeLillo’s engagement with media culture and the complex politics of postmodern simulacra, it is not surprising that he is often linked with the theoretical works of Jean Baudrillard,15 specifically his work on the postmodern culture of simulacra. Nonetheless, most critical declarations about DeLillo’s critique of commodity culture stop at highlighting DeLillo’s emphasis on the subversive, if not redemptive, value of art, or what Marc Osteen (2008) calls “art’s cunning capacity to salvage from loss something lasting” (p. 146).16 Similarly, Anne Longmuir (2007) describes DeLillo’s The Body Artist as an exploration of “the possibilities of a political aesthetic” that invites “political resistance” (p. 540). In Longmuir’s terms, this political resistance is facilitated not through “recovering the body” but rather through its performance (p. 540). However, DeLillo’s (2001) novelperformance text challenges such a reading by flaying and inevitably mourning the redemptive potential of performance art, with which it is frequently aligned. The novel asks whether the redemptive and often

26

Chapter One

celebrated, emancipatory potential of counterculture art forms does not, in fact, rely on a dangerous co-optation of aesthetics to stage the very ecstasy of commodification as yet another iconoclastic, albeit revivalist, spectacle. The irony of DeLillo’s The Body Artist is not that the text aspires to modernist minimalism, as Nel (2002) suggests, or that it subverts America’s consumption as Schuster (2008), Longmuir (2007), and Boxall (2008) argue. Rather, it exposes the desire for renewal as contingent on beckoning towards the paradox of America as the utopia achieved … a society which, with a directness we might judge unbearable, is built on the idea that it is the realization of everything the others have dreamt of—justice, plenty, rule of law, wealth, freedom: it knows this, it believes in it, and in the end, the others have come to believe in it too. (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 77)

And yet, underpinning this American paradox is the utopian demand for a renewal, the disappearance of which it persistently mourns.17 As the narrator of The Body Artist ponders, “Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can’t remember it, can’t concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 116). Lauren Hartke, the body artist and the novel’s protagonist, is reeling from grief over her husband Rey’s suicide, a has-been film-maker who dedicated the last years of his life to writing what she refers to as his “bullshit autobiography” (p. 34). Mourning the death of her husband, Lauren strives to move beyond the image of Rey as a construction of “tapestried lies and contrivances, stories shaped out of desperation” (p. 34). She is desperate to resuscitate the reality of their everyday life together: their silent breakfasts, his groans, and who “he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable or not” (p. 22). What she remembers is not Rey’s narrative or stories constructed by the film industry and its critics, but rather “her knowledge of his body” (22), the materiality of his existence. As Longmuir (2007) emphasizes, the body with all its excesses and materiality occupies an important yet controversial position in this otherwise minimalist text.18 Lauren makes a living by contorting and twisting her body, transforming it into an artifact. When Rey passes, not only does “the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 21) disappear, but so does his body of work. Mutilated and violated by the press, Rey’s film art is reduced to a bombastic spectacle of speculations about his ex-wife, his Spanish origin, his short brush with fame, and finally his commercial failure of what one of his critics refers to as “poetry of alien places” (p. 31). Rey’s death, however,

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

27

has a different meaning for Lauren; she is not mourning the passing of a celebrity, but rather their “passing through each other, easy and airy as sea spray, and how he’d told her that she was helping him recover his soul” (p. 63). Immune to the invasive public gaze, Lauren and Rey’s relationship is based on a sense of mutual embodiment and mirroring. Their becomingOther is derived from the body as a site of perception or as a “clear and distinguished zone of expression” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 98). DeLillo suggests in The Body Artist that to acknowledge the Other means to “become someone else” (p. 22). Such becoming-Other is essential to Lauren’s regimented bodywork, which allows her to transform “the world lost inside her” and “organize time until she could live again” (p. 39). Viewed in this context, Lauren’s becoming-Other through her own corporeality evokes the baroque enfolding of Otherness as an “amorous paradox” on the one hand and the melancholy gaze on the other (BuciGlucksmann, 1994, pp. 133, 156). Initially following Rey’s death, Lauren feels disconnected from her body. As her body is invaded by grief, she notices that it “felt different to her in ways she didn’t understand. Tight, framed, she didn’t know exactly. Slightly foreign and familiar” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 35). During the first few days after having lost Rey, she collapses, “forgetting how to stand” (p. 35). In order to reconnect with her corporeality, she decides to awaken her senses through food. While not necessarily having a soothing impact, the process of digestion brings “her body back” as it forces her to “spen[d] a number of subsequent hours scuttling to the toilet” (p. 37): In the first days back she ate a clam from hell and spent a number of subsequent hours scuttling to the toilet. But at least she had her body back. There’s nothing like a raging crap, she thought, to make mind and body one. She climbed the stairs, hearing herself from other parts of the house somehow. She threw off a grubby sweater. She raised her arm out of the sweater …. (DeLillo, 2001, p. 37)

As she reconnects with her body’s basic functions, Lauren is able to feel through the loss of her husband. She also simultaneously acts her loss out by means of bodily rather than verbal expression, which allows her to “open [time] up” (p. 109). Turning her body into an artistic medium allows her to transform mortality into art or, as she calls it, express “a still life that’s living, not painted” (p. 109). Therefore, subjecting her body to a “strict regimen of cat stretch and methodical contortion” becomes an important vehicle for exceeding corporeality, for manipulating her own disembodiment into an-other form that expresses the “world … lost inside her” (p. 39). According to Nel, (2002), Schuster, (2008), and Osteen

28

Chapter One

(2008), by working through her grief, Lauren returns to her body in order to renew herself or, as she puts it, to find “who she was” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 126). Not surprisingly, the point of this so-called return is to give her body a different turn, or what Deleuze (1993) refers to as “a privileged expression” that results in a kind of inversion of corporeality (p. 98). Such an expression emphasizes the relationship between the material and the imaginary, but it also deploys the body as a “closed interiority” that exemplifies “presence in illusion” or “rather realizing something in illusion itself” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 124). DeLillo (2001) aligns this illusion with the public gaze, its perception reducing the presence of a human subject—in this case, Rey—to a consumable yet burnt-out icon or, in other words, a mutilated fragment of “overlapping realities” (p. 84). In The Body Artist (2001), Mr. Tuttle, a stranger who makes a sudden appearance in Lauren’s rented house, exemplifies this overlapping of realities. Mr. Tuttle is a “nutcase who tries to live in other voices” (p. 92), but in his gliding from past to future tense, his fragmented speech challenges assumptions of what is socially acceptable or what is “believed to be mad” (p. 99). As an allegory of the mourning process,19 Mr. Tuttle exposes the realities of grief as escaping any coherent narrativization, but he also foreshadows Lauren’s slow realization that representing the unrepresentable (i.e., the haunting grief that has invaded her body like an alien) is in itself a potentially consumerist, commodifying principle. When she finally stages the grief that consumes her through a public performance titled “Body in Extremis,” Lauren, inspired by Mr. Tuttle, presents us with a kind of trompe l’oeil, a hyperbolic presentation that simultaneously parodies representation as an attempt at monumentalizing human experience while simultaneously mocking the fact that “[we] are made out of time” and hence circumscribed by our mortality (DeLillo, 2001, p. 94).20 The performance thus becomes a parody of life itself: there is no way of eschewing death since life is death. It is a part of the everyday that we do not wish to see, the burnt-up corpse lying beside us like Mr. Tuttle’s presumed madness or Lady Gaga’s memento mori. To prepare for her performance, Lauren goes through a rigorous process of peeling her body of its corporeality, a process whereby she publicly stages her grief as an aestheticized, albeit completely exfoliated, bleached, erased body. She wax-stripped hair from her armpits and legs. It came ripping off in cold sizzles. She had an acid exfoliating cream, hard-core, prescribed, and after she stripped the hair she rubbed in the cream to remove waste papery skin in flakes and scales. … This was her work, to disappear from all her

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

29

former venues of aspect and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance. … In the mirror she wanted to see someone who is classically unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bled of familiar aspect, a spook in the night static of every public toilet. (DeLillo, 2001, pp. 86–87)

Lauren’s preparation, the literal peeling off of her body, evokes Lady Gaga’s memento mori dance, whereby the aesthetic enfleshment is enfolded in the very process of the body being flayed, consumed by the gaze it so desperately tries to outmanoeuvre. While Lauren’s body is renewed through the almost ecstatic flaying of the form, or as DeLillo puts it, through “jump[ing] into another level” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 110), its aesthetic materialization remains trapped in the opposition between self and Other, rather than realizing that a true emancipation lies not so much in the counter-resistance or absolute alienation but instead in what Rancière (2009) calls the “third way” (p. 22). The “third way” is “what is involved in linking what one knows with what one does not know, being a performer deploying her skills and a spectator observing what these skills might produce in a new context among other spectators” (p. 22). However, DeLillo’s novel suggests that, unlike her friend Mariella Chapman, Lauren gets it: through her performance, she becomes the “bullshit autobiography” Rey has been attempting to write. The grief Lauren embodies is not some essential self she manages to sanctify, but rather a confirmation that an “emancipated gaze” reveals its own blind spots (Rancière, 2009, p. 22). Lauren’s performance translates death into the fabric of life. Consequently, by stripping herself bare of her representation as a “wife” or “widow,” she presents us with the ecstasy of death: life as death incarnate. Interpreting her performance as an act of subversion, however, would be a mistake; DeLillo persistently points to the ways in which Lauren’s desexualization is simply the reverse of the hypersexualization that is associated with the ecstatic form of postmodern spectacle. In contemporary culture, the ecstatic has taken on the form of the hypersexualized gyrating body in which corporeality disappears in the name of the image; the more pornographic, the less “real” the body is. Lady Gaga’s previously mentioned performances are a case in point. However, DeLillo’s daring suggestion in The Body Artist is that body art, while countering the spectaclist gaze, is not entirely free of the proliferative spectacle against which it revolts, as it simultaneously courts it. Baudrillard (1993) suggests that “when everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants” (p. 10). To extend this notion further, it can be said that Lauren’s performance reveals how the

30

Chapter One

desexualized body becomes a mere variation on hypersexualization. In this respect, both the hypersexualized and the desexualized variations are thus lost to the “overkill of its staging” and “the theatrical excess of its ambiguity” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 25).21 Consequently, ecstatic overkill informs not only Lady Gaga’s performances but also DeLillo’s minimalist novel. The transformation of Lauren’s corporeality into a theatrical medium of expression begins with an elaborate albeit melancholy staging of bodily forms that commodify rather than subvert loss and suffering. Her performance, similar to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance opening scene, brings forth a visual plethora of bodily incarnations—an ancient Japanese woman, a naked man, and a business woman. Moreover, Mariella Chapman, the journalist who interviews Lauren, describes Lauren’s performance in such a way: “Hartke makes her body do things … only seen in animated cartoons. It is a seizure that apparently flies the man out of one reality and into another” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 111). The Other’s “animated” gaze underpins Lauren’s performance, exposing and recreating the spectacle of this othering process. In DeLillo’s text, the figure of the Other is symbolic of the mortality from which everyday life is frequently estranged. As Baudrillard (1993) puts it, the Other “is the shadow or the mirror-image, which haunts the subject as [her] ‘other,’ causing [her] to be [herself] while at the same time never seeming to be quite [herself],” because “the double haunts the subject like a subtle death, but a death forever being conjured away” (p. 129).

The Memento Mori Dance as an Ode to (Im)Mortality: Dedoubling Reality The memento mori dance exemplified in Lauren Hartke’s waxing, exfoliating, waste-papering, and ripping of her body hair is also reminiscent of the surrealist mutilation of the body, or what André Breton (1929) in his “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” refers to as “dédoublement” (Freeman, 2007, p. 45). John Freeman (2007) defines dédoublement as detachment, but perhaps it would be more fitting to describe dédoublement as a restrained doubling or, to put it in Alain Badiou’s (2005) terms, a form of “subtraction” (p. 428). As Badiou (2005) declares in Being and Event, What happens in art, science, … and in love (if it exists) is the coming to light of an indiscernible of the times, which, as such, is neither a known or recognized multiple, nor an ineffable singularity, but that which detains in its multiple being all the common traits of the collective in question: … it is the truth of the collective’s being. (p. 17)

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

31

Particularly relevant is his notion that the “unrepresentable occurs within presentative forcing” (p. 17). Badiou’s presentative forcing evokes Breton’s concept of dédoublement, a concept that enfolds the baroque forcing of the flesh to realize the soul by means of exceeding the bodily form. Breton (1929) introduces the concept of dédoublement as a way to challenge the potential danger of turning the dreamy quality of the inner experience that surrealist performance requires into a commodified cliché (Freeman, 2007, p. 45). The point of doubling with restraint, however, inevitably inheres in a violent act of the subject’s own selfcommodification, as is revealed in Lauren Hartke’s “Body Art in Extremis” performance, evocatively subtitled “Slow, Spare, and Painful.” Freeman (2007) notes that an important aspect of body art is its presentational rather than its representational character (p. 84). This presentational aspect pervades the work of contemporary body artists, such as Chris Burden’s Endurance (1995), Carolee Schneemann’s Body Collage (1967) and Interior Scroll (1975), and Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque (1997).22 But as Freeman (2007) emphasizes, “a declared opposition to the ideological constraints imposed by the dominant culture” (p. 81) does not necessarily undermine the dominant culture, nor does it create a new space free of “paternal prohibition” and “disfiguring masks of cultural difference,” as Boxall (2008, p. 50) suggests. Rather, this opposition generates spaces where “heterogeneous performances are translated into one another” (Rancière, 2009, p. 22), where the gaze is not necessarily subverted but taken into account, problematized, and exposed. In a similar manner, DeLillo’s character Lauren Hartke uses her body to get in touch with “another level” of being where “what begins in solitary Otherness becomes familiar and even personal” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 112). Through her performance, Lauren redoubles time by making it both of the past and the present, but she also inevitably represents her grief as a “presentative forcing” of her own Otherness, to use Badiou’s words (2005, p. 57). Presenting her grief through her body, Lauren inevitably challenges the expectation of verbalizing and talking through loss. Moreover, by putting her body on display, she reveals the ways in which the history of the body has been informed by the double as an “imaginary figure … the shadow or mirror image, which haunts … the subject like a subtle death forever being conjured away” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 129). Similar to the slitting of the heroine’s eyeball in Buñuel’s and Dali’s (1928) Un Chien Andalou,23 Lauren’s performance gives life to her pain as it anesthetizes, but also inevitably aestheticizes, the grief she presents as an ecstasy of Otherness, or, as the meaning of the term “ecstasy” suggests, as being outside of herself (“Ecstasy,” n.d.). The spectacle of suffering

32

Chapter One

underpins contemporary media culture, from displays such as Abramovic’s overblown art installations to Gaga’s over-the-top performances. Hartke’s unorthodox performance revels in blurring the line between life and death, male and female, and body and narrative by stripping language of its power: She is acting, always in the process of becoming another or exploring some root identity. There is the woman who makes paintings with her vagina. This is art. There are the naked man and woman who charge into each other repeatedly at increasing speeds. This is art, sex and aggression. (DeLillo, 2001, p. 107)

Given DeLillo’s preoccupation with the so-called emancipated gaze, it is not surprising that Lauren’s performance is constructed through the lens of an interviewer, her former classmate, Mariella Chapman. Mariella writes of the performance: “Through much of the piece there is sound accompaniment, the anonymous robotic voice of a telephone answering machine delivering a standard announcement. This is played relentlessly and begins to weave itself into the visual texture of the performance” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 108). The piece ends with the “naked man [who] is stripped of recognizable language and culture” (p. 109). Mariella further describes the performance as a staging of bodily Otherness and its (redoubled) realities: In a series of electro-convulsive motions, the body flails out of control, whipping and spinning appallingly. Hartke makes her body do things I’ve only seen in animated cartoons. It is a seizure that apparently flies the man out of one reality and into another. (p. 110)

However, these two realities are not exclusive; they connote what she describes as “what we can know and what we can’t. … we know them both. We see them both” (p. 109). Such redoubling of reality allows for the art to exist, to engage with experiences and emotions that are difficult to represent or that remain unrepresented and unrepresentable. In his emphasis on Lauren Hartke’s transformation of personal history into art, DeLillo returns to some of the major tenets of modernist aesthetics, engaging specifically with what Nel (2002) describes as DeLillo’s “faith” in the value of art to provide distance from the contemporary culture of mass commodification (p. 15). Hartke, through her art, undoubtedly critiques the public’s consumerist gaze by flaying her body to the point of extinction in the manner advocated by T. S. Eliot (1919/1953). Longmuir (2007) argues that “like T. S. Eliot, DeLillo

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

33

differentiates artistic subjectivity from that of his other characters, seeing it as our best hope for autonomy from the dominant culture of late capitalism” (p. 530). However, DeLillo’s The Body Artist reveals that there is no “autonomy” to speak of—only a series of mediations that underpin textual, mediated, or embodied performances. While the unexpectedness of death in the light of life’s experiences, on the one hand, and its unavoidable immediacy, on the other, are the two realities that permeate DeLillo’s novel in the form of Lauren’s nostalgia for “some root identity” (p. 107), DeLillo (2001) refuses to indulge in the nostalgic form, as its generation would only reinforce the ecstasy of consumption. By contrast, he highlights the impossibility of root identity or any kind of absolute knowledge. If modernism is a nostalgic aesthetic that relies on the form to provide “solace and pleasure” to the reader or viewer, as Lyotard (2005) puts it, and the postmodern highlights the “unrepresentable of presentation itself” (Lyotard, 2005, p. 1432), then DeLillo’s (2001) novel performs its own dédoublement. The artist extinguishes her personality in the process of offering her body to the spectaclist gaze as a memento mori—as an art object that self-immolates only to stay present, that self-commodifies only to mourn and acknowledge the culpability of art and aesthetics in what Olster (2008) calls the “imperative to consume” (p. 3). While critics such as Schuster (2008), Nel (2002), Longmuir (2007), and DiPrete (2005) align Lauren Hartke’s performance with DeLillo’s insistence on deploying art as a feminist and political intervention, but also as a critique of capitalist consumerism, such an assertion ultimately reaffirms the kind of iconoclasm DeLillo consistently rejects. Instead, DeLillo’s The Body Artist provides an insight into what Mariella Chapman, the interviewer, suggests are the rare moments exposing “who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are … It is about you and me” (DeLillo, 2001, p. 111). Lauren’s disembodiment enfleshes the reality of her loss. It comments on the contemporary commodification of the (artistic) body through the so-called “emancipated gaze” but also through the artist’s own complicity in monumentalizing suffering into an act of public consumption. Like Lady Gaga, Lauren cannot entirely subvert the spectacle that she stages; neither does DeLillo suggest that art can recuperate the nostalgic modernity that contemporary America yearns for. No matter how much Lauren strives to “shake off the body” (p. 107), its physicality and weight have the last dance. Viewed in this light, DeLillo’s (2001) novel enfolds rather than recuperates or subverts what Baudrillard (1988) calls “America’s utopian nature, its mythic banality, its dream quality, and its grandeur” or, in other

34

Chapter One

words, a dream fit for a surrealist nightmare (p. 95). The singed body that the dystopian society of spectacle innocently coddles experiences its own glorious flaying. In this manner, the body realizes its materiality through the dédoublement that flies the corporeal out of the window like the birds Lauren Hartke observes throughout the novel (DeLillo, 2001, pp. 24, 55, 173), like “the sea tang on her face and flow of time in her body,” only to confront “in the mirror. … someone who is classically unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bled of familiar aspect, a spook in the night static of every public toilet” (pp. 126, 127). However, as The Body Artist reveals, the unseen spectator (i.e., the reader) is equally complicit in the act of flaying. Dancing to the rhythm of the limits of corporeal possibility, the voyeur-consumers unwittingly perform their own memento mori dance: the utopian romance gone bad.

The Spectacle and/as the “Dream of Extinction”: The Universal Eye/I and Point Omega In Point Omega, DeLillo (2010) follows the previously mentioned voyeurconsumer to the 2006 MoMA exhibition of Douglas Gordon’s installation 24 Hour Psycho. Protected by his anonymity and stripped of identity, the voyeur, like the camera eye of the projected image he follows around, disappears into the “ten by fourteen” screen (DeLillo, 2010, p. 3). He becomes an “eye/i-con,” but also a kind of con of an eye/I, surveying the images in front of him, extinguishing himself and others in the process of watching: “the man standing alone moved a hand toward his face, repeating, ever so slowly, the action of a figure on the screen” (p. 3). Locked in the image of the figure on the screen, the man at the wall finds himself in a “radically altered plane of time” (p. 12). His gaze, detached and depersonalized, becomes a subjectivity of its own—a universal eye that represents what Jonathan Beller (2006) calls “the radical alienation of consciousness” (p. 15). Reduced to an inanimate object, this depersonalized eye that frames the text also becomes a kind of weapon, blurring the line between Universal Studios, the political resistance of performance art, and the world. But this anonymous gaze is also the embodiment of ecstatic consumption—the intersection of scopophilic desire (i.e., the pleasure and terror of looking), silence, and inertia—that subjects all it sees to an indefinite proliferation and metamorphosis, which constitute the alpha and omega of the spectacle. In brief, the spectacle of ecstatic consumption is the ultimate point of reversibility and exaltation with which DeLillo’s novel begins and ends.

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

35

Framed by Douglas Gordon’s slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), an installation that extends the running time of Hitchcock’s 109 minute movie to 24 hours, but also by the merciless gaze of the man at the wall, Point Omega takes place between the two long takes of “Anonymity I” and “Anonymity II,” chapters that function as stills of what could be called the novel’s “negative intensity” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 18). The four chapters that lie within these two frames generate a different kind of heightened state: a desire for transcendence. The chapters follow the conversations of Richard Elster, a former defense intellectual, and Jim Finley, an aspiring filmmaker whose aim is to make a documentary consisting of one continuous take about Elster’s life. Both Elster and Finley are searching for some otherwordly universe where humankind is saved from wars and, ultimately, from itself. Following the Heraclitean logic that the ever-changing nature of the universe is unified by the four elements,—earth, water, fire, and air—the chapters take us away from the fast-paced world of New York City to the desert, where Elster and Finley become unified in their isolation, but also where, in their closeness to nature (and the cosmos), they can contemplate their individual theories of spiritual transcendence. Their coming together is, however, interrupted by the appearance and disappearance of Elster’s daughter, Jessie, whose eerie presence and sudden absence become indicative of the relativity of the absolute that both Finley and Elster try to grasp—Elster through his decoding of war as haiku and Finley in his desperate search for a cinematic form that captures the “dawn of man” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 71). Searching for some neutral ground where wars disappear into thin air, where art becomes a solid path to understanding man’s ontology, the novel propels the reader into a neutral yet intense zone where time is space, space is time. It is a zone where the busy New Yorker, trapped in the spectacle of excess, billboard consciousness, and detachment finds a repose from the rendition called life. Partly a philosophical reflection on the postmillennial state of humanity, partly a smorgasbord of visual snapshots, quantum theory, and poetry, Point Omega ponders the meaning of life and death by exploring the relativity of being. Not surprisingly, the novel centres on exploring and dismantling universal truths—be they related to world events, individual experience, or art. It is a tall order for a novel that relishes, if not advocates for, ideological restraint and stylistic sparseness. And yet, this is DeLillo’s point: in order to map the world that is spinning out of control, or what Boxall (2012) refers to as a “Yeatsian moment of becoming” (p. 689), DeLillo (2010) insists on “taking work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 13) to allow the individual time to come to a

36

Chapter One

stand-still, where the moment becomes eternal, extinguished in its ecstatic decelaration to a kind of absolute singularity or “a pseudo-sacred entity” (Debord, 1983, p. 25). This absolute singularity is “an intimation of lifebeyond, world-beyond” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 15), where life and death are enfolded in the detached gaze of the man standing at the wall and the cinematic projection in front of him. The novel performs this enfolding through a constant expansion and retraction of the narrative forces that drive it. Such dédoublement pervades the novel. But similar to The Body Artist, detachment as a restrained doubling becomes a means of exploring the hypertely of the contemporary image-conscious society, where cinema becomes a consumer weapon but is also its very antidote. As in his previous work, DeLillo refuses to succumb to ultimatums or binaries. His fiction is an ever-expanding universe trapped in minimalist, ever-shrinking prose that disturbs the fine line between perception and production, art and consumption, cinema and war, and life and death. Accordingly, Point Omega does away with conceptual rigidity for the sake of variable subjectivity, relativity of perception, and universal dreaming, whereby the individual universe is one of the many parts of an ever-expanding continuum. Like most of DeLillo’s oeuvre, Point Omega offers a dystopian view of consumer culture and its emphasis on the spectacle as an “instrument of unification” that increases an overall sense of alienation and isolation (Debord, 1983, p. 3). It also desperately strives to awaken humanity from its slumber by presenting us with a post-Euclidean universe where new ways of looking, seeing, and perceiving are not only possible, but where counterpoints become a part of the same, complex reality. Echoing Albert Einstein’s (1916/1961) general theory of relativity, Point Omega envisions a space where art, science, war, life, and death can no longer outperform one another, where they are unified in their entanglements and contradictions, and where their value and effects are relative to their respective context. As RoseLee Goldberg (2011) has argued, performance art has become the ultimate postmillennial art form, bringing together technology, corporeality, and visual effects, but also allowing for a “level of aesthetic mastery, creating mobile, three-dimensional pictures in real time” (p. 229). Accordingly, DeLillo turns to yet another performance artwork to gauge his novel’s search for what Roland Barthes (1953) calls “zero degree writing,” an unbound relativity, a kind of murder of excess (p. 76). Similar to The Body Artist, DeLillo’s Point Omega relies on a kind of restrained redoubling, an unfolding around two very different yet related axes: the world of the image (the icon) and the world beyond it (where the icon is merely a con of individual perception, the world of the

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

37

“eye/I”). The novel, however, urges us to refrain from seeing these axes as separate realities. Rather, it asks us to see these realities as two simultaneous performances that form an identical albeit relative universe in the creation of which the reader/spectator is equally implicated. In this context, Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho serves as an imprint of this relative universe where life and death are reversible entities, where Norman Bates’s 50-minute stabbing of Marion Crane is an X-ray portrait of the dark and violent grotto that is our unconscious, as well as a means of diversion from its violent urges.24 Following such logic as already established in The Body Artist, Point Omega suggests that performance art is just as much a source of subversion and critique as it is a controversial co-optation of primordial desires, political resistance, and consumer culture. The novel delivers a similar verdict on the fate of cinema in the 21st century. On the one hand, DeLillo reveals how much cinema as/and universal production has been subsumed by the capitalist machine. On the other hand, he also ponders the possibility of whether cinema can return to a more spiritual art that cinematographers Andrei Tarkovsky or Dziga Vertov25 envisioned. In many ways, Point Omega challenges us to see “outside our [limited] experience” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 72), asking us to look beyond the spectacle eye/icon. Following Debord’s idea of the spectacle, DeLillo acknowledges that “the spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion” but also a kind of “technical realization” of the ultimate detachment, where the line between the pleasure of watching and committing murder is increasingly blurred (Debord, 1983, p. 20). Connecting the visual and technological modes of production and consumption, Jonathan Beller develops Debord’s idea further by suggesting that cinema has become a form of war economy, whereby “both pleasure and murder, indeed the (mass) pleasures of (systematic) murder, [are] worked out in the calculus of the image that sustain the reality of hierarchical society” (Beller, 2006, p. 8). As Beller notes, not only do we “produce our own extinction” in “processing the time-image” (p. 242), but violence and war have become the “language of intervention in contemporary society” (p. 259). Just as humans are reduced to images and icons, simulacra and simulated singularities, so are the logistics of perception tied up in the linking of the eye to visual weaponry, employed for the sake of ecstatic consumption, whether it takes the form of commodity or art and/as war.

38

Chapter One

War as Abstraction: The Raw Politics of the Visual Economy Examining the visual economy of contemporary society, Point Omega exposes the ways in which good and evil, beauty and terror, and war and art have become subject to a reversible metamorphosis. Throughout the novel, Elster argues that postmillennial society is trapped in a culture of images. He acknowledges that states are run on carefully gathered information that consists of nothing more than a sum of “translation, interpretation, [and] performance” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 34). Referring to the government’s “criminal enterprise” (p. 35), Elster comments on the fallibility of perception and the persistent reliance on the spectacle. According to Elster, the strategists in the Pentagon and the “naked, chained, blindfolded” prisoners are all “actors” trapped in “a revenge play,” a mere performance of inaccurate translation and subjective interpretation (p. 34). Through Elster’s cynical musings on the fate of humanity in the millennium, DeLillo decries the increasing attachment to visual production as a kind of regression to the imaginary, or what Elster calls the “dream of extinction” (p. 36). DeLillo links this “dream” to mankind’s aggressive drive that sublimates violent urges primarily through the eye. Elster speaks to this visual bondage when he tells Finley about the ways in which wars have become a matter of gauging and interpreting “salvaged videotapes of caged men” by “men and women in cubicles, wearing headphones” (p. 33). Invoking Freud’s 1932/1933 essay to Einstein, “Why War,” in which Freud responds to Einstein’s concern about man’s violent lust for “hatred and destruction” (Gay, 1989, p. 346), DeLillo probes the postmillennial reliance on cinema as a means of controlling the masses, but also as a kind of consumer weaponry that has ushered us into a new, elliptical kind of reality, where space and time have become meaningless coordinates, where war is art, and where destruction is beauty. Inevitably, Elster’s musings on the relationship between war and art constitute the epicenter of the novel. Reduced to a kind of pragmatic lens, Elster serves as DeLillo’s camera obscura,26 the seer in the dark who finds a temporary repose from the noise of his own reality in his monologic inversions (and conversations) with Finley. While Elster talks, Finley listens. Their unbalanced exchange mirrors Freud’s impersonal relationship with Einstein. Dismissing cinema as an instrument of war, Elster frequently derides Finley’s search for a perfect cinematic form. While he concedes that art, literature, or cinema can serve as a means of deflection, Elster does not believe that they can “cure” man’s violent

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

39

urges. However, “when you strip away all the surfaces, what’s left is terror” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 45). Elster here echoes Freud’s skeptical attitude towards Einstein’s theories. As Strachey (1991) notes in his introduction to Freud’s Civilization, Society and Religion, in the preface to his essay, “Why War?,” Freud did not think much of Einstein’s work. He found Einstein’s scientific writing “tedious” and “sterile” (Freud, 1933/1991, p. 344). Like Elster with Finley, Freud agreed to entertain Einstein’s questions about the war, but only to a point. His letter is brief and dismissive of Einstein’s naive suggestion that there must be a way of circumventing man’s lust for violence. In his letter, Freud warns Einstein that not much can be done about the human drive for death since death is the primary “aim of life” (qtd. in Gay, 1989, p. 613). He suggests that the only possible way of curtailing the primeval urge might be to “divert it” through art or other “Eros”-oriented means, but even that might be a “Utopian expectation” (Freud, 1933/1991, pp. 361, 362).27 Elster echoes Freud’s views by telling Finley that “this [the mankind’s lust for violence and wars] is the thing that literature was meant to cure” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 45). DeLillo, however, seems to refute such a view by asking whether, by becoming such a form of diversion, literature’s role is not, in fact, reduced to reinscribing what it is attempting to cure in the first place. As Elster acknowledges, the cure is an illusion or, as he cynically puts it, a “bedtime story” that sublimates violence through symbolic murder (i.e., aestheticization of violence, p. 45). Reflecting on the insufficiencies of language to grasp experience in its totality rather than approximated signs, Elster suggests that perhaps poetry or, more specifically, “haiku” is as close as we get to capturing the “submicroscopic moments” of “the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that’s not the movies” (pp. 17, 15). Like Walt Whitman (1855), who in his preface to Leaves of Grass celebrated the age of wars as a mechanism of renewal,28 Elster dreams of a perfect war that would “bare everything in plain sight” (p. 29) like haiku does. In his quest for some pure essence, Elster inevitably reveals the limitations of art and/as war on consumer society, but also the increasing reversibility of the two in which the observer and the environment are one. Such a form of synthesis is essential to the understanding of haiku’s aesthetic immediacy. In his study of Japanese aesthetics, Kenneth Yasuda (1995) describes haiku as an “attitude [of] readiness for an experience for its own sake” (p. 127). In other words, haiku requires us to give up cogitation and be in the moment; it asks the poet to surrender to his environment, to become one with what he sees. Einstein famously embraced the Japanese haiku as a model for his theory of relativity.

40

Chapter One

Specifically, he was attracted to the emphasis on experiences being read in a way that is relative to their context. As Ernest Cassier (1953) notes, Einstein’s theory of relativity rests on “observability” or an observer’s ability to lose his “awareness of himself as separate from what he sees or hears,” and instead “becom[e] one with the object” (p. 134). In his emphasis on the elliptical nature of the universe where two counterpoints become indistinguishable (Einstein, 1916/1961, p. 126), Einstein, in fact, anticipates Freud’s hypothesis of the man’s universal drive to “return to the inanimate state” (Gay, 1989, p. 613). Interestingly, such reversibility is also the very essence of art. Art cannot escape the very process of objectification that it strives to transcend. As Rolland Barthes (1953) suggests in Writing Degree Zero, art is a form of murder: “it transforms life into destiny [or biography], a memory into a useful act, duration into an oriented and meaningful time” (p. 5). DeLillo bemoans that in the contemporary age, art has become the victim of its own disappearances and, ultimately, murder. Subsumed by the image culture, contemporary art is “trying to go beyond itself … the more it transcends towards its empty essence” (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 27), towards its own point of extinction. This notion of extinction of the body—whether textual or physical—already permeates The Body Artist, in which DeLillo contemplates the following conundrum: If a drive towards abstraction or aesthetization of politics is a condition of the postmillennial society, then what happens to the body? If it is viewed as an abstract entity, is the body dead or transcendent? Is the transcendent body then dead or alive? If The Body Artist (2001) flays the corporeal in order to awaken the benumbed soul from its slumber, then Point Omega (2010) explores the relative similarities between transcendence, incorporeality, and its underlying premise—extinction—through the predominant art of the 20th and the 21st centuries: cinema. Since World War I (WWI), cinema has played an integral role in the shaping of global perception; however, it has also served as a device of detachment, in which humans become objectified bodies—objects of perception. Many cultural critics of the 20th century, including Walter Benjamin (1968; 1996), Theodor Adorno (1974), Guy Debord (1983), and Paul Virilio (1989), critiqued the image-driven art form as being trapped in a mechanical reproduction of images that separates the masses from their own consciousness. Whether gauged as the “opium of the masses” (Debord, 1983, p. 44) or as a “major site for a trade in dematerialization” (Virilio, 1989; p. 43), cinema has become the ultimate art form of capitalist production, transforming aesthetics into production and abstraction into a global economy of commodified images. As humans

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

41

become mere images or objects of the gaze, they are reduced to abstract entities,—dots on a map or a screen or characters in a play—extinguished in and by their incorporeality. Point Omega (2010) suggests that cinema, wars, and art, but also religion, are all a part and parcel of what Freud (1928/1991) viewed as “the future of an illusion,” man’s desperate preparation for and stalling of his ultimate end: death (p. 1). DeLillo suggests, however, that death is not only the end, but also the very beginning: the omega point of existence. In the second chapter of Point Omega, Elster provides a whole soliloquy on the ending as a new beginning. To defend his point of view, he quotes from Teilhard de Chardin’s (1955/1964) spiritual text The Future of Man, written in the 1930s but published posthumously due to de Chardin’s controversial views. Teilhard de Chardin argued for a complete synthesis of the universe to be accomplished by mankind’s new perception of time, a kind of space-time continuum not so different from Einstein’s space-time interval, where “there is no longer any distinction between those things that we classified on other levels as physical or moral, natural or artificial, organic or collective, biological or juridical” (de Chardin, 1955/1964, p. 91). De Chardin believed that this synthesis would lead the man towards a “hyper-personal state” and usher him into a “sidereal world [a world existing side-by-side],” where all personalities would become one, inverted into a “centre of consciousness,” which he calls “point omega” (1955/1964, p. 263). In his discussions with Finley, Elster refers to de Chardin’s call for this hyper-personal state when he argues that mankind aspires to “leap out of our biology … back now to inorganic matter” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 52). While Elster explains this point as a complete exhaustion of consciousness (p. 52), DeLillo draws parallels between the 20th century philosophies of the universe, aesthetics, and human psychology. Following Einstein’s logic, DeLillo positions Elster’s theory of extinction as a dream that represents two realities at once: the inversion into an absolute inertia (i.e., the screen/canvas/text, where pleasure and murder blend into one, where spectators/readers are pleasure-seekers but also murderers) and the more global concern of the ways in which cinemaas-art has been deployed as a war weapon or a new “war machine,” to put it in Paul Virilio’s (1989) terms (p. 4). DeLillo explores this dangerous dédoublement through the pairing of Jim Finley, the artist, and Richard Elster, the war specialist. As suggested earlier, both Finley and Elster are in search of some world beyond. While Finley’s life goal is to make a documentary of Elster’s “complete experience” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 21) in “one continuous take” (p. 22), Elster is desperate to fill what DeLillo

42

Chapter One

refers to as history’s “blank spaces” with a series of lectures on what he calls “the dream of extinction” (p. 36).29 Echoing Freud’s work on the death drive and de Chardin’s theory of the “omega point,” Elster believes that the ultimate goal of humanity is its own disappearance—what de Chardin (1955/1964) calls a “supreme synthesis” achieved by turning inward (p. 123), or what Freud refers to as “the instinct to return to the inanimate state” (qtd. in Gay, 1989, p. 613).30 Both Elster and Finley are concerned with the ways in which our perception is terrorized by “dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 45). Each character, however, represents a different spectrum of the role that cinema increasingly plays in shaping humanity. As a war/defence intellectual, Elster ponders the ways in which capitalist societies after WWI started measuring time by relying on what Paul Virilio (1989) refers to as “a systematic use of cinematic techniques in the conflicts of the twentieth century” (p. 1), specifically the use of cameras, spy-satellites, drones, and video-missiles to gauge the enemy. Elster’s stint in the government makes him cynical about the war but also about humanity in general. He explains to Finley that wars are like works of fiction: they are derived from images and interpreted evidence and pieced together into a “dead conjecture” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 17). Detached from the enemy site, the military is forced to rely on images and “logistics of military perception” (Virilio, 1989, p. 1); today, the line between the war and cinema is therefore extremely tenuous. As Virilio (1989) emphasizes: a war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles). In a technician’s version of an all-seeing Divinity, … the drive is on for a general system of illumination that will allow everything to be seen and known (p. 5)

Elster persistently speaks to this divine, all-seeing objectification and bemoans the primarily destructive role it plays in contemporary society. When Elster goes with Finley to see the MoMA installation of Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, he watches carefully as the Norman Bates shower scene is extended to 53 minutes.31 Observing the scene, Elster comments on the irony of what he is seeing: the same terrorizing visuals are often the fodder for military action. In Gordon’s expansion of Hitchcock’s dark, violent universe of the human psyche, Elster recognizes “the plotters, the strategists” in the Pentagon (DeLillo, 2010, p. 28). He says to Finley, “War creates a closed world and not only for those in combat but for the plotters, the strategists. … Their war is abstract. They think they’re sending an army into a place on a map” (p. 28). As Elster

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

43

explains to Finley, the so-called war experts operate solely on faith and perception or what he calls a “saga of created reality” (p. 28), a pulp fiction of skewed storylines supported by images turned into global weapons. No matter how scientific or philosophical Elster gets, his point of view remains cynical about art and/as war.

Art as Extinction or Universal Awareness: Search for the Lost Meaning Inverting Elster’s cynical philosophizing on the end of the world is Finley’s artistic vision: his pursuit of pure cinema, which he envisions as an effective means of uncovering the meaning of life. In his pursuit of cinema-as-art, Finley serves as a creative counterpoint to Elster’s commodity-turned-haiku principle. Yet, as DeLillo demonstrates, Elster’s and Finley’s viewpoints, regardless of their obvious differences, are in fact convergent. Both men are preoccupied with the notion that human perception is limited and that detachment is not only a necessary condition of consumer society but also, paradoxically, the very aim of art. Elster’s dream of a haiku war is not very different from Finley’s concept of cinema as an artistic medium that captures the unacknowledged, invisible, and unspoken aspects of lived experience. Both men dream of capturing direct experience as is by using images to distill meaning beyond words. Doing away with the weight of the form—be it textual or corporeal—that hinders our access to direct experience is something that Finley strives to accomplish through his art. Finley’s approach to cinema actually mirrors Elster’s preoccupation with extinction. In the process of making his art, Finley figuratively extinguishes himself. Like Mr. Tuttle in The Body Artist, Finley is more or less a ghostly emanation haunting the text. Grayley Herren (2015) notes the “stalking” quality of DeLillo’s artist, who is not only a creator but also a murderer or a predator (p. 138). Although Herren assigns this quality primarily to the gaze of the anonymous narrator/voyeur, both Finley and Elster are consumed by the same predatory drive, albeit in reverse. Elster’s former job in the Pentagon required him to turn his aggression against others; meanwhile, Finley turns this aggression inward. No matter how much he eats, Finley remains a “scrawny”-looking individual (DeLillo, 2010, p. 24). When Elster asks him how he accomplishes to eat so much yet remain so skinny, Finley responds that “all the food, all the energy gets sucked up by the film. The body gets nothing” (p. 24). In this context, Finley represents the other side of ecstatic consumption—an art based on disciplined subtraction whereby the self disappears into the art form. His

44

Chapter One

goal is to make a film that speaks to direct experience, documenting humanity as is without any embellishments or stylistic accoutrements. He is not interested in big Hollywood productions—he deplores mass entertainment’s iconography. Instead, he sees mass (re)production as a con, a form of conography. Like Lauren Hartke, the protagonist of DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001), Finley is desperate to document the immediacy of suffering and mankind’s slow and sometimes sudden progression towards death. While Hartke mourns her deceased husband, Finley searches for a way out of the consumerist inertia and ennui. He dedicates himself to the pursuit of the perfect subject, which he finds in Elster and his endless philosophizing about governance, the importance of wars, and the human drive for selfdestruction or, as he calls it, extinction. In many ways, Finley’s concept of art mirrors Elster’s concerns about the world’s apocalyptic striding towards its end. Through his celebration of the haiku war, Elster hopes for some absolute, pure war that would bring about a renewed sense of reality and clarity, to “bare everything to plain sight” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 29). Finley, on the other hand, tries to find this form of exposure in and through cinematic art in a form as close as possible to the direct experience of life that haiku represents. But the world in which Finley finds himself is not interested in yet another experimental documentary that is more of an “idea” than a film (DeLillo, 2010, p. 25). Instead, this world is trapped by “inferior time, people checking watches” (p. 45). When Finley takes Elster to see Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho at the MoMA, he realizes that the show is the embodiment of the world gone psychotic, perceived at a slow motion— Norman Bates stabbing Marion, who blurs into Bates’s mother Norma and later into her deceased body. The installation only further enhances Hitchcock’s exposure of the human yearning for symbiosis—whether it takes the form of the desire to return to the mother’s womb or the desire for death itself. While paying homage to Hitchcock’s acute representation of the human unconscious, Gordon also exposes the ways in which contemporary society is violated by images and the constant barrage of slow-motion footage of wars, casualties, and murder that is replayed and glorified on TV screens everywhere. Gordon’s installation serves as a testament to the society benumbed by the storm of images that commodify lived reality by substituting social relations with commodities, or what Lady Gaga refers to as a “bad romance”. However, it also reveals how much the artistic process is alone a form of synthesis and symbiosis between the artist and his work, a process of distillation and ultimately detachment.

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

45

In his drive to expose the spectacle of consumption as “the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep” and as well represents an “exile of human powers” (Debord, 1983, p. 23), Finley expends himself completely, disappearing into his art like Elster’s “stones in the field” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 53). Interestingly, Elster’s preoccupation with the stoniness of the stone becomes the common denominator for not only his haiku war but also for Finley’s quest for pure cinema. If art is a means of “recover[ing] the sensation of life” or “mak[ing] the stone stony,” as Viktor Shklovsky put it in his 1917 essay “Art as Technique” (p. 219), then it is plausible to suggest that what connects Elster’s and Finley’s perspectives on life is a matter of what Shklovsky calls a “technique,” or what Heidegger (1954/1977) refers to as “techné,” an ability to reveal what is concealed from reality. As Heidegger writes, techné is a “way of reveal[ing] whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie before us” (p. 13). Similarly, Shklovsky (1917/1998) describes technique as uncovering the stoniness of the stone by turning art into a “way of experiencing the artfulness of an object” because “the object is not important” (p. 219). When Finley tells Elster that he wishes to make a documentary about him, Elster warns him that such an attempt is “nothing more than a dead conjecture” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 17). But Finley insists that there is something beyond the dead conjecture that only art can capture. Believing in art as a means of transcending the limitations of language, Finley pursues Elster to the desert, the ultimate symbol of transience. Far away from civilization, the desert represents an elliptical universe where time and space blend into an ideal site for contemplating life’s many asymmetries. For Finley, especially, this space-time interval serves as an important source of inspiration where he can live out his dream of pure cinema, uncluttered by self-conscious editing and affected acting. In the desert, detached and isolated from the noise of the world, he and his art become one. Inspired by Russian experimental cinema, specifically by Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Finley wishes to document Elster’s experience in a “single extended shot” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 22). His artistic vision echoes Dziga Vertov’s (1924/1984) manifesto called Kinoks: A Revolution, in which Vertov argued for a kind of “theory of relativity on the screen” or what he referred to as a “kino-eye,” a cinematic perception that would document what cannot be seen (p. 41). Vertov described the kino-eye as “the possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, [and] the acted nonacted” (1924/1984, p. 41). This new type of cinematography was meant to grasp what the human eye cannot see—what Vertov refers as the “negative of time” or a kind of

46

Chapter One

“film-truth” (p. 41). As Finley explains to Elster, he finds something “religious, rapturous” in it (DeLillo, 2010, p. 25); it gives him a sense of “beyond.” Perceiving cinema as a reflection of the man and his universe, Finley links cinema to a different kind of ecstatic form: art as truth. Finley’s vision of cinema is comparable to Vertov’s ideals of the kinoeye, but it also echoes the ideals of another Russian director, Andrey Tarkovsky (1986)—specifically his insistence that real cinema is like poetry. In fact, invoking Einstein’s comparison of theory of relativity to Japanese haiku, Tarkovsky (1986) writes: “What attracts me to haiku is its observation of life—pure, subtle, one with its subject, a kind of distillation, … [a] direct observation of life” (p. 66) that is reflective of the very spirit of cinema. Tarkovsky’s reflections on cinema are particularly useful here. In Sculpting in Time: Reflections on Cinema, Tarkovsky (1986) draws interesting links between cinema, time, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Similar to Vertov’s insistence on seeing beyond what can be seen, Tarkovsky deploys time as an imprint of the human soul (p. 57). He argues that, unlike any other art form, cinema has the potential to “manifest itself directly” and thus, like a haiku, capture what he calls the “living image” (p. 67). Tarkovsky’s vision of cinema as haiku insists on being capable of capturing the sidereal world/s to which the human eye has no access. He calls for an antitheatrical, unaffected cinema: “A true artistic image gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings” (p. 109). Finley frequently voices these same ideals as he ponders Elster’s documentary as an unaffected piece, just a “man and a wall” (DeLillo 2010, p. 21). Finley’s problem, however, is that, in the age of consumer cinema and digital technology, his desire for unaffected cinema and hours of unedited footage does not really speak to the consumer audience. The more he tries to push himself to create the kind of art that would “turn and loosen the soul” that Tarkovsky (1986) envisioned (p. 119), the more he loses himself in the process. Accordingly, Finley represents the art process as a means of “extinguishing one’s personality,” which T. S. Eliot (1919/1953) described in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (p. 28). In the process of making his one and only film about Jerry Lewis, Finley acknowledges that he has turned into “Jerry’s frenzied double, eyeballs popping out of [his] head” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 27). As he becomes Other, Finley inevitably erases his personality but also figuratively murders his own subjectivity. In delineating the fine line between art and extinction, DeLillo suggests in Point Omega that the artistic process mimics Freud’s death drive while simultaneously transforming it into a life force, a kind of “pointer to

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

47

infinity” (Tarkovsky, 1986, p. 118). By the end of the novel, the reader/consumer thus arrives at the other end of point omega, the supreme consciousness as hyper-reflection, or what de Chardin called “hyperpersonalization” (1955/1964, p. 259). Finley, like Lauren Hartke, disappears into his art only to reappear as another entity, the “ecstatic eye” in the MoMA gallery or the man at the wall watching the man at the wall being watched by an ambiguous other.

The (I)Con of Supreme Synthesis: From the Femme Fatale to the Sylvan Sign The overall sense of ambiguity and transience that pervades Point Omega are associated with the limitations of language and the blind spots of human cognition. For centuries, literature has aligned this ambiguity with the female gender, deploying women as symbols of transience and instability. Given DeLillo’s interest in challenging expectations and absolute truths, it is ironic that he chooses to resuscitate the femme fatale cliché in his dystopian vision of the universe through Elster’s daughter, Jessie, who is both a daddy’s girl and an archetypal femme fatale. She does not mind her father’s overbearing behavior, his possessiveness, or his refusal to let her speak for herself. Mirroring Elster’s relationship with his daughter, Finley similarly idolizes Jessie to the point of sneaking in on her, watching her as she does her ablutions. Jessie’s arrival cleaves the two-dimensional world in which Elster and Finley find themselves. Ephemeral and “sylphlike” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 49), she is the Lacanian objet petit a, the bar that severs the imaginary from the symbolic. For Lacan (1978/1981), the direct experience, or what he calls “the real,” remains inaccessible—the objet petit a is the embodiment of its ephemeral nature, its ungraspability, “an ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element which can be approached, but never grasped” (Lacan, 1978/1981, p. 280).32 Similarly, Jessie represents the direct experience that Elster and Finley are so desperate to capture and to which they have only a mediated access: Elster through his intellectual theories and Finley through his art. Finley describes Jessie as giving the “impression that nothing about this place was different from any other, this south and west, latitude and longitude. She moved through places in a soft glide, feeling the same things everywhere, this is what there was, the space within” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 49). When Jessie disappears after a few anonymous phone calls, Elster and Finley are led to believe that she was murdered by a stalker.

48

Chapter One

Jessie’s disappearance is in line with her femme fatale qualities. For Jessie to remain the sign of transience, she must “[pass] into air,” as the opening of chapter four of Point Omega suggests: “Passing into air, it seems that is what she was meant to do, what she was made for” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 81). As Mary Ann Doane (2013) explains, the role of the femme fatale is to exude ambivalence and be sylvan and sylphlike: Her power is of a peculiar sort insofar as it is usually not subject to her conscious will, hence appearing to blur the opposition between passivity and activity. She is an ambivalent figure because she is not the subject of power but its carrier. … In a sense, she has power despite of herself. (p. 3)

While critics continue to speculate as to whether Jessie is the victim of a stalker’s aggressive drive or whether she reappears at the MoMA as an anonymous woman exchanging numbers with the man at the wall, the need to interpret and to resolve is exactly what DeLillo’s Point Omega strives to subvert. Like Hawthorne’s enigmatic scarlet letter that becomes both a sign of adultery and ambiguity, Jessie is a hieroglyph of relativity. In this, she remains a cliché but also becomes a perfect commodity of the world of spectacle, where women continue to represent the uncanny as the ultimate hyperbole of patriarchal and capitalist imagination. However, given DeLillo’s concern with coexisting realities and parallel universes, Jessie’s symbolic role might as well be a trick that the author plays on the reader-voyeur—an optical illusion, the point omega into which everything disappears and flies out the other end, like “the window, spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 117). DeLillo suggests that if the world wants a fine spectacle, he is willing to deliver, but only to a point. Accordingly, Point Omega ushers the reader-voyeur into a vertiginous world of images, projected screens, and bodies consumed by pain and fear, where perception is on trial and its limitations exposed as the kind of fatality that they are. By bringing his readers to this point of violent ecstasy, DeLillo manages to bring about the kind of pataphysical perspective that Baudrillard (2008) refers to as being “open to objective irony” (p. 229). In conclusion, Point Omega refuses a satisfying conclusion. The novel’s philosophizing about the end of the world as we know it and art’s inability to deflect the apocalypse are merely one side of the ellipsis. The other side is DeLillo’s daring suggestion that while art may be unable to rescue us from the visual prison of the spectacle, it can provide a simple pointer to the experiential reality that we cannot see or refuse to see. Bringing together Einstein’s theory of relativity, Japanese haiku, and Freud’s writings on the death drive and human aggression with Virilio’s

The Ecstatic Gaze in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

49

polemic on cinema and/as war, and aligning Vertov’s experimental “kinoks” dream with Tarkovsky’s vision of a true cinematic expression that affirms “the salamander of the human soul” (Tarkovsky, 1986, p. 57), DeLillo delivers a blow to absolute truths, encouraging his readers to think beyond the expectations of a plot and an ending. In this final gesture, DeLillo tips his hat to the burnt corpse of the artist lying within: the enfleshed idea called art.

CHAPTER TWO LIFE IN THE HILLS: SEX, MONEY, AND SIMULACRA IN JANE SMILEY’S TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS

We are complicit in our desire to be amused rather than informed. —Karen Sternheimer (2014), Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility, p. 9 Simulation … stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. —Jean Baudrillard (1995), Simulacra and Simulation, p. 6

Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) explores the ways in which wars are subject to public consumption through media and cinematic commodification. Jane Smiley similarly takes issue with the increasing mediatization of war atrocities and genocides in her 2007 novel, Ten Days in the Hills. Taking readers on a 10-day journey into the lives of L. A. Pacific Palisades residents, Ten Days in the Hills deals with the concerns of the privileged, focusing on characters who hide from the outside world in their Hollywood Hills bubble and what happens when they are faced with the onset of the war in Iraq. The novel opens on March 24th, 2003, only a few days after George W. Bush announces the official invasion of Iraq; it ends on April 2nd of the same year. During these 10 days, the novel’s main characters hide from the world outside in Max Maxwell’s plush Palisades house, which includes two gardens and plenty of rooms to accommodate the remaining characters: his partner, Elena; his ex-wife, Zoe, and her personal guru lover, Paul; his daughter, Isabel, and her much-older boyfriend, Stoney; his agent, Jerry; Zoe’s mother, Delphine, and her friend Cassie; and finally, the family friend Charlie, whose conservative and prowar views jar with the rest of the thespian occupants. A signifying chain of juxtapositions of the inside versus the outside, intimacy versus detachment, sex versus war, and pacifism versus conservatism frames the

52

Chapter Two

novel. The novel echoes Karen Sternheimer’s (2014) concern that “we are complicit in our desire to be amused rather than informed” (p. 9). However, it also suggests that the barrage of information from the media—from celebrity gossip to the daily supply of war imagery—makes it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and lies, distracting us from the real significance of war atrocities and injustice. Jerome DeGroot (2008) emphasizes that the public engagement with history is mediated through discourses of consumption. In his terms, “the visual past is part of contemporary (global) consumption practice, one of many particular tropes deployed to encourage brand recognition and subsequent economic investment” (p. 10). Wars have similarly become subject to commodification. In fact, as Susan Sontag (2003) bemoans in Regarding the Pain of Others, watching and thus consuming calamities is “a quintessential modern experience” (p. 18). Mass media, including Hollywood in its manufacturing of history, present the public with a banquet of violent imagery where war atrocities are reduced to daily gossip and turned into a pornographic spectacle through a constant, objectified and objectifying exposure.33 Anticipating DeLillo’s concern that in the 21st century, both public and personal events and experiences are subsumed by the consumer market and deployed by the media spectacle as interchangeable and thus reversible, Smiley’s novel sets out to explore how the media, cinema included, fetishizes wars by sensationalizing events while simultaneously rendering them more distant and less immediate, thus less relevant. Ten Days in the Hills confronts the postmillennial society’s reliance on what DeGroot (2008) calls “vintage erotica,” a kind of re-enactment of history as a consumable commodity (p. 11). Accordingly, the novel opens in Max’s bedroom where he and his partner Elena are having one of their extended lovemaking sessions, which is interrupted by periods of dispassionate dialogues about the war raging outside their large bedroom window but also by Max’s erectile dysfunction, or what he calls a “noncontributing member problem” (Smiley, 2007, p. 22). A female version of Don DeLillo’s Richard Elster, Max’s partner and lover Elena Sigmund becomes the mouthpiece for these similar dialogues, voicing her dismay and critiques of the American government and its involvement in Iraq. Elena’s theory is that wars stem from a “manliness problem” (p. 17). Echoing second-wave feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin,34 Elena’s view is that wars are caused by the male desire to conquer and possess. As an outspoken pacifist and a writer of selfimprovement manuals, Elena believes in magicking order through her pen.

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

53

The pen as a phallic weapon plays an important symbolic role in the novel. As compared to Max’s camera lens, a figurative extension of his (non-functioning) phallus, the pen appears to have a modicum of power to retain the order Elena so desires. Elena’s book titled Here’s How: To Do Everything Correctly strives to provide a guide to an organized life; in reality, it lacks the intellectual acumen and power to change the world. Elena’s pen, like Max’s flaccid penis, is only a parody of vigour. The irony is essential here as it exposes Elena’s own hypocrisy and helplessness in the face of the war that takes place outside her bedroom window and realm of existence. On the one hand, Elena rages against patriarchy; on the other, she is desperate to revive it through her gentle caressing of Max’s unresponsive member. Elena’s theory about war as a “manliness problem,” like Elster’s dreaming of extinction, is a compensatory mechanism that persistently revitalizes the powers of the phallic symbolism that she simultaneously bemoans. By extension, Elena deploys sex as a figurative war between two bodies, whereby male penetration becomes a form of violation of the female body. Honing this analogy, Elena’s theory draws parallels between the U.S. invasion of Iraq, where Iraq is violated by U.S. weapons, and sexual penetration as an invasive, masculine act. Smiley exemplifies this analogy through a very detailed (and graphic) description of Elena’s thought process. While caressing Max’s cock, Elena contemplates the connection between a gun and a penis: You could film it that way—cutting from herself and Max, idly considering his dick, to the brutal-looking hit men, glancing at one another as they took positions, then back to her running her index finger up the artery on the Big Classic, then encircling the shaft with her hand, and the two of them smiling at each other, then back to hit man number 1 … setting down his weapon. (Smiley, 2007, p. 19)

Making a connection between Max’s penis and/as a weapon, Elena asserts her feminist critique of patriarchal warmongering, but she also ponders its very origins; her exploration of war and love as interrelated affects plays on and with the very nature of love as both a life-inducing and a destructive force. However, Smiley refuses to wax poetic on the power of love as a transcendental force; instead, she draws attention to the ways in which Eros (the life-preserving instinct) has been modified, if not rendered impotent, by simulacra. Throughout their lovemaking sessions, Max and Elena have to rely on her “Big Classic,” a dildo that is a mere simulacrum of Max’s manhood. No matter how hard Elena tries to resuscitate Max’s

54

Chapter Two

phallic powers, she is unable to do so; in the same way, she is powerless to influence the “deaths and dismemberments,” the daily casualties of war to which the public has become immune and indifferent (Smiley, 2007, p. 23). Echoing Elster’s philosophizing on humanity’s demise, Elena thinks: Mistakes were made; some things are always unforeseeable. But actually, from beginning to end, indifference would be permanently on display, the indifference of those who made the war to the war’s resulting deaths and dismemberments. The warmakers knew they should care—everyone agreed they should care—but in fact they didn’t, and you couldn’t get around it. (p. 23)

Emphasizing the warmakers’ lack of care, Elena raises the issues of empathy and indifference that permeate human relationships and that make a difference between life and death—or, in Freudian terms, between Eros as a life-preserving force and Thanatos, the death drive. 35 Her emphasis on the increasing depersonalization of war and its frequent reduction to televised entertainment echoes Richard Elster’s theory that humankind, unable to withstand the powers of Eros for an extended period of time, yearns for its own extinction. In this way, Smiley echoes DeLillo’s political agenda. She critiques the ways in which wars have become an essential part of consumer culture, commodities unto themselves, driven by the desire for power and money rather than for public good. But she also suggests that wars raise the issues of love and care about other cultures: who do we love and why? Bush’s agenda after September 11th was clear: those who presented a potential threat were to be subdued by means of war, and not to be loved. Consequently, Ten Days in the Hills is a novel about the politics of love and/as war. It investigates the various cultural, gender, and class aspects of love discourse as sites of both pleasure and violence. Smiley fuels this dialectic further by resuscitating poems from Ovid’s (2 AD/2010) The Art of Love, in which the archetypal coupling of Eros (the Greek god of sex, ambition, and drive) and Ares (the Greek god of war) persistently wrestle for dominance. As Ellen Atkins (2008) notes, Smiley also draws on medieval courtly love romances, taking inspiration from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1351/2014), a set of tales about 10 people trying to escape the Black Plague (1348) by resorting to the idyllic countryside, where each takes a turn telling their stories of woe, love, and lovesickness. Like Boccaccio’s Decameron, Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills provides a commentary on the evil of human ambition and greed. Partly a parody of courtly love, partly a quest novel pastiche, Ten Days in the Hills, despite its preoccupation with the indulgent Hollywood elite,

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

55

pursues a higher ideal. Against the plethora of erotic innuendoes and woes, Smiley’s characters seek comfort in a common friendship of sorts. In this context, the novel revisits Plato’s (360 BCE/1993) Symposium and Aristotle’s (350 BCE/1979) Metaphysics, especially their emphasis on philia (loosely translated as “friendship”), a combination of friendship and social responsibility.36 It explores the characters’ various approaches to love, all while advocating for Plato’s notion of ascendant love—love as both Eros (a life-preserving force) and a public good. The heart of the novel addresses the aggressive side of love—the tangential relationship between love, war, and friendship. Taking her readers to a figurative feast in the Hollywood Hills, where Max’s entourage wines, dines, makes love, and discusses war, Smiley (2007) uncovers the unpleasantries of society’s complicity in western culture’s military history as intertwined in and with love discourse. Consequently, she reveals that love and war are not only related but are also governed by adversity, conflict, and conquest. From courtly romances to captivity narratives and the domestic novel, western literature abounds in stories of conquest. Using the language of love and/as war as a framework for her novel, Smiley (2007) explores the world of Hollywood and celebrity culture as an extension of the ecstatic form that has abolished ethics, morality, and also intimacy. Indicting what Frederic Jameson (1991) describes as the “waning affect” of what is now post-postmodern, postmillennial culture (p. 17), Smiley (2007) revives the notion of the domestic novel by exploiting its topoi of conflict, domesticity, and sentimentality to comment on the ironies of ecstatic production—the increasingly non-existent separation between the “fabula” (story) and reality, emotional response and detachment, and pleasure and murder.

Immoral Fabulations: From the Domestic to the Postmodern Novel As a writer and teacher of creative writing, Smiley has built her career on exploring public politics through the lens of family politics. While her fiction primarily deals with the complexities of human foibles and histories, Smiley does not shy away from incisive critiques of the political issues that plague American society. From Duplicate Keys (1984), The Greenlanders (1988), the Age of Grief (1987), Ordinary Love and Good Will (1989), A Thousand Acres (1991), and Moo (1995), to The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998) and Ten Days in the Hills (2007), Smiley’s novels rarely steer clear of the plagues of family life; however, her focus is less on the sentimental than on her characters’

56

Chapter Two

“nearly invisible and often unattended tragedies and catastrophes,” their idiosyncrasies and search for meaning (Nadakate, 1999, p. 23). In this sense, her writing pays homage to the domestic novels of Jane Austen, but it also evokes postmodernity’s nostalgia for historical meaning. As Fredrick Jameson (1991) argues in his seminal work on postmodern culture, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, postmodern fiction is preoccupied with historicity because it wrestles with the ahistorical aspect of its age that “has forgotten how to think historically” (p. vii). Therefore, although Smiley’s novels might be grounded in a Midwestern sensibility, as Nadakate (1999) suggests, a deep sense of irony and use of pastiche contribute to their largely postmodern tenor (p. 17). Unlike Smiley’s other novels, Ten Days in the Hills addresses what Jameson (1991) refers to as the “degraded landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture” (p. 12). Highlighting the contrast between the plush lives of the novel’s 10 characters and the war happening outside the walls of Max’s mansion, the novel laments the striking lack of ethics and care that is the by-product of commodity culture. Also highlighted is the characters’ inability to grasp what is happening outside, as their only access to the war experience is through a barrage of visual imagery, from historical movies produced by Hollywood to the endless streaming of TV news that provides a necessary, though largely ignored, background to their musings. Zoe, Max’s ex-wife and a successful Hollywood actress, perhaps best exemplifies this postmodern degradation; she lives for her “crises,” which feed her attention glut (Smiley, 2007, p. 44). As an actress, Zoe is a shameless self-promoter and social-climber. Marrying Max was merely a step up on the Hollywood ladder—she admits that he was her “opening act” (p. 49), getting her into the business and launching her career. Zoe earns a lot of money, but she is miserable. Her paid relationship with her lover-therapist Paul is as close as she gets to having a sense of intimacy and, ultimately, agency. But while Smiley uses Zoe to deplore the surface world of celebrity culture, she also points to the ways in which Zoe as a person is dehumanized by the world that feeds off her success. Zoe becomes the embodiment of the Hollywood spectacle, unable to separate real life from the screen. Unsurprisingly, she feels more like a “location than a person, a phenomenon that was perennial even while things were happening to it” (p. 202). Referring to herself as an “it,” Zoe exemplifies Debord’s (1983) notion that the “spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life” (p. 45). As she cultivates her image, Zoe becomes the living, breathing iconography—a commodity enfleshed.

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

57

Zoe’s sense of depersonalization is further highlighted at the end of the novel when, after an appointment with her agent, she tries to parse through the information about the war in Iraq. But instead, “the only headline she noted before turning away was ‘Bombing Is Tool of Choice to Clear a Path to Baghdad’” (Smiley, 2007, p. 527). She does not even flinch at the colonial and patriarchal subtext of the headline; instead she turns to the TV, that wonderful “opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws” (Debord, 1983, p. 44). She then directs her attention to American Idol and contemplates whether she would like to have Paula Abdul’s job (Smiley, 2007, p. 528). Although Zoe registers that TV time is frozen yet cyclical, covering both “the war and American Idol” in the same breath (p. 528) and ignoring the “plagues and the fires and the massacres and the genocides and the clashes of armies and civilizations” (p. 529), she focuses her attention elsewhere, to her navel-gazing life in the petri-dish of Hollywood’s great consumer experiment. The increasingly globalized nature of consumerism inundates the individual with a barrage of images. Their role is to redirect attention from others to oneself, but also to highlight the scopic function as the ultimate value in the capitalist economy. As Beller (2006) emphasizes, postmodern culture produces an “attention deficit” that depersonalizes affect, subjecting it to the socioeconomic process of circulation and the commodification effect (p. 97). Accordingly, Zoe’s attention deficit speaks to the depersonalizing effect of celebrity culture on the individual, specifically its reliance on hyperbole and what could be called the hysterical aesthetization of affect. As spectating replaces the need to emote and verbalize affect, depersonalization plays a crucial role in commodifying human experience, historical events included. Hijacked from its context, history becomes an aestheticized fantasy that bases renditions on the spectacle; the role of spectacle is to encourage titillation and an almost pornographic violation of the historical experience itself. Similar to American Idol, the Iraq war is transformed into an empty sign, a floating image that, like the celebrity starlet herself, has “a certain liquidity, much like the mobility and exchangeability of the capital” (Marshall, 1997, p. 6). The war’s relationship to the outside world is thus navigated through the process of fetishization, whereby history becomes a commodity, a subject of movies rather than everyday reality.37 Cassie, a friend of Zoe’s mother, notes that important historic events are reduced to people “suffering and dying on screens that are as big as possible,” while spectators indulge in a “fetishistic longing” that arouses the public’s desire to watch others in pain or “being saved” (Smiley, 2007, p. 385). Flipping

58

Chapter Two

through the newspapers, where war coverage competes with fashion bytes and celebrity gossip, Zoe notes that the war is not shocking anymore; it’s old news, a mere version of the reality TV show she is watching. Countering Zoe’s views is Max, her ex-husband. Max, very much like DeLillo’s character Jim Finley, is desperate to resuscitate the cinematic form as a meaningful art form. Max is a successful but waning Hollywood director. He dreams of making an extended one-shot movie called My Lovemaking with Elena, which would document every detail of his relations with his partner, uncensored and de-aesthetized. Regarding cinema as a medium of storytelling and contemplation, he is interested in documenting Eros in its transcendent form—as the potential of erotic love, rather than pornography, as he explains to Elena. Max insists that his movies are stories. He believes that “telling stories is the least offensive way to communicate, because it’s the least coercive. … So I don’t see what I do as coercive. In fact, I see it as objective. I offer something for the audience to contemplate” (Smiley, 2007, p 177). Consequently, Max believes in cinema as a dialogic form that establishes a conversation between the director, the story, and the viewer. Cinema, in his mind, suggests; it does not coerce or objectify. Mike, a Russian agent and connoisseur of art, dismisses Max’s theorizing on the value of American cinema. Instead, he devalues it as not only entertainment but also as a narcissistic endorsement of America as a nation. Mike says: Here in America, you have forgotten what the effect of movies is, because you are used to it. You think that it is entertainment, but, really, it is seeing yourself. Seeing yourself so much, all the time, not because you are required to but because you want to, and then you say that that is who you are. (Smiley, 2007, p. 399)

Hollywood represents and fosters the American Dream of upward mobility and success. In its stories, America can see itself, but, as Mike points out, it can also reinforce its sense of myth and mythical dimension. Mike suggests that Max take the Hollywood mythography to the next level by producing a film based on Nikolai Gogol’s (1835/2003) historical novella, Taras Bulba, backed by his shady business. Max resists the offer, refusing to glamorize violence and money. Instead, he wishes to “make something more intimate” (p. 407). Max’s drive for a cinema that captures human experience in its raw, ungroomed essence echoes Finley from Point Omega and his nostalgia for pure cinema. But while DeLillo seems to be taken by Russian experimental cinema, Smiley (2007) deploys

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

59

experimentalism as co-opted by the capitalist production of the Hollywood machine. Ten Days in the Hills parodies Hollywood’s manipulation of historical events for consumer appeal and capitalist gain. By suggesting that the Iraq war coverage competes for attention with American Idol, Smiley (2007) also highlights the fractured nature of postmodernity, its preoccupation with surfaces that results in a “caricature of historical thinking” (Jameson, 1991, p. 194). Since the beginning of the 20th century, Hollywood has specialized, if not institutionalized, such caricatures of historical thinking through cinematic representations of traumatic history while simultaneously pandering to America’s imagination and the construction of its national identity. As Elizabeth Bronfen (2012) argues, Hollywood not only provides “access” to the very experience of traumatic events, but, in their representation, it also inevitably “renegotiates the traumatic traces of [America’s own] historical past” (p. 2). At the same time, however, Hollywood also reveals the uncanny aspects of human experience, highlighting the fact that our access to war events is mediated through visual narratives about warfare, destruction, conflict, and aggression. Such an aesthetic formalization of tragedy refers to the increasingly waning affect of postmodern society of which Jameson (1991) writes. Just like the audience cannot comprehend the star as commodity other than through the image that the star presents and embodies, humanity has no direct access to war events other than through narratives (visual, historical, and literary), which mediate between reality and its representation. As Linda Hutcheon (1992) insists, however, the very idea of historical knowledge is based in the questions of reference and representation. It is a matter of “whose truth gets told” (p. 123). Echoing Hutcheon’s definition of the postmodern, Smiley’s (2007) characters become the perfect embodiment of postmodernity’s manipulation and fabulation of historical memory. Their multi-perspective views show that there is no one particular version of history or of Eros. Still, Smiley refuses to succumb to the cynicism postmodernity is so famous for; returning to the Platonic and Aristotelian views on love and ethics, she argues that Hollywood’s escalating mass desensitization hampers the very notion of public good that was so important to the Greeks.

“Making Love, Not War”: From Ares to Eros Juxtaposing the postmodern ennui with her characters’ revisionist take on Platonic dialogues, Smiley generates an interesting discussion about the value of love and its relationship to the individual and society as a whole.

60

Chapter Two

In Ten Days in the Hills, Smiley asks: how does human desire shape and impact the public good? If the postmodern breakdown of meaning ushers in a scopophilic culture, a culture dependent on and driven by the visual image, how does this scopophilic drive, fostered primarily by the desire to consume, affect the human capacity for love, empathy, and compassion? To find answers to these questions, Smiley turns to the Greeks, specifically to Plato’s Symposium (360 BCE/1993). A rhetorical banquet where different speakers share their attitudes to and visions of love and its relationship to desire, knowledge, ambition, but also strife, Plato’s Symposium presents an interesting socio-cultural commentary on the limits and politics of Eros. Defined as a combination of love and sexuality, but also of courage and strife, the notion of Eros refers to “a wide array of inclinations comprising ambition, patriotism, and other aspirations that were properly political in nature” (Ludwig, 2002, p. 2). As a primary connecting point between wisdom and ignorance, love and war, and individual and public politics, Eros becomes crucial to Plato’s philosophy of the common good as a leveraging force between good and evil, sex and emotion, and love and war. Given the context of Smiley’s (2007) novel, it is not surprising that she chooses Plato’s Symposium as a model for her interrogation of America’s post-9/11 politics, specifically the heightened “us vs. them” rhetoric that plagued Bush’s government. Just as Smiley’s novel unfolds at the time of Bush’s much-disputed invasion of Iraq, Plato’s Symposium takes place during a critical time in Athens’s history: it dramatizes an event that most likely took place in the spring of 416 BCE, during the time when Athens was immersed in the Peloponnesian War for supremacy and power (431-404 BCE). As Scott and Welton (2008) emphasize, Plato critiques Athenian imperialism, its “misdirected sense of honor and an overweening love of gain” and greed (p. 16). Similarly, Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills is more than a domestic novel of Hollywood indulgence; it is also a socio-political commentary on American imperialism and the post-9/11 “war on terror.” Just as Plato’s Symposium is interrupted by Alcibiades’s aggressive entrance or, more specifically, as Alcibiades barges in on the speech of Socrates, demonstrating his misguided, warfaring Eros, Bush’s decision to declare war on Iraq occupies the domestic space of Smiley’s characters, prompting them towards a “general feeling of shame and fear” and forcing them to consider the significance of self-care and compassion (Smiley, 2007, p. 4). Smiley playfully connects the characters and their views with the Symposium speakers to probe the logic and politics of human desire. Moreover, in highlighting the importance of a mutual dialogue, she creates new alternative ways to address the values of consumer culture and its

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

61

courtship of global markets while unveiling the complex politics and rhetoric of love and hate promoted by imperialist agendas. Hollywood and the media have increasingly taken a prominent role in war coverage. As Paul Virilio (1989) emphasizes, the physicality of war has been progressively hijacked by the visual warfare waged by the government’s co-optation of the media industry. According to David Dadge (2006), Bush’s infiltration and use of the media to cultivate an “axis of evil” rhetoric were crucial to the corporate interests of the war. Media served as a “conduit” for the administration’s goals (Dadge, 2006, p. 20). In fact, the Bush government relied on the media not only to feed the war frenzy but also to reinforce the emotive language of love and hate (p. 20). Sara Ahmed (2004) argues, however, that acting in the name of justice or love is frequently a masquerade for acting out of hatred. The call for patriotism and patriotic love then morphs into an imperative of sameness, whereby those who are different become a threat and thus a source of hatred: “the narrative suggests that it is only this ‘for-ness’ that makes ‘against-ness’ necessary” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 123). This narrative of patriotic care was exemplified in the justification speech that Bush delivered on March 18, 2003, from the Cross Hall in the White House. Calling for justice and asserting the national ideal of freedom, Bush’s speech identified that the Iraqi government violated basic human rights and freedoms. Accusing Iraq of hoarding weapons of mass destruction, Bush outlined his agenda for a pre-emptive war as a necessary evil in the quest for the good of the nation, emphasizing America’s “sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security” (Bush, 2003, n. pag.). Iraq was presented as a “threat” to the nation and defined as an enemy to be subdued and restrained. The opposition to these politics of invasion—what many viewed as Bush’s hegemonic rather than preemptive war—constitutes the crux of Smiley’s (2007) Ten Days in the Hills. Critiquing Bush’s renunciation of public opposition from political bodies such as the United Nations as well as from the American people, Smiley raises questions about the politics and ethics of counterinvolvement and individual agency. Echoing Plato’s concern that wars are frequently the product of leaders’ and their citizens’ failure to transform their base desires into higher ideals, Smiley connects the invasive nature of wars to the lack of motivation to care for the public good or even for oneself. In the novel, Elena serves as the self-proclaimed guardian of the common good but also as a dry and somewhat limited orator who has difficulty accepting differing viewpoints. Famous for her many theories addressing the government’s pursuit of war in spite of public opposition,

62

Chapter Two

Elena centres her soliloquies on the issues of motives and logic. In her view, governments should be just and serve the higher good. Finding her views naive, Max rebuts by emphasizing that, in the postmillennial society, the whole notion of public good has been co-opted by the global economy. He states that “the free market is the highest good” (Smiley, 2007, p. 25). This “highest good” has nothing to do with logic but all to do with greed. As Max tells Elena, this is “the nature of civilization” (p. 25). Killing and wars, he points out, are an essential part of the global economy. Here, Smiley echoes Plato’s dialogues, specifically Pausanias’s response to Phaedrus, whereby he corrects Phaedrus’s assumption that love drives humans towards noble, beneficial deeds or what he calls aretƝ (excellence). While Phaedrus believes that love of honour and courage will tame the more common human instincts, Pausanias emphasizes that, depending on whether the base desire or the more heavenly desire wins, Eros can also (and frequently does) drive humans to ugly, shameful ends (Scott & Welton, 2008, p. 58). Smiley suggests that indifference is one such base desire. Most wars are the product of unrestrained, imperialist desire that is propelled by lack of care, or what Smiley sees as indifference. Similarly, the politics of hate is increasingly governed by the demands of global markets, not by reason and empathy. As mentioned previously, Elena acknowledges that “the warmakers should care,—everyone agreed they should care—but in fact they didn’t, and you couldn’t get around it” (Smiley, 2007, p. 23). She notes, “they didn’t think killing had anything to do with them or their loved ones” (p. 26). Such geopolitical and cultural ignorance frequently justifies private interests, but it also distorts the relationship between love and hate, political might and corruption. Elena is aggravated by the American government’s decision to pursue the war in spite of worldwide opposition. Noting corrupt elections and cheating as a means of “attaining power” (p. 171), Elena complains about the loss of American ideals for the sake of economic gain. While Max and his daughter Isabel both suggest that the history of America is not as idyllic as Elena suggests,—by contrast, it has been based on atrocities and genocides—Elena refuses to part with the American Dream; she still believes in its ideals and validity and refuses the kind of cynicism Max and Isabel represent. Instead, she believes that, through dialogue and theorizing, she can change the world—or at least shift the warmongering focus from aggression to tolerance. In other words, she puts rational desire above appetite, returning to the aspiration for higher good as a mechanism that keeps violence and excessive behaviour in check.

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

63

Interrupting her lovemaking with Max with soliloquies on love and war, Elena takes on the role of an anti-war activist, but her reasoning is dry, and she is caught up in her own unwillingness to acknowledge her white privilege. Like Point Omega’s Elster’s musings on extinction, Elena’s theorizing of war and human aggression echo Freud’s (1920/1991; 1933/1991) theory of the death drive. Similarly, her insistence on love winning the day suggests that Eros, if deployed for the sake of concord, will overpower mankind’s base, primordial instinct. Elena’s verbal antics are a cross-pollination between Socrates’ speeches on Eros as higher good, Plato’s view of a dialogue as a means of inquiry and a pathway to higher ideas, and the “man of science” Eryximachus’ dry philosophizing, which stifles the ambitious undertones of the Symposium. But while Eryximachus’ views on love as strife might be considered as the most “unerotic” of the speeches (Scott & Welton, 2008, p. 63), his understanding of Eros as philia (i.e., concord and, in more general terms, friendship) brings together the baser aspects of erotic love with higher ideals and aspirations that steer humans closer to the divine. In his emphasis on philia as a reconciliation of opposites, Eryximachus also paves the way towards Plato’s recounting of Socrates’ philosophy of Eros as an intermediary between the humans and the gods. Paul, Zoe’s lover and psychologist, provides an interesting link between Elena’s theorizing and Max’s political cynicism. As a Zen psychologist and Zoe’s personal therapist, Paul ponders the ways in which humans are governed by their instinct rather than driven by higher aspirations. No matter how hard he tries to explain to Zoe that her pursuit of fame and success has nothing to do with life itself, he cannot quite get this point through to her. Echoing Elena’s ideals, he states that “the mystery of life was what you were supposed to do after surviving and reproducing, and obviously the clue to this question was the extra biopower humans had [to] … [get] ready for translation to a higher sphere” (Smiley, 2007, pp. 109–110). Paul refers to these higher aspirations as “pruning” and “gardening” (p. 110). He insists that humans simply wither away into “being less noticeable” until they disappear completely. His “vegetable” politics, as Zoe calls them, parallel Elster’s theory that humans dream of their own extinction—the Freudian death drive that only the powerful, life-affirming Eros can overpower. Despite his desire for rhetorical balance, Paul is hardly a match for Plato’s Socrates. Rather, Smiley pokes fun at his pop psychology ideals and his inept speechifying that exploits his customers, whose hunger for fame and success makes them blind to his philosophy as a commercial ploy rather than the true Zen philosophy of care and fulfilment.

64

Chapter Two

Just as Plato’s Symposium anticipates the indictment and trial of Socrates for being a philosophical charlatan, bamboozling the young, Smiley parodies the culture of fame as trapped in and bound up by the rhetoric of shame. In her parody of pop culture psychology, which includes Dr. Phil’s reality TV show and Dr. Drew’s televised rehab, Smiley questions whether Eros can remain the life-affirming force that Freud and the ancient Greek philosophers advocated for. Concerned that Eros has become prey to the consumer economy, Smiley wonders whether it has the wherewithal to challenge its warfaring counterpart, Ares. Like the famous tragedic poet Agathon who scorned those eager to consume the tragic spectacle, Smiley mocks those who are too quick to succumb to the visual fanfare of the Hollywood spectacle. Advocating moderation but also political love, Smiley persistently weaves connections between the erotic intercourse of the characters, their intimate chats, and the war they see on their TV screens. Echoing the Greek notion of meignumi, which can be loosely translated as joining in both erotic embrace and a battle,38 Smiley’s (2007) narrative manages to probe into the ways in which human desire for life and death, wholeness and lack thereof, intersect. But it also investigates the value of political care in the performance of healthy and compassionate citizenship. While Sara Ahmed (2004) argues that love cannot form a solid, unbiased foundation for political action or produce what she calls a “good politics” (p. 141), Martha Nussbaum (2013) declares that love not only “matters for justice” but that it is also necessary for cultivating a healthy public emotion or “political love” (p. 388). Nussbaum (2013) emphasizes that the will to promote social justice must come from within: it requires not only an honest encounter with oneself, but it also anticipates an ability to accept and acknowledge the polymorphousness of emotion. In her emphasis on the importance of embracing diversity and heterogeneity of opinion, Smiley seems to anticipate Nussbaum’s theory of political emotion as a necessary means of cultivating a healthy nation. The inability to exercise restraint, but also the unwillingness to consider other diverse ways of loving the self and the Other, drives the rhetoric of war and hate. In addition, the consumer approach to war as a tool to satiate hunger for global imperialist exploits is what lulls contemporary society to indifference and lack of care for others. Smiley locates the source of this plague in postmodernity’s populist approach to historical responsibility. The expanding commodification of history as a highly simulated, screened experience—be it through the mass and social media or the Hollywood industry—blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and fabulation. In Ten Days in the Hills, Mike, the

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

65

Russian agent whose corrupt dealing and wheeling ultimately claims his life, exemplifies the culture of postmodern simulacra. As the characters enter Mike’s house, they are confronted with their own hypocritical rendering of historical events and their own narcissism and lack of concern for others. Mike’s house is a pastiche, an imitation of various historical styles and cultures. Evoking Baudrillard’s (1995) description of Disneyland as a kind of playground of the hyperreal imaginary and a “panegyric of American values” (p. 12), Mike’s house consists of a sequence of “fantasy rooms” that simulate various events in human history. From the Renaissance room to the Reformation/Counter-Reformation suite, filled with paintings of torture and dead bodies, Mike’s house mimics the characters’ inability to make sense of their reality. For instance, as the characters eat their breakfast in the kitchen inspired by the old French market Les Hales, Elena notes that the artist’s “trompe-l’oeil” camouflages the agony of chickens in 19th century France, “kept … in cages in the vaults beneath Les Halles” (Smiley, 2007, p. 496): It was appropriate to the times, but also to the room, which was a fantasy of France and specifically of the old market Les Halles. The feathery, soaring metal grillework of that building was neatly painted on the walls, and in the frames created by the faux grillework, the painter had painted long, sunny perspectives of Paris: Eiffel Tower to the west, Luxembourg Gardens to the south, Père Lachaise Cemetery to the east, and Montmartre to the north, all recognizable and in proportion, as if, indeed, you could look out through the nonexistent windows of Les Halles and see what you could not see. (Smiley, 2007, p. 496).

Seeing Mike’s kitchen as the death of reality, so to speak, the characters struggle to orient themselves in this simulacrum of cultural fantasy and history reduced to a visual fetish, far removed from the real events and struggles of the dead bodies portrayed on the walls. The entire kitchen is a museum of human aggression summarized in a brush stroke of a painter’s genius. The baroque trompe l’oeil serves as a connecting point between each of the rooms’ visual excess and their aestheticization of historical violence and suffering. Such dissolution of reality into a spectatular medium of hyperreality is endemic of postmodern fabulation. As Baudrillard (1995) emphasizes, postmodernity relies on the media manipulating the meaning as representing both meaning and countermeaning: “they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely MĘbian and circular logic” (p. 84). Trapped in this circular logic, meaning is lost as the “signs of the real” replace the real

66

Chapter Two

(Baudrillard, 1995, p. 2). In her parody of Hollywood’s hyperreal world, Smiley suggests that the endless proliferation of simulated realities is not only stimulated by the visual warfare that accompanies it, but it also spreads like a bad virus or plague. As in Boccaccio’s (1351/2014) Decameron, Smiley’s (2007) characters are desperate to find a refuge from a plague of sorts. In Ten Days in the Hills, the plague becomes not just a physical manifestation of an ill society but also a metaphor for the diseased citizenry, unable to navigate through the consumer world in which they belong. Drawing a link between the body politic and the inner lives of the characters whose bodies are immersed in various acts of consumption and commodification,—from eating and copulating to dialoguing—Smiley points to the ways in which love and war affect both the individual body and the body politic. She echoes Plato’s concern that a healthy republic takes place in a society where citizens practice restraint and self-care or, in other words, who aspire towards the higher ideals summarized in Plato’s theory of forms. Scott and Welton (2008) emphasize that, critical of Athenian imperialism, Plato urged against the “overweening love of gain, a greed that bloated the city and turned it from caring about virtue to the pursuit of material wealth” (p. 16). Throughout her novel, Smiley echoes Plato’s notion that human greed brings demise to social health. Both Smiley and Plato locate this demise in the inability to refine human desire or to elevate one’s needs to a higher form. As Plato emphasizes, desire has an “ideational content, a form, a whatness that makes it what it is” (Scott & Welton, 2008, p. 95). Desire’s whatness then depends on the choice of direction and orientation, something that Smiley’s characters feel that they are lacking. Elena persistently voices her sense of disorientation; “I think I’m becoming deracinated” (Smiley, 2007, p. 26), she says to Max. Debord (1983) emphasizes that producing such a sense of deracination and absolute alienation is the alpha and omega of consumer society. The core of this plague or disease, as Smiley’s novel asserts, is not some physical disease, but rather what Smiley calls a “moral illness” (2007, p. 26). The lack of a moral compass and the propensity for human compassion is what lies at the heart of the deracination that plagues her characters. Consequently, no matter how much they try to escape their sense of ennui and deracination, they are unable to magic themselves into a new kind of reality. All that remains is an illusion of a life without wars or disease.

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

67

From Aesthetics to Postmodern Kitsch: Consumer Culture and/as the Plague of Forms While cultural studies theorists like Debord (1983) and Baudrillard (1995) suggest that there is no escape from the world of simulacra, Smiley refuses to give up hope, exploring alternative, albeit fictional, ways of challenging the culture of hyperreal spectacle from within. Deploying Platonic dialogues as a means of probing rather than resolving the anxieties haunting post-9/11 America, Smiley (2007), following Plato’s direction, suggests that there is much to learn from a constructive dialogue. Organized into narrative frames and ranging from erotic to bathetic, playful to serious, Smiley’s dialogues bind the high- and low-brow cultures together. However, they also allow for further inquiry into how love and war discourses are constructed and gendered. Language (or forms in Plato’s terms) is strategic in shaping such discourses. Carole Cohn (1987) emphasizes in her study of state defence rhetoric and its use of patriarchal and domestic images that wars are persistently tied to the love discourse through the use of formulaic imagery, whether by invoking patriotic love or by rampant romanticizing of wars as mechanisms of peace. War discourses, however, are also deeply sexualized as they are frequently associated with images of virility, hypermasculinity, and sexual conquest. In her study of military language, Cohn (1987) notes that “both the military itself and the arms manufacturers are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual domination that their weapons so conveniently suggest” (p. 694). Terms like “penetration,” “conquest,” and “big stick” deploy wars as hypermasculine, sexy endeavours. In addition to sexual imagery, the rhetoric of domestic bliss constitutes another crucial element of militarism. Smiley (2007) constructs her entire novel around this premise, revealing the interconnection between domesticity and militarism as an aspect of global consumerism. Critiquing the pornographic nature of mediatized warfare and its imperialist drive, Smiley (2007) brings up the issue of sexuality and the social construction of gender as important players in discourses on love and/as war through her revisionist take on domestic fiction as literature for and about women’s desires and emotions. Given the history of domestic fiction as a connecting point between social experience and sexual encounters (Armstrong, 1987), it is not surprising that Smiley (2007) draws on the sentimental genre to explore the role that human emotion, sexuality, and desire play in social justice and world events. If domestic fiction questions the intricate relationship between social experience

68

Chapter Two

and/as sexual encounters through its exploration of human desire and sexuality (Armstrong, 1987), then Smiley’s (2007) postmillennial pastiche investigates the increasing disappearance of the private space into the hyperreal void of public platitudes and mass consumption and the impact that this morphing of the private and the public sphere into one has on the human subject’s sense of individual and sexual agency. The reductionism that comes with the culture of spectacle-turnedhyperreality drives Smiley’s questions about the possibility of representing history without succumbing to sensationalism and the kind of “vintage erotica” associated with postmodern deconstruction of historical events. Placing her readers in the domestic space where the novel’s characters gather, eat, have sex, and discuss the injustice of the Iraq invasion, Ten Days in the Hills is a palimpsest of genres, whose pastiche-like quality is not so much a “blank parody,” as Jameson (1998) describes it (p. 131), but rather a critical inquiry into the ways in which narrative and political authority is established. While Elena becomes the novel’s primary narrator, her authority is challenged through the characters’ individual resistance to her views and diverse perspectives on love and war. One of the points that Elena persistently drives home is the pitting of masculine versus feminine narratives that pervades consumer culture. As an author of self-help guides to perfection, Elena believes that wars are a direct effect of the “manliness problem” (Smiley, 2007, p. 24). Echoing Cohn’s emphasis on the sexualization of militarism, Tom Digby (2014) argues in Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance that cultural militarism is frequently couched in narratives of romance and heterosexual politics that reinforce the so-called “faith in masculine force” (p. 9). Apart from glorifying force and valour, such narratives also celebrate heterosexual adversity (p. 7). Such endorsement of heterosexual values pervades the sentimental/domestic genre. As Janice Radway (2006) emphasizes, one of the strongholds of the domestic novel is its “ritual retelling of the psychic process by which traditional heterosexuality was constructed for women, but it also seemed to exist as a protest against the fundamental inability of heterosexuality to satisfy the very desires with which it engendered women” (p. 225). Smiley deploys the domestic novel as a source of socially normative discourses that tie wars to masculine virility, but also to expose the violence of patriarchal objectification of women and marginal(ized) citizenry. Although she takes her cue from the domestic genre, Smiley nonetheless constructs Ten Days in the Hills as a counter-narrative of sorts. The novel is built around the multiple characters’ resistance to and challenging of Elena’s narrative authority, allowing for a diversity of

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

69

viewpoints. In the process of their storytelling and dialoguing, the characters shed light on both personal and state biases that pit not only historicity and authenticity but also social responsibility against mass culture’s co-optation of interventionist narratives. Smiley demonstrates how this co-optation commodifies counter-narratives, turning their intrinsic value into a postmodern kitsch. As a by-product of industrial capitalism, kitsch is one of the hallmarks of postmodernity. Loosely defined as a “bad taste that is always expressed in consumption” (Larson, 1993, p. 26), the culture of kitsch coincides with the rise of the middle class and modernity, but kitsch is particularly prominent in postmodernity as the ultimate embodiment of hyperreality.39 Its dominant feature is to appeal to the collective consumer consciousness through an imitation and simulation of feeling that speaks to and for everybody. Tomas Kulka (2010) defines this kitschy characteristic as supporting the universal emotion of a collective by enhancing their sentiments and beliefs rather than subverting them (p. 27). In sum, postmodern kitsch in particular rides under the banner of universal sentimentality, convention, and identifiability that eradicates both individual and collective responsibility. Even though Elena believes that her anti-war soliloquies challenge the consumer culture that surrounds her, she inevitably plays into its cooptation of interventionist activism as a means of justifying the invasive strategies of war. Her own self-help guides to perfection are the ultimate embodiment of capitalist warfare on human bodies and behavior. Titled Here’s How: To Do EVERYTHING Correctly!, her book uses lots of allcaps and exclamation points to reinforce the drive for perfection. It centres primarily on mastering the “correct” (i.e., gendered) behaviors of cleaning and laundering properly. However, it also includes chapters instructing how to be a congressman, how to run a multinational corporation, and how to organize the Pentagon—all of which are “mostly for comic relief” (Smiley, 2007, p. 379). As Elena admits herself, she does not quite care for the more politically driven readership. Instead, she targets the “average person who is cleaning her bathroom” (p. 379). All she wants is to encourage this average woman to “have the feeling that her actions have larger consequences and are significant” (p. 379). Elena’s attempt to give women some form of domestic agency undermines the very authority she tries to impart on them. Given the socially prescribed nature of her “howto-do” books, it is clear that Elena’s views are not to be trusted, as they are implicated in reinscribing what she rebuts in the first place. Simulating the nature of reality TV, Elena’s manuals fit the description of postmodern kitsch. They have nothing to do with artistic enlightenment, but are instead a form of entertainment. The manuals play into what

70

Chapter Two

Adorno (1991) refers to as the conformist consciousness of the culture industry (p. 99), but they are also evocative of the hyperreal production of the imaginary associated with Baudrillard’s (1995) simulacra. Simulacra “[conceal] the fact that the real is no longer real” but is rather reduced to “the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degradation” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 13). In other words, the simulated nature of simulacra gives the illusion of plenitude that is desirable and lacking but inaccessible. Similarly, Elena’s manuals are constructed around the promise of flawlessness that provides an infantilizing escape for her readers while simultaneously encouraging them to address what they are lacking through imagining rather than actually achieving fulfilment. The world out there, according to Elena’s “how to do everything properly” vision, is simply less real by definition and more manageable if reduced to a set of imaginary and controllable tasks. Here, however, lies the danger of Elena’s philosophies about the injustice of the “fact that elsewhere, or everywhere else, the vast and the horrible loomed” (Smiley, 2007, p. 378). Such a reduction of the real to a sign is part of what Baudrillard (1995) calls an “aesthetics of the hyperreal, a frisson of vertiginous and phony exactitude” (p. 28). This hyperreal aesthetics has nothing to do with politics—rather, it exposes society’s obsession with power to the point of hallucination.40 Elena’s guide to proper behavior generates its own, albeit aestheticized, war on citizens and their bodies. Charlie, the most conservative guest of all, calls out Elena on her own hypocrisy by challenging her anti-war rants as rooted in the same politics she is critiquing. As a conservative, he acknowledges that the line between entertainment, intervention, and activism has become exceedingly thin, but he sees this collusion as a necessary evil in order to defend America’s world position. Just as Max’s films use the big screen to entice his audience into a pleasurable escape, Charlie suggests that multinational companies likewise rely on adversarial agendas to provide domestic security. On the same note, he implies that Elena’s rants become insignificant, if not indulgent, in light of her manuals, in which the primary role is to police human bodies. In Charlie’s view, such writing is complicit in manipulating truth and thus contributes to the war discourses that Elena indicts. Like Plato’s Alcibiades or the conservative government she criticizes, Elena refuses to take responsibility for her own blind spots. Addressing Charlie’s belief that “most people are [in support of the war]” (Smiley, 2007, p. 248), Elena defines American imperialism as a danger to the world while ignoring the potentially dangerous role that her manuals play in pandering to the same rhetoric she fights so desperately against. In this

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

71

way, Elena is no different from Max’s shallow starlet ex-wife Zoe, who admits to having voted for the conservative government but who ultimately disagrees with the war. Zoe’s mother Delphine suggests to both Zoe and Charlie that their agreement with the government’s policies makes them both complicit in the Iraq war. Elena interrupts their sparring by suggesting that such petty argumentation is precisely the goal of the administration. She says, “It’s perfectly fine with Rumsfeld that you debate issues of global life and death, because that occupies you while he deploys his army” (p. 256). As Elena concludes, distraction is an important part of the postmillennial spectacle. To be distracted from political events, but also from life itself, means surrendering one’s agency to the reign of simulacra. Such a surrender inevitably reduces individuals to inanimate puppets who watch the real subjects on the ground, as simulated digits on the screen disappearing into some mnemonic stratosphere, where their human plight becomes nothing more than a sensational, albeit tragedyinfused, story. Once again, Smiley returns to the increasing shift from the spectaclist culture to the hyperreal simulacra. With wars being subject to technological simulation, but also to “human imagination and creative thought” (Smiley, 2007, p. 255), death casualties become mere numbers, depersonalized and disembodied, as warfare itself turns into a desirable commodity and a tool of global economy. Cassie emphasizes that there are “little messes here and there, so there can be some buying low in order to do some selling high, and some war profiteering, but the money has to keep flowing, and the investments have to pan out” (p. 383). Cassie’s point is that postmillennial culture is trapped in the economic production fostered by multinational companies and their imperialist endeavours. In her theoretical approach to war and her complicity in feeding the consumer machine through her guides to proper mores, Elena becomes just as implicated in the consumerist agenda as the guests whose views she calls into question. In her pandering to the proper social mores, she contributes to the kind of depersonalization that underpins military warfare. Consequently, in her emphasis on the use and abuse of language in politics, Smiley echoes Plato’s complex theory of desire as both a positive and negative force: what kind of impact it will have ultimately depends on how it is (de)formed, or expressed. Forms of expression shed light on different ways of seeing while exposing the blind spots of human ignorance. The dialogic form upon which Smiley’s novel relies on particularly lends itself to a kind of teasing out of ideas and exploring new ways of communicating and acting. Drawing on the philosophy of the

72

Chapter Two

ancient Greeks, Smiley reveals the power of dialogic discourse as a means of circumventing aggression and cathecting destructive desire into a different form. While print culture is primarily monologic, digital media has broadened the opportunity for social interaction and dialogue. Though it does not always provide a positive venue for discussion, the digital culture has reestablished the importance of dialogic exchange. Smiley is skeptical about such postmillennial developments, but her embrace of the Socratic dialogue is an attempt to return governments and their citizens to the political art of debate.

Dialogue as a Way Out? One of the prerogatives of consumer culture is its insistence on commodification and conformity. As Theodor Adorno (1991) has argued in his essay on the culture industry, a careful cultivation of mass ignorance drives commodity culture. While the famous cliché, “ignorance is bliss,” serves as a fine “opium” for the masses (Debord, 1983), it annihilates any sense of compassion or empathy, not to mention ethics. Plato’s Symposium delineates the dialogic form as a means of learning and self-care. The art of dialogue not only uncovers human ignorance but also generates new forms of awareness and knowledge. It encourages learning by stimulating independent thought and an exchange of ideas (Scott & Welton, 2008). The ability to share ideas with others leads to the possibility of revisioning established notions and stale systems, but it also encourages a plurality of views and thus creates a space for empathy and compassion. Smiley’s (2007) use of intertextuality and her playful engagement with postmodern pastiche allows for the dialogic encounter to take shape as well as to become a form unto itself. Inscribing and revising diverse cultural and literal traditions, from Plato, Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer to Jane Austen’s domestic fiction and pop culture genres like soap operas and reality TV, Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills is a palimpsest of literary genres and forms. In its imitation and resuscitation of literary themes, genres, and texts, it formulates an interesting reflection on postmodern pastiche as a kind of farewell to the possibility of agency, authority, and authenticity. Fredric Jameson’s (1998) description of pastiche as a prominent feature of postmodernity, but also as a kind of a “blank parody, a parody that has lost its sense of humour” (p. 131), is particularly useful here. Pastiche, according to Jameson, exemplifies the “death of the subject,” or in other words, the death of agency and authority but also history. Smiley’s (2007) novel inscribes this postmodern tendency through a playful imitation of literary styles from morality tales and

Sex, Money, and Simulacra in Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills

73

courtly romances to sentimental fiction and the postmodern novel. More importantly, however, her novel queries the postmodern revisionist and subversive take on history, engaging with its metafictional, intertextual quality to investigate the entanglement of social encounters and human desire—sexuality, desire, and political power—as tied up with a yearning for some idyllic past that never was. An essential part of postmodernism is its nostalgic turn (Jameson, 1991). This turn is reinforced by the self-reflexive nature of parody and irony that drive its backward glance to a critical and revisionist view of history. Linda Hutcheon (1992) emphasizes that postmodernism is not the radical, utopian oppositionality of the modernist avant-garde. Instead, it questions the very act—and authority—of taking a position, any position, even an oppositional one that assumes a discursive situation exterior to that which is being opposed. (p. 37)

Postmodernism exposes the ambiguity of historical representation, raising questions about authority. As Hutcheon (1992) asserts, how the historical narrative addresses historical events matters, but who tells the story becomes equally significant. Postmodern narratives parody historical truth and challenge the very premise of authority. Such questioning of authority—historical, individual, and political—lies at the heart of Smiley’s (2007) novel. Consequently, Ten Days in the Hills can be described as a parody of the postmillennial world’s breakdown of meaning, as well as of the human capacity for empathy and compassion. It raises serious questions about the impact of commodity culture on human relationships and understanding. Smiley asks: if reality is merely a simulation, a cave filled with images, and if our approach to world disasters and wars is to be persistently mediated through visual media, then where are human subjects and their ability to learn, to gauge the world around them, left? If every fact is a story-within-a-story without an origin or ending, then what is the meaning of life? In spite of their mundane concerns and self-indulgent behavior, Smiley’s characters seem to ask such important questions without necessarily committing to any of the answers they generate.

CHAPTER THREE POSTHUMAN IDENTITY AND THE CORPORATE FORTRESS IN MARGE PIERCY’S HE, SHE AND IT

The last 30 years have seen both the rise of globalization and the domination of free market capitalism, the increasing ubiquity of information and communications technologies, and the burgeoning power and influence of techno-science. … At the same time these events offer extraordinary challenges to the preconceptions through which our existence is negotiated. These include, for example, the annihilation of physical distance and the dissolution of material reality by virtual or telecommunication technologies, or the apparent end of the human and the rise of the so-called posthuman as a result of advances in Cybernetics, robotics and research into consciousness and intelligence. —Charlie Gere (2012), Digital Culture, pp. 14–15 Advanced capitalism as globalized cash-flow rests on the convergence of information and bio-technologies and activates a proliferation of differences aimed at commercial exploitation. —Rosi Braidotti (2006), Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, p. 263

Both Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) and Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills (2007) are concerned with the impact that advanced capitalism, global consumerism, media, and, increasingly, digital technology have on the future of humanity. What does it mean to be “human” in the wake of postmodernity? In what ways does globalization augment what Rosi Braidotti (2006) refers to as the “commercialization of all that lives” (p. 264)? From Facebook and Instagram to blogs and Twitter, digital media has not only changed what it means to be human, but it has also virtualized communication to the point of absolute alienation and avatarization of the individual subject. The 21st century is an era of information glut and “wikinomics,” a “mass collaboration” and co-production of knowledge in which online consumers are also producers and translators of knowledge (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 11). According to Jean Baudrillard (1995), “we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning” (p. 79). Both DeLillo’s Point Omega and Smiley’s Ten

76

Chapter Three

Days in the Hills address the subject of information overload and its impact on human desire and life in general. Alienation as well as a state of absolute commodification are among the most prominent anxieties explored in these novels. Published in 1991, a much celebrated work of futuristic imagination and a seminal reflection on the challenges of the cybernetic age, Marge Piercy’s He, She and It anticipated many of these anxieties. Set in the year 2059 in the Nebraskan desert, where the “corporate fortress” Yakamura-Stichen (Y-S) dominates the living and the non-living through a “protocol-hedged hierarchy” and global psycho-engineering (Piercy, 1991, p. 3), He, She and It envisions a world of human desire gone rogue. This world is governed by 23 multinational corporations called “multis” who rely on the work of the “gruds,” their professional personnel. Most Y-S executives have had various bodily enhancements, and in 2059, most children are conceived through artificial insemination. In the world of Y-S, the physical body with all its accoutrements and appetites is a liability, while the ability to embrace the absolute digitization and corporatization of everything is the key to achieving ultimate global bliss. Juxtaposing this global, futurist dystopia with the recollection of historical events and memories long passed, the novel imagines an egalitarian community called Tikva (meaning “hope” in Hebrew) as an antidote to the hard data and profit-marketeering promoted by the Y-S. Counter to Y-S, Tikva is a place where hope supposedly trumps greed, where psycho-engineers and scientists like Avram, Malkah, and Shira cocreate worlds in which digital imprints are based in oral as well as print traditions, and where storytelling becomes a metaphorical food, nourishing the virtual Base into which the residents of the community are “plugged.” More importantly, as it balances the technocracy with spiritual yearning, He, She and It persistently plays with and revisits the connection between the kabbalist tradition of golem-making and the postindustrial obsession with cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and absolute transcendence of corporeality. Through a romantic triangle between Malkah, her daughter Shira, and Avram’s cyborg Yod, Piercy sets out to examine globalization as a quest for science turned magic and magic turned science. Ingrained in the kabbalist tradition of the ecstatic power of oral and written prophecy, the novel explores globalization as a postindustrial quest for an absolute economic, cultural, and social synthesis that promises emancipation, fulfilment and a general betterment for all. To the contrary, this synthesis generates new forms of inequities in the very guise of propelling the world toward a penultimate ideal: an ecstatic form of existence. Aligning kabbalist ideals with dreams of global bliss, Piercy sets out to explore the

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

77

ways in which globalization frequently co-opts religious and spiritual discourses to promote its spurious agendas by relying on proselytizing as a prophecy of an ecstatic future to come, be it in the form of advertising, postindustrial propaganda, or spiritual beliefs. Since its publication in 1991, Piercy’s He, She and It has garnered a great deal of critical attention. Hailed as an important foundational work of the cyberpunk genre, the novel became a compendium of theoretical, literary, spiritual, and technological imagination.41 According to Badmington (2000), the novel draws on a variety of intertexts, from Donna Haraway’s (1991) “Cyborg Manifesto,” Golem legends, and Kabbalist traditions, to Mary Shelley’s (1818/1994) Frankenstein, Isaac Asimov’s (1976/2002) “The Bicentennial Man,” and William Gibson’s (1984) Neuromancer, but it also provides an incisive commentary on the very “contradictions of humanism [and posthumanism]” (p. 90). Given its cyberpunk quality,—its exploration of human desire for technological replication, artificial intelligence, and global dominance—it is not surprising that the novel continues to be interpreted primarily through the lens of its (post)humanist queries. Moving the discussion to a slightly different terrain by (dis)engaging, if only slightly, with (post)humanist theories, this chapter suggests that Piercy’s novel is primarily concerned with the challenges of creative imagination and its materialization. What does it mean to live and be alive? Does creativity bring humanity beyond itself? And if so, what does that say about the notion of being “human”? In what follows, this chapter returns to Plato’s reflections on the intricate relationship between Eros and Ares as it draws attention to Piercy’s mapping of creativity as both a life force and a (self-)war or strife and thus inevitably as a process of becoming-Other: a form of alterity unto itself. Through close reading of He, She and It, this chapter examines the novel’s vision of posthuman virtuality and its consideration of the consequences of unbridled ecstasy, whether in the form of capitalist consumerism, global digitization, artistic creativity, or heightened spirituality. It then suggests that the novel explores the ontology of ecstasy as a cause–effect relationship between a desire to achieve a higher state of being and hubris, or what Plato in his dialogues defines as the struggle between the “spirited life” and bodily appetites (Scott & Welton, 2008, p. 46). However, this chapter also examines the ways in which ecstasy is tied to the spectacular as a steady coaxing of the off-scene, the impossible, and the obscene into one’s line of vision. He, She and It not only shows how the age of globalization resuscitates the spectacular but also how it makes it into an ecstatic form par excellence. As the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, the spectacle (from Latin spectaculum) means “something

78

Chapter Three

presented to the view, esp. of a striking or unusual character,” but it is also a “means of seeing, … a window or a mirror” (“Spectacle,” n.d.). Probing the global and non-linear flows of power and influence, He, She and It raises questions about ethics and the role that art and, in particular, literature play in exposing and dissembling, but also at times reinscribing, the alienating, dehumanizing principle of the spectacular. While Baudrillard (1995) suggests that the postmillennial society is no longer the society of the spectacle, this chapter argues that the Internet and digital media have ushered us into a new era of the spectacle that is more spectacular than ever, albeit virtually so. The spectacle is no longer reliant on panoptical introjection of power, but it is present and hyper-present everywhere—in the physical space and beyond—through its use of ecstatic speech that relies on prophecy as a language of the future that is to come. But since, as Maurice Blanchot (1959/2003) emphasizes, prophetic speech “makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible” (p. 79), this type of language cannot deliver what it promises to communicate; all it is capable of doing is being an errant (and forever erring) cause and effect of the future’s rupture and foreclosure.42

Cyberpunk, Kabbalah, and the Language of the Global Future: Beyond Posthumanism Since its inception, cyberpunk literature has been concerned with futurity. When Bruce Bethke published his story, “Cyberpunk,” in November 1983, the term became an important marker of a new zeitgeist, a socio-cultural shift in postmodern pondering of representation and its mishaps to the cybernetic logic of techno-capitalism, artificial intelligence, and posthuman virtuality.43 As a subgenre of sci-fi, cyberpunk literature focuses on the impact of digital technology on human consciousness and, more specifically, on human relationships and corporeality. According to George E. Slusser and T. A. Shippey (1992), “in the cyberpunk world, to write science fiction is to make physical, even visceral contact with the mechanical and biological extensions of our personal infosphere (cyborgs, grafts, prostheses, clones)” (p. 3). The cyberpunk genre imagines the future of humanity enhanced by virtuality and artificial intelligence, but it also simultaneously acts as an apocalyptic prophecy of the post-/nonhuman world, stripped of compassion, empathy, and critical thinking. In this context, the cyberpunk genre evokes Blanchot’s (1959/2003) notion of a prophetic speech that wanders and acts as a “sort of eternal sending on a journey” (p. 81). Frequently described as a narrative of “rhetorical overload” that unfolds in a non-linear, rhizomatic manner that defies any

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

79

particular direction (Slusser & Shippey, 1992, p. 5), cyberpunk encourages resistance to hegemonic discourses through a nostalgic embrace of myth and memory while simultaneously interrogating the cyborg identity from an ethical standpoint but also as an entity and conceptual formation unto itself. Piercy’s novel has been celebrated for its cyberpunk quality and, more specifically, for Piercy’s engagement with Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and the call for embracing the non-human as a living entity rather than a threat. Departing from Haraway’s (1991) dictum that “we are [all] cyborgs,” and hence, by default, we are all “hybrids of machine and organism” (p. 150),44 Piercy challenges several aspects of the cyborg manifesto by investigating the ways in which humanity has been fascinated with alterity since antiquity. Pondering the relationship between human embodiment and ideas of humanity, Piercy suggests that at the heart of progress—or the human desire for progress—lies the intriguing relationship between the known and the unknown, between existence and potentiality. While the digital age is specifically targeted for its information overload, Piercy parses information as a much broader term that encompasses communicated knowledge in general.45 Locating its roots in the humanist ideals of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Piercy ponders the notion of information as a form of creative conception rather than a meaningless concatenation of signs. Bringing together two very distinct philosophical traditions,— humanism and its post-versions with early kabbalist teachings—Piercy’s novel combines the conceptual fervor of philosophical movements and traditions with the ecstatic power of language and/as prophecy. As Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922/2010) argued in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, language is a “totality of propositions” (p. 38); in other words, language provides a “picture” of reality. It cannot capture reality in its entirety: its value is connotative. Language merely points to what it can be rather than what it is. It is “the expression of agreement and disagreement with the truth-possibilities of elementary propositions” (p. 51). As such, language suggests the possibilities of what reality was, is, and can/will be. In this context, language can be described as a virtuality of its own kind or, as Piercy suggests in He, She and It, as a force of ecstatic conception (and conceptualization) where the living and non-living, sense and senselessness, meet in a temporarily uninterrupted rapture. It is an aspiration to a speech whose continuous exaltation lays everything bare (Blanchot, 1959/2003, p. 81), or as Piercy (1991) suggests, a speech that discloses the fine line between myth and reality. As Malkah, one of the main characters and masterminds behind the socialization of robots and

80

Chapter Three

cyborgs in Tikva, confides in Yod, “myth forms reality and we act out of what we think we are. … Our minds help create the world we inhabit” (p. 25). Calling herself a mystic of sorts, Malkah is well aware of the ways in which the “bubeh maisehs,” the old wives’ tales she tells, and the dangerous pursuits of governments to achieve so-called global paradise are driven by a similar, intoxicating desire to overcome the limitations of humanity through ecstatic incantations, whether they pertain to making “clay” or cyborg men and objects. Be it in pursuit of good or evil, the rhetoric that both mystics and government pundits use relies on prophetic permutations of various mantras and intensities with “primal eagerness” (Blanchot, 1959/2013, p. 85). Malkah’s story about the great golem-maker and mystic Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague, exemplifies this dialectic. In his pursuit of higher knowledge, the Maharal is very much aware of the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of his quest. Malkah notes that at any moment of history, certain directions are forbidden that lie open to the inquiring mind and experimental hand. Not always is the knowledge forbidden because dangerous: governments spend billions on weapons and forbid small sects the peyote of their ecstasy. What we are forbidden to know can be—or seem—what we most need to know. Further, for a human being to make another is to usurp the power of ha-Shem, to risk frightening self-aggrandizement. It is dangerous to the soul, dangerous to the world. As soon as the mind conceives of a possibility, it wants the possible to be actualized. It wants to be doing, no matter what the cost of the damage. The Maharal is preconsciously aware of human frailty. … He cannot decide wherein lies the correct path … (Piercy, 1991, p. 29).

For the Maharal, the quest for the unknown and the mystical remains an obligation to pursue and achieve a higher form of existence, beyond the material, whether it be a physical body or language itself. In this light, Piercy’s resuscitation of the kabbalist ritual of golemmaking as a means of conceptualizing existence beyond knowledge and language provides an important means of parsing global capitalism and its propagandist, techno-crazed rhetoric. Drawing on the 16th century legend of the Maharal of Prague, He, She and It probes into the ways in which humanity’s investments in progress and self-aggrandizement are separate yet also deeply intertwined. Taking her readers on a journey into the 1580s city of Prague, Piercy invokes the ecstasy of the kabbalist belief in the power of language through Malkah, the rabbi of the virtual stratosphere, whose ability to recount tales of ancient lore evokes the return to a culture of orality and mystical retelling. Piercy not only privileges but also deploys this culture as a means to an open-ended (thus close to divine/transpersonal) existence. Malkah, who is in her late 70s, is skeptical

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

81

about progress—specifically the artificiality and techno-rigour with which the Y-S society is associated. Like the ecstatic kabbalists, Malkah prefers to escape into the world of ideas, her own virtuality, where conception is a matter of creative expression rather than a military intervention. As the novel begins, Malkah embarks upon a close-to-impossible endeavour to teach Yod, a cyborg, a lesson or two about humanity and its (post)human aspirations. Relying on the power of oral culture and memory, Malkah retells the legend of the Golem, examining both its potential and limitations, to draw Yod’s attention to the complexities of the human mind. Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague, becomes an interesting symbol of a quest for virtual consciousness or the kind of Teilhard de Chardinian “noosphere” that Elster persistently invokes in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.46 While Elster theorizes that humans dream of their own extinction and wish to become “stones in the field” (DeLillo, 2010, p. 53), the Maharal’s dream in superhuman powers has roots in the desire for immortality: he wishes to become the Name, “ha-Shem”, or in other words, to be the beyond (Piercy, 1991, p. 67). In her description of the Maharal’s ecstatic journey, Piercy evokes the work of Moshe Idel (2002), whose life-long study of the mysteries of kabbalah has been instrumental in providing insight into kabbalists including Abraham Abulafia, a 13th century wanderer and scholar. Abulafia believed that the human intellect was capable of achieving a “mystical union” with the divine entity (Idel, 2002, p. 64). His ecstatic model consisted of a fourfold scheme that progressed from over-activating the intellect and language through a repetitive recitation and permutation of certain letters, their actualization through speech as “a spiritual faculty, not only as a reproduction of intellectual matters on a corporeal key,” and finally, moving from a “homiletic” to a “secret” sense (p. 65). Consequently, the awakening of the golem was an attempt to amalgamate the human and non-human bodily and spiritual qualities by means of a special, mystical experience. In Piercy’s novel, the Maharal, whose life’s complex dilemma was whether to see golem-making as a higher path of absolute creation or the very opposite, is described as “a bright, fierce man, a hotheaded kabbalist, steeped in ancient tradition so that Torah haunts and informs and sculpts the world for him” (Piercy, 1991, p. 21). While grounded in corporality, the Maharal’s aspirations of awakening the golem emphasize the value of abstract knowledge—the power of words to enliven and elevate mankind to a higher spiritual reality. A man committed to lifelong learning and study, the Maharal evokes Plato’s vision of higher ideals as life forms. Like Plato’s Socrates, he is the

82

Chapter Three

embodiment of Eros, who is both a messenger and an intermediary between the human world and the divine realm (Scott & Welton, 2008, p. 95).47 He believes in free speech. As an “original thinker” who is, by default, a “troublemaker” (Piercy, 1991, p. 22), the Maharal, who echoes Platonic principles of higher ideas overcoming baser humanity, is inevitably the embodiment of opposites. Like most prophets, he thrives on dialogic exchange. As a champion of free speech, the Maharal insists on pursuing and speaking the truth no matter what it may be. Unwilling to compromise his right to free speech, the Maharal challenges the Dominican priest, Thaddeus, by “conduct[ing] running wars of words with the most famous rabbis of his time” (p. 21), a choice of action that has dire consequences for the already ostracized Jewish community in Prague. Desperate to fight for his community while persecuted by antisemitism, the Maharal pursues a “higher truth” by committing his energy to the “disciplines of the Kabbalah, through the rungs of emanations toward the all that is nothingness, the Ein Sof” (p. 27). Like many of his counterparts, the Maharal believes in the “power of words and letters” to propel humankind beyond its limits (p. 28). The Maharal’s creation of the golem as a “being in human form made not by ha-Shem” is therefore partly a divine aspiration and partly an act that runs the risk of “self-aggrandizement” (Piercy, 1991, p. 29). As he starts chanting and permuting the various combinations of letters, he realizes that his endeavor is torn between two potentialities—life and death, creation and destruction: “he knows in that moment more than he has ever known in his life and more than he will know in five minutes” (p. 65). By drawing attention to Maharal’s so-called coincidentia oppositorum, a Jungian “interpretation, interdependence, and unification of opposites” (Drob, 2000, p. 1), Piercy contemplates the relationship between the Kabbalist golem and the cyborg Yod as a “miracle … beyond the ordinarily human” (Piercy, 1991, p. 25). Throughout the novel, however, Piercy unifies rather than distinguishes between the golem and the cyborg, highlighting the fine line between the human and nonhuman, the good and evil, the myth and reality, science and religion, and Eros and Ares (desire and war). In this unification, Piercy embraces the mystical dimension rather than the embodied posthumanism of Donna Haraway or Rosi Braidotti. While both Haraway (1991) and Braidotti (2006) see bodies and machines as embodied entities,48 Piercy also emphasizes the spiritual quality of the machine that is based in the kabbalist tradition of understanding the divine and the world as a holistic yet mystical whole beyond the corporeal.

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

83

Piercy’s revision of Moshe Idel’s retellings of the golem legends, as well as his study of the Safedian Kabbalists Isaac of Acre and Abraham Abulafia, creates a space for contemplation. It also provides a critique of the abuses of power, whether they are justified in the name of spirituality or economics. Echoing the kabbalist emphasis on the spiritual metamorphosis of an idle man into an ideal man through a course of study and contemplation rather than greed and consumption (Idel, 2002, p. 70), Piercy (1991) draws a line between global totalitarianism and a spiritual sense of wholeness. Through Malkah’s and Shira’s social engagement with Yod and their reliance on storytelling rather than social construction, Piercy provides an interesting insight into the power of storytelling as a form of Eros, a life-affirming mechanism that exposes the fine line between the Maharal’s “war of words” and Avram’s pursuit of the ideal cyborg/man. By returning to the ecology of the spirit, Piercy thus defies the radical, embodied posthumanism advocated by Braidotti and Haraway, but also challenges the dream of global commodification. Like Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills (2007), Piercy’s He, She and It relies on Platonic influences. It explores the Ares-Eros conjunction by examining “the relationship between the perfect human and the divine … on the one hand, and the perfect automaton and the human on the other” (Lancaster, 2008, p. 2). As Lancaster (2008) emphasizes, the human here acts as “the essential bridge between the world of nature and the macrocosm” (p. 3). The golem and the cyborg reflect the human dream for wholeness that, paradoxically, is also the dream of extinction as argued by Elster in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010), where gender, cultural, and class differences disappear. Similarly, digital technology, like the mystical incantations of the kabbalist, promises “the dissolution of material reality by virtual or telecommunication technologies” (Gere, 2012, p. 15). This dissolution of materiality is an illusion, albeit a powerful one. While it aspires to the annihilation of differences, it frequently reenforces them. As Piercy shows, these differences—sexual, gender, racial, and cultural—are a crucial aspect of the creative drive that propels humans towards better goals. Shira, whose name means “song” in Hebrew, becomes the embodiment of this recognition process. Embodying this process, Shira thus represents the kabbalist notion of the “song of songs” as a secret to the mystical ascent where the pleasure of the mystical experience is derived from the body and its pleasures (Idel, 2002-2003, n. pag.). As Idel notes, in Abulafia’s ecstatic tradition, there is “an additional stage to the acquisition of intellectual perfection—namely, that of the pleasure deriving from the mystical experience” (Idel, 2002-2003, n. pag.). The importance of

84

Chapter Three

pleasure as a driving force of speech is crucial to Piercy’s narrative. While Malkah’s relationship to Yod is primarily intellectual, his relationship with Shira is driven by her attempts to socially and sexually educate him, whereby the intellectual is combined with the sexual. The romantic relationship that develops between Shira and Yod has been the source of many a scholarly debate, ranging from critiques of the novel’s so-called endorsement of traditional gender polarity to its formulaic tendencies that reinforce essentialist and gendered discourses of romance.49 One of the most cited passages in these debates is Shira’s programming of Yod to be an ideal man—a perfect lover, partner, and father. However, as this chapter suggests, this notion of an ideal man has more to do with Piercy’s invocation of the kabbalist notion of the mystical transformation of an idle to an ideal man than with the western heterosexual fantasy of an ideal sexual lover and partner (Idel, 2002– 2003). As Idel argues in his article on the Platonic influences in Jewish mysticism, unlike the idle man, the golem, whose intellect is dormant and passive (i.e., he does not think or speak), the ideal man is a man of an “acquired intellect” whose aim is to reach the kind of superhuman quality that Plato associates with aretƝ, loosely translated as “excellence,” a state that incorporates the positive aspect of Eros and transforms it into a higher form (Idel, 2002–2003, p. 71). Piercy explores the notion of an ideal man by assigning Yod (super)human qualities that not only challenge gender bias but also bring into focus the importance of care. Shira contemplates the intensity with which Yod cares for her son Ari, but also with which he makes love to her. She notes his difference as an ideal yet uncanny phenomenon: He touched her as if he had all the time in the world. Of course he did not experience bodily fatigue; his desire was not based in any physical pleasure; he did not sleep. He caressed her as if he could do so all night, and probably he could. (Piercy, 1991, p. 161)

In this passage, Shira aligns Yod with perfection. However, Piercy refuses to wane poetic about Yod’s (super)human qualities. Malkah, as opposed to Shira, is skeptical about Yod’s “ideal” qualities. Contemplating the fine line between human and inhuman intensity, Malkah brings the reader back to the baser aspects of (super)humanity. She points to the ways in which humans, when consumed by greed, behave like automatons. She says that “men so often try to be inhumanly powerful, efficient, unfeeling, to perform like a machine, it is ironic to watch a machine striving to be male” (Piercy, 1991, p. 161). Anticipating Smiley’s examination of erotic and aggressive drives, Piercy probes into the potentially destructive impact that

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

85

technology can have not only on global economy but also on human intimacy. By associating Yod with the golem tradition, she is able to explore the coming together of opposites—the male and female aspects, the human and the non-human/automaton/divine—while simultaneously highlighting the destructive potential of the creative drive. However, just as in the golemic tradition in which the mystic must surpass the initial “pleasure of vision” through his incantation and ecstatic speech, Shira must find it in herself to move beyond the physical, the romantic, and the socially-prescribed by declining to recreate Yod when he is forced to self-destruct to avoid being annihilated by Y-S. By ending the novel with Shira’s decision not to resurrect Yod as a perfect lover, partner, and father, Piercy avoids reinscribing the traditional expectations of the formulaic romance (i.e., a happy ending or a forever-after). Instead, Piercy redirects the reader’s attention to Shira’s own agency in storytelling. Acknowledging the value of women’s romance fiction in recovering women’s voices, Piercy echoes Janice Radway’s (2006) pop culture studies. Radway deploys women’s romance as a form of recovering the invisible and suppressed women’s voices and as a “form of individual resistance” (p. 225). Moreover, by writing Shira into the position of a great kabbalist mystic who recognizes the potential dangers of ecstasy, Piercy debunks several traditions at once: first, she undermines the patriarchal discourses that underpin both global corporatization and the kabbalist traditions; second, she challenges the feminist emphasis on embodied subjectivity by asking whether such an emphasis does not further essentialize and thus commodify the corporeal (albeit, in reverse). Like DeLillo, Piercy explores the dream of absolute reversibility as a “dead point” that holds us hostage to an “end to the horizon of meaning” (Baudrillard, 2008, pp. 33, 45). Unlike DeLillo’s Elster, Shira follows Malkah’s holistic approach to the future of humanity: she has not given up on the idea of a future. Living up to her name, which means “song” (“Shira,” n.d.), Shira embraces the future as fluid and forever changing rather than fixed. By rejecting the dream of wholeness, Shira also refuses to participate in the power dynamics represented by the Y-S and Tikva. She refuses not only hyper-capitalism but also the utopian striving that Tikva’s resistance movement and hacking represents. Shira carries her backpack holding Yod’s remains to the recycling plant where she sets him/it “free,” as his crystals “[slide] away into the fusion chamber and [become] energy” (Piercy, 1991, p. 429). As she releases Yod’s remains, Shira renounces her dependence on ecstatic alterity, whether it takes the form of a perfect man/lover/father or a commodity. In this renouncement, Piercy creates a

86

Chapter Three

narrative in which the traditional discourses of sexual polarity and gendered romance are examined along their trans-versions. Instead of rejecting one side or the other, she brings these versions together to contemplate the asymmetries that underpin globalization and to uncover its marketing strategies as grounded in the prophetic intensity of speech. Nonlinear and diverse rather than purely hierarchical, the postindustrial corporate network has generated various power, gender, racial, and ethnic asymmetries that nurture their own forms of bias and fundamentalism.50 These asymmetries rely on and reproduce dualities, but they also generate ecstatic forms of Otherness by promising (an)other life or simply by exploiting the lives of others. As Rosi Braidotti (2006) emphasizes, “advanced capitalism and its globalized economy is a machine that spins off and multiplies differences for the sake of their commoditization and profit” (p. 91). Otherness is not only an issue of racial and gender difference, but it is, in a Baudrillardian sense, an ecstatic form of branding and tribal sorting. In the novel, Piercy not only explores the historical abuses of creativity and creative conceptualization, as well as their collapse into a form of aggrandizement, but she also asks what drives the desire for the so-called global wholeness, what propels the quest for perfection—whether it is fostered by psychological, cultural, or economic arguments. As I mentioned earlier, like Smiley in Ten Days in the Hills, Piercy in He, She and It investigates the drive for what Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium refers to as aretƝ: doing good things; achieving excellence. The novel thus lends itself to a wider conversation than the discussion of the limits of cyber-feminism and cyborg identity as “a nightmare of overwork” allows (Hicks, 2002, p. 94). However, it also categorically moves beyond the “contradictions” that the kind of posthuman vs. human or non-human agendas stage (Badmington, 2000, p. 90, 97). Instead of regurgitating political and feminist ideologies, the novel persistently interrogates these ideologies’ premises by permuting them and turning them around and around. Consequently, Piercy reveals how the politics of language and its power to tip the balance by blurring the semantic line between love and war, sex and violence, life and death, or creation and destruction play an important part in navigating and manipulating global discourses and their digital enhancements.

“Global Madness,” Digital Technology, and Ecstatic Alterity The utopian and dystopian qualities of globalization and its multifaceted journey for wholeness—from the dream of a global village to an

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

87

amalgamated corporate fortress or the achievement of an absolute Singularity through the ecstasy of digitization—underpins He, She and It.51 In pitting two different societies against one another, the utopian matriarchal town of Tikva with the patriarchal corporate dystopia of the YS, Piercy tackles the complex and multidimensional aspects of globalization by exposing its “two faces” (Moghadam, 2005, p. 40). As Valerie Moghadam (2005) emphasizes, globalization, on the one hand, advocates multilateralism, free trade, and multiculturalism; it also promises to liberate society from the capitalist yoke of fragmentation and alienation. On the other hand, globalization precipitates, if not enhances, the very discontents and inequalities that it promises to undo. From its reinforcement of patriarchy and the global McDonaldization of markets to various forms of economic, cultural, and national(ist) fundamentalisms, globalization intensifies rather than alleviates the symptoms of capitalist alienation. The end result is an extreme sense of alterity that is polarizing yet multidimensional. In addition, alterity becomes a form of prophecy of the future in danger, wherein the anthropoid stranger is put on display as a harbinger of the apocalypse to come (in dystopian terms) or as an avatar of global consciousness (in utopian terms). In pondering the liminality of utopia and dystopia, matriarchy and patriarchy, as well as materiality and abstraction, Piercy reveals the spectacle of globalization as mired in power asymmetries that both undo and recalibrate some of the most potent forms of oppression. Throughout the novel, Piercy blurs the line between the two societies (Tivka and Y-S), emphasizing the ambiguity of the utopia/dystopia divide. While the corporate fortress of the Y-S becomes an allegory of the global corporatization of international markets, the freewheeling commune of Tikva does not escape its brushes with inequalities either. Defined by the all-powerful multis and their “Shinto” ideology, the economic gains of the Y-S are the result of the capital being both mobile and also put on display through its abstract and often spectral iterations: the “gruds” and the “stimmies” creating the image of the impenetrable fortress, the marriages based on five-year contracts, and the Y-S branding of their employees through plastic surgery (Piercy, 1991, p. 5). Regardless of the pursuit of the global “face” of the Y-S, the hierarchies and asymmetries between the multis and the gruds are quite clearly defined. As Shira realizes, while “almost every exec, male or female, had been under the knife to resemble the Y-S ideal, … [the]techies flashing past on the movers looked far more diverse” (p. 5). Contrary to the loneliness and alienation of the workers and multis cultivated in and by the Y-S, the residents of Tikva foster warm friendships and do not distinguish between ranks, races, or sexes. Yet,

88

Chapter Three

despite the communal nature of Tikva, its matriarchal system does not necessarily provide the solution to the ills of patriarchy. While Malkah dominates the Tikvan base with her knowledge and frequently undermines the scientific accomplishments of her fellow scientists like Avram, her bubeh stories assert agency in different but equally dominant ways. In He, She and It, new forms of dominance therefore arise not so much out of the unbridled capitalism and psycho-engineered branding but rather from the unboundedness of imagination and creativity taken to the dark side. Just like the Y-S does, the Tikvans desperately defend their ideology: their sense of protection is the Y-S idea of destruction, and vice versa. Irrespective of their political inclinations, both Y-S and Tivka are implicated in what Piercy perceives as a dangerous and affective colonization of physical, intimate, and virtual space. Piercy also recalls the basic tropes of (post)colonial literature as the novel navigates through historical and futuristic discoveries that necessitate and produce new forms of naming. The Y-S is a post-national enclave divided into ghettos and marginalized communities. Tikva, on the other hand, is based on the kind of digital tribalization that has become viewed as both a boon and a dangerous side effect of the spread of the World Wide Web. How these colonizing regimes connect but also dissolve the difference between affect, violence, community, and solipsism constitutes an important thread throughout the novel. Creative journeys and discoveries of new, alternative spaces, as well as their less than ideal transformations, permeate the novel’s imaginary fabric. Although inspired by Malkah and Shira’s absent yet politically active mother Riva, Shira’s journey is that of mapping her own space and line of discovery. Like Yod, she serves as a connecting point between “people and artificial intelligences that formed the Base of each corporation and every other information-producing and information-eating entity in the world, as well as the information utility called the Network, which connected everyone” (Piercy, 1991, p. 1). Shira, like the Maharal, performs an intermediary function, regulating between two extremes: freedom and unfreedom, agency and subjection. She increasingly learns that the “anticorporate communitarianism” can revert into its own form of fundamentalism (Schryer, 2012, p. 149). Avram, Tikva’s renowned scientist and Malkah’s ex lover, provides a prime example of Tikva’s own colonizing (and globalizing) endeavours. Avram works on defense mechanisms, experimenting with virtual intelligence and cyborgs. In his laboratory, Avram assembles and dismantles robots: “[he] snapped off the left arm at the elbow and then at the shoulder, did the same to the right arm” (Piercy, 1991, p. 46). Avram attempts to make Yod look as human as

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

89

possible to ensure that, as a weapon against the Y-S, he “passes” for a human. Avram tells Shira that he “felt the more closely he resembled a human being, the less likely he would be detected. It will be necessary for him to pass time with humans, and he must seem as much like them as possible” (p. 71). While anthropomorphizing Yod, Avram insists that Yod’s purpose is to perform a primarily defensive function—that is, as a cyborg, he/it is first and foremost a military weapon. Avram imagines that the cyborg’s anthropoid qualities will outsmart the Y-S weaponry through its built-in reconnaissance and stealth mechanism. Anticipating DeLillo’s character Elster and his theories of defence, Piercy’s Avram is the brains behind the “defense systems [that] … defeat penetration into a multi or town base” (Piercy, 1991, p. 45). His laboratory is full of service robots, but it also hides his secret project, Yod, a “cyborg … mix of biological and machine components” designed to protect Tikva against the Y-S and other corporate attacks (p. 75). Avram’s project is part of the resistance movement in Tikva. Malkah, too, is engaged in uncovering and dealing with “misinformation, pseudograms, and falsified data” (p. 45); her daughter, Riva, is an “information pirate” who “finds hidden knowledge and liberates it” (p. 78). As a hacker, Riva represents the activist voice of Tikva, which the Y-S clearly sees as a threat to its corporate fortress. Aimed at undermining capitalist greed and exploitation, hacking in He, She and It represents an outlaw activity, wherein the goal is to turn the Y-S against itself by wreaking chaos through subversive online activity. Not surprisingly, the Y-S renounces Riva’s activities as criminal, but Tikva regards them instead as both ethical and liberating. The issue of ethics becomes a bone of contention in the novel as digital technology collapses the creative and destructive drives, Eros and Ares, or, in Freud’s terms, Eros and Thanatos. Yod expresses this dangerous form of reversibility when he/it recognizes that his programming interferes with his ethics: “This is what I was created for. I am Avram’s weapon. Killing is what I do best. … I judge myself for killing, yet my programming takes over in danger” (Piercy, 1991, p. 410). Yod is a weapon of global capitalism, a spectre of its turning gyre. Here, Piercy speaks to the “industrialized warfare” and “logistics of military perception” (Virilio, 1989, p. 1), but she also probes into the economic colonization of national markets and the increasing widening of the gap between the powerful and the powerless through the emphasis on accumulation and spectralization of labour—whether it be through the employment of informal workers (i.e., contract-based workers who are not protected by unions or communities) or digital technology. Valerie Moghadam (2005) states that “global

90

Chapter Three

accumulation as the driving force of the world-system not only hinges on class and regional differences of economic zones, but it is also a ‘gendered process’ that co-opts communal and democratic discourses” (p. 192). In other words, globalization blurs the line between the communal goals of political activists and economic corporations by creating new hierarchies of power while co-opting democratic discourses in order to mobilize its efforts. Consequently, the novel reveals that both the Y-S and the resistance movements coming out of Tikva’s communal beliefs are not so distinct in their endeavours. While the Y-S aspires to a complete domination of markets, Tikva’s pursuit of freedom at all cost generates similar forms of negative influences, from physical wars to abstract violence. Indeed, the war between materiality and abstraction is the key to understanding Piercy’s text. Like Smiley in her novel Ten Days in the Hills, Piercy brings to the forefront the agonistic yet interdependent relationship of creative and aggressive drives. On the one hand, she critiques the corporate glut and the need to conquer at all costs; on the other hand, she also reveals the aggressive aspect of the creative drive. Aspiring to some abstract perfection—be it an idea, a piece of art, or an ideology—has its own challenges. As Malkah notes, “creation is always perilous, for it gives true life to what has been inchoate and voice to what has been dumb. It makes known what has been unknown, that perhaps we were more comfortable not knowing,” just as “every mother shapes clay into Caesar or Madame Curie or Jack the Ripper, unknowing, in blind hope” (Piercy, 1991, p. 67). It is such “blind hope” of globalization that Piercy addresses in her novel. She does this by aligning the increasing dematerialization of capital, money, and reality by the global economy with the creative aspirations to “give birth” to new systems—textual, physical, cultural, or virtual. The dematerialization and abstraction on which globalization depends also drive the ideals of the utopian world of Tikva. Avram’s violation of the Y-S embargo on anthropomorphic robots results partly from his desire to protect his community against corporate assassinations and terrorist invasions, but it also stems from his own greed to develop a supermachine whose human-like features would soothe but also be subjected to the will of others. As Malkah cautions, such a desire is dangerous because it promotes rather than stifles oppressive discourses of alterity. Not only has globalization been enhanced by digital technology, but its pursuits are also tied up with the rhetoric and politics of alterity. As Rosi Braidotti (2006) has noted, “advanced capitalism and its globalized economy is a machine that spins off and multiplies differences for the sake of their commodification and profit” (p. 91). That is, in service of military

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

91

governments and economic markets, digital technology is used to configure the language of alterity to suit its needs. The translation of information and the application of knowledge to social causes are two important aspects explored in Piercy’s novel. Imagining an age in which the deluge of information will result in a disappearance of meaning, Piercy (1991) argues that as digital technology replaces face-to-face means of communication, the process of alienation and isolation will be transformed to an extreme form of alterity, whereby the figure of the stranger will not only be reproduced but also intensified to the point of obscenity. Jean Baudrillard (1998) defines this form of obscenity as a moment when all differences as well as “spaces and scenes [are] abolished in a single dimension of information” (p. 151). This dimension brings about the ultimate reversibility of the familiar and unfamiliar, whereby the figure of the stranger is resuscitated as the kind of coincidentia oppositorum mentioned in the previous section. Like the dumb mass of the golem, the cyborg sidelines as the ideal human(ized) body and its very opposite as a commodified and commodifiable artifice/reality/virtuality. Whether we choose to see the creation of anthropoid machines as Marshall McLuhan’s (1987) pursuit of “extensions of ourselves,” Sigmund Freud’s (1920/1991) quest for a “preservation against extinction,” or Baudrillard’s (2008) form of transhuman exoticism that eliminates rather than facilitates our ability to think about and engage with strangeness is beside the point. He, She and It refuses to force any conclusions on the reader or defend a particular line of thinking. Instead, the novel debates such humanist ideals as troubling and hence worth investigating. Through the coincidental opposites in which reversibility might be striking, yet inevitable, Piercy reveals that the discourses of utopia and dystopia are not only incredibly similar but also divergent. While the Y-S manipulates and abandons the notion of democracy through the unification of markets and human looks, creating a kind of homogeneity that simultaneously divides, the Tikvans and their resistance movements often succumb to a similar rhetoric of communality that oppresses rather than liberates. As this chapter has emphasized, the way that authors, scientists, militants, or governments use language matters. All the main characters of Piercy’s novel are translators of information who depend on the linguistic code to parse through data as well as to decode meaning. This decoding process, whether embodied or not, happens in between codes and realities. Such in-betweenness remains unspeakable and unspoken; like a prophecy, it is a potentiality but not definitively the future, the past, or the present. Avram, the cyborg scientist of Tikva, echoes Point Omega’s Elster in his

92

Chapter Three

defense security concerns. Avram dreams of a cyborg experiment that would outsmart the kind of haiku war that Eslter talks about. He hopes to construct an infallible defense system that would protect against the Y-S foes, but, as DeLillo shows in Point Omega and Piercy contemplates in He, She and It, such fantasies do not always distinguish between creativity and extinction, perfection and destruction. Piercy writes that “artificial intelligence was the province of bodiless computers” (1991, p. 45). These computers, however, are persistently anthropomorphized only to be subjected as a “tool” of will and control (p. 418). At the end of the novel, Piercy suggests that “an artificial person created as a tool is a painful contradiction,” but it is also “wrong to create a being subject to your will and control” (p. 418). As was mentioned in the previous section, Piercy ponders the human desire for anthropomorphic self-extensions through the romantic intimacy that Yod and Shira develop through their socialization lessons. These lessons, however, also gesture to the ways in which global markets and digital technology rely on romantic formulas to navigate the consumer affect. While it is Shira’s job to educate Yod in the ways of the humans, Malkah persistently interferes by returning to the importance of desire and fantasy by invoking the golem story of Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague. Emphasizing that the tradition of “living mimicry” has been a part of human history (Blanchot, 1959/2003, p. 83), Malkah brings to the forefront not so much the issue of embodiment but rather the role that language and intimacy (i.e., affect, spoken or unspoken) play in sustaining ethical relations with others. The power of language is double-edged here: it can be used as a tool of creation but also as a weapon of destruction. One of the novel’s main arguments is not so much that golems and cyborgs are posthuman, or even that they are embodiments of human desire for immortality, but rather that through them, the disappearance of the Other can be explored through an absolute synthesis—whether this synthesis pertains to the globalization of markets, the colonization of bodies and territories, or a digital abstraction whereby locality, embodiment, time, and space become irrelevant. Piercy thus insists that difference has been hijacked by global and digital discourses and recalibrated as an ecstatic form of alterity that is fetishized and commodified on a regular basis. From hackers and golemand cyborg-makers to the fantasists imagining a super-virtuality as a military tool, He, She and It encompasses many different alternatives of utopian and dystopian gestures that, depending on the context, are dangerously reversible. Piercy, through her narrative, is very much aware of the increasing co-optations of activist language in postindustrial,

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

93

military, and other fundamentalist pursuits. Her novel unveils the pursuit of ecstatic alterity as located in colonizing tendencies that pervade the fetishizing rhetoric of global markets and that also permeate the alternative networks of affect generated by digital culture. The issues that Piercy raises throughout He, She and It relate to the ways digital technology and global markets contribute to the reduction of the physical body to an alternative body of information data. As Vincent Miller (2011) emphasizes, philosophers like Plato emphasized the potentiality of mind as “located” beyond the corporeal, aligning the capacity to think with man’s ability to use his rationality as a tool (p. 219). Echoing Donna Haraway, Miller suggests that humans are cyborgs by definition. Both digital culture and globalization have redefined not only what it means to be “human” but also the very concept of embodiment. The rhetoric of alterity pervades the comparisons between the physical bodies of humans and the virtual bodies of avatars. Is the human being’s online Facebook or Twitter identity less real than that person’s physical identity? What role does the western perception of alterity contribute to the hegemonic perception and validation of those who are like “us” versus those who are not? While the novel ends with the cyborg’s “selfde(con)struction” (Badmington, 2000, p. 97), it refuses to ignore the different alterities that the characters represent. As members of a marginalized community, Avram, Malkah, and Shira are, by definition, the Other to the Y-S Shintoist identity principle. Piercy (1991) goes to great lengths, however, to emphasize that just as identity is a social construct, so is the very concept of alterity. Connecting alterity to prophetic speech, Piercy focuses on the role that language and its uses play in shaping perception. If prophecy “makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible” (Blanchot, 1959/2003, p. 79); or, to put it differently, if it is a speech that announces a future that is, by virtue of being announced, a future that will have been (Blanchot, 1959/2003), then alterity, like prophetic speech, is a promise [that is] … not a necessary failure or the resentment of a broken promise …; rather, it is the positive promise and concretization of different actions, practices, and organizations that orient and give force to an alterity politics of response. (Nealon, 1998, p. 15)

Such positivity underpins Shira’s decision to set Yod free. By choosing to refuse a self-definition that depends on an external Other, Shira opts for embracing the Other within. In this embrace, she renegotiates the affective topography of her own alienation. In doing so, she is able to challenge the marginal versus majoritarian binary, as well as to highlight the potentiality

94

Chapter Three

of language to name ecstatically, a form of naming that blurs the line between the majority and minority while simultaneously sustaining the positivity of difference.

The Future that Has Come: The Self as Data or the Logic of Consumption The 1990s—the decade Piercy’s novel was conceived and published—was a time of a great cybernetic revolution. The rise of the Internet and the promise of an ecstatic life fostered by limitless connectivity and an incessant exchange of information drew a thick line between the “era of metaphysics” and the “era of hyperreality” (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 148). Elements of the past belonged to the sphere of the unknown, and the symbolic had become a digital hyperreality. Social media, from Facebook to online gaming, has accomplished the complete alienation of the self by promising an ecstasy of constant, uninterrupted speech. As human subjects project themselves into the digisphere as virtual Others, their sense of community virtually increases, but it also simultaneously decreases as the self, reduced to pure data, becomes disembodied and alienated, turning into a part of a digitized community of megabites. Charlie Gere (2012) notes that social media and digital technology are “bringing about a new paradigm of consumption,” where the self is not only transformed into information but also simultaneously consumed (p. 214). Piercy’s He, She and It (1991) envisions what the future of humanity transformed by digital media could potentially look like. By 2016, Piercy’s “vision” has almost become a reality: while humans are not literally “plugged into” the Net, their reliance on various extensions—Wi-Fi, iPhones, iPads, and digitally and genetically enhanced organisms—is a common daily experience. Whether this experience can be viewed as yet another form of capitalist consumption or a form of mankind’s ever-expanding quest for knowledge remains to be seen. Piercy, however, deploys the pursuit for immortality through self-extensions as deeply suspect and complicit in the consumer drive that fosters it. Her vision of a cyborg society is persistently aware of the consumerist agenda that drives it and co-opts its rhetoric of futurity as global bliss. As He, She and It reveals, globalization, like a golem, is a body politic whose speech is ecstatic but, at times, mute and immune to the social and power asymmetries that it generates. While the golemic tradition that Piercy resuscitates in her novel allows for metaphysical contemplation, her depiction of the absolute virtualization of humanity refuses to ignore the very logic of “prosthesis” upon which cyborgs and other digitally-enhanced tools depend.52 No

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

95

matter how sophisticated it is, digitization implies a particular function that “entails the reduction of an object to binary code” (Elwell, 2010, p. 44). Piercy elucidates this point at the end of the novel when Yod, like Melville’s Captain Ahab, cannot deny his own “humanities” (Melville 1851/2001, p. 89). And yet, despite his “desire” to act on his so-called humanity, he illuminates two interrelated, yet frequently confused, issues plaguing the debates of the culture of posthumanity. On one hand, Yod’s project and purpose is to kill anyone threatening the population of Tikva— a noble but potentially dangerous endeavor that backfires in the sense that it merely reinforces the aggressive and inhuman aspects of the dystopiaturned-utopia, and vice versa. On the other hand, Yod’s project further reiterates the distinction between the metaphysical golem tradition and the hyperreal culture of the digital world divided into ones and zeros. As Yod cautions Shira, “I judge myself for killing, yet my programming takes over in danger” (Piercy, 1991, p. 410). Yod exemplifies what Elwell (2010) refers to as the “disappearing subject” (p. 27). Piercy shows that becoming digital comes at a price. Elwell’s (2010) notion claiming that regardless of how interconnected humans and their digital extensions are, they are not interchangeable is particularly helpful here: The fact that digitization effectively dissects all that it encounters into the absolute polarities of one and zero, corresponds to the fact that it operates according to a pure binary logic of yes or no, on or off, true or false, here or there. As a result, digital code holds out the promise of absolute precision, efficiency, and speed. (p. 28)

The binary aspect of digital data is crucial to Piercy’s investigation of the impact that digital technology has and will have on humankind. Regardless of his/its pining for being and feeling like a human, Yod cannot change his it-ness; he/it is, after all, a living testimony of wholeness and/as abstraction. Is Yod simply a new human, or is he a sophisticated weapon or an art work? Since the ’90s, the art world has been adamant about exploring digital media’s increasing dematerialization of humanity by challenging the war of words between humanists and posthumanists. Artists like Stelarc, Jeffrey Deitch, and Eduardo Kac have queried the legitimacy of the physical body in the digital age.53 Stelarc’s famous notion that the code renders the body obsolete is further exemplified in his performance art. From the act of growing an ear on his arm to the attachment of another “arm” onto his 1990s exhibition The Ping Body (1996), Stelarc has been a life-long advocate of becoming digital. His artwork embraces the kind of transfiguration that transforms the physical into the virtual, whereby the embodied self is reduced to, or enhanced by

96

Chapter Three

becoming, a code. Similarly, Jeffrey Deitch’s (1992) New York show Post Human contemplates the connection between art and genetics. Eduardo Kac’s (2000) transgenic art piece GFP Bunny reveals the extent that the natural and digital worlds are interconnected and governed by codes (Elwell, 2010, p. 17). Kac’s glow-in-the-dark bunny is a conglomerate of art and genetics. Inserting a synthetically enhanced green fluorescent protein into the genome of a rabbit, Kac demonstrated that the two worlds not only collide but also co-exist (Elwell, 2010, p. 17). Piercy’s novel responds to the 1990s zeitgeist by trying to establish logical and emphatic similarities between the natural, genetically-enhanced, and digital worlds. Like Stelarc, Deitch, and Kac, Piercy acknowledges that connecting the natural and digital worlds is their dependence on a code of a particular kind (e.g., language, genes, or digital bites). What matters, her novel insinuates, is how these codes are used (and abused) and implemented. Our reality is “coded” by language. Humans, like the machines, depend on gauging reality through similar processes: from subjecting a perceived object or situation to a particular code and/as a form of translation. Driven by cultural and linguistic as well as extra-linguistic contexts, the process of translation can be as enhancing as it is incapacitating. This is where Piercy’s counter-argument comes in: by their virtue, codes alienate; whether they do so in the name of an ecstatic alterity or commodification is a matter of degree rather than of difference. Piercy anticipates Elwell’s (2010) cautionary note that “once … polarities are collapsed in an identity of one with the other, we lose any sense of the transcendent and are thereby left incapable of negotiating the power that our technologies have bestowed on us” (p. 165). Whether enacted in the name of global economy or spiritual mysticism, a misdirected consciousness is, as Piercy warns, a tool of war rather than of peace. Consequently, the novel brings to the foreground the importance of ethics and care. In its incisive diagnosis of the human (dis)ease with selfextensions, He, She and It targets the affective topographies of ecstatic alterity as an important marker of postindustrial, global society. By debating the so-called logic of difference that governs both global and digital markets, Piercy also interrogates the neo-colonial tendencies that underpin the discourses of Otherness as empowering tools of hope and peace, but also as potentially marketable commodities or weapons of mass destruction. He, She and It opens up binaries by refusing to provide a definite conclusion; the novel thus challenges the nostalgia for the prophetic future that will have been. It suggests that whether or not “this is a time of beginnings and endings, of large risks and dangers, of sudden death by mental assassination” is a matter of curbing rather than enhancing

Identity and the Corporate Fortress in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

97

“manufactured fantasies” and disciplining our quest for absolute control (Piercy, 1991, pp. 17, 241). Ending on a cautionary note without quite concluding anything, the novel returns to the wandering quality of the prophetic speech in which the promise of ecstatic life is nothing more or less than it aspires to be: a promise.

PART II THE ECSTASY OF (MULTI)CULTURALISM

CHAPTER FOUR “DARK AS CHOCOLATE”: (MULTI)CULTURAL DIFFERENCE AND GLOBAL APPETITE IN DIANA ABU-JABER’S THE CRESCENT

Mainstream American discourse is constructed in such a way that if Arabs articulate any feature of our identities, we automatically recall the undefined but identifiable terrorist. —Steven Salaita (2006), Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes From and What It Means, p. 109 The opacity of globalization is that it uses difference for undifferentiation; it congeals culture as a conduit for stasis; it renders the local merely a fragment of its larger picture; it promises freedom via a worldliness that means oppression for those who are not among the “golden billion.” —Peter Hitchcock (2003), Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism, p. 196 The multicultural nation is invested in the presence of others who breach the ideality of its image. They become the sign of disturbance, which allows the ideal to be sustained in the first place; they “show” the injury that follows from not approximating an ideal. —Sara Ahmed (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 139

Like Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Crescent (2003) deals with the notion of ecstatic alterity. But while Piercy’s novel envisions what the future of (post)humanity might look like, Abu-Jaber’s work focuses on probing the various calibrations of Otherness that pervade America’s multicultural society. Framing Crescent are the various affective topographies of an Arab-American community in Los Angeles— a community shaped by exile and displacement as well as (post)colonial histories of oppression and marginalization. One of the main points of contention in the novel is the increasing globalization of (multi)cultural discourses and their reliance on emotion and “affective economies” to celebrate difference as an important socio-cultural, racial, and gender

102

Chapter Four

marker, but also as a marketing tool.54 Ethnicity is thus offered up as a subject of interest for public consumption and is inevitably commodified in the process. In other words, ethnicity sells (Hitchcock, 2003, pp. 196– 197). Reduced to an artificial commodity, the ethnic subject is subjected to an ongoing process of homogenization or “undifferentiation” that feeds the appetite of (multi)cultural societies (Hitchcock, 2003, p. 197). In her novel, Abu-Jaber aligns this process of undifferentiation with the racial and ethnic tokenism that pervades the socio-cultural construction of Arab Americans and their communities within the United States. In the preface to Crescent, Abu-Jaber makes note of her multicultural background. A daughter of a Jordanian father and an American mother, Abu-Jaber describes growing up listening to her father’s stories and the ways in which her mother taught her “how to listen to stories” by creating a “transformative” space for not only her father, but for the whole family to “reinvent” themselves (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 408). She relates how these experiences have shaped and continue to influence her life, as well as how they feed her passion for telling stories. Abu-Jaber insists that food has always played an essential role in carving her own identity. Food is also crucial in Crescent, in which the intricacies of dislocation, exile, and marginalization of Arab Americans in postmillennial America become sites of emotional and cultural tension.55 At the heart of Abu-Jaber’s novel is a love story—a complicated relationship between Sirine, an orphaned Iraqi-American chef, and Hanif Al Eyad (Han), an Iraqi exile and professor of Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. These two characters’ journeys intertwine but also clash as they together discuss and try to make sense of their individual personal experiences of displacement and lack of belonging. The central location of Sirine’s and Han’s encounter is Nadia’s Café, a small café in the Iranian neighbourhood of Los Angeles called “Teherangeles,” where Arab immigrants gather to eat Sirine’s food, which is infused with “the flavours that remind them of their homes” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 20). Homesick and lonely, many of the community members visit Nadia’s Café to create a new sense of identity, but also to escape the stereotypes they see in the media about “Arabs … shooting someone, bombing someone, or kidnapping someone” (p. 223). As Abu-Jaber emphasizes throughout the novel, the Arab community provides a diverse antithesis to the American stereotypes of the Arab—be it as a “terrorist” who poses a threat to American society and security or as the mysterious, exotic “tragic soul” of romance novels. Abu-Jaber’s novel carefully works with and against such stereotypes.

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

103

Crescent thus strives to capture not only the many different iterations of Arabness but also their equally diverse politics and cultural traditions. Accordingly, the novel’s Arab-American community is as layered as Sirine’s uncle’s stories, which he delicately weaves to teach his niece about love, patience, and endurance. Not only do these stories frame the novel; they also provide a carefully-crafted alternative to the much exoticized stories of A Thousand and One Nights, which Sirine’s uncle invokes and reinvents with each of his retellings. From describing food as nourishment to food as a symbolic bond between immigrants and exiles, whose sense of loss can never be completely alleviated by consumption of any kind, Abu-Jaber’s novel is a narrative about love and loss, belonging and exile, the consuming aspects of loss and emotion, as well as the role that such affective topographies play in the construction of (multi)cultural identity as a paradox—on one hand as a desirable yet anxiety- and fearinducing commodity and, on the other hand, as a potential site of terror and threat. Although written after 9/11, Crescent shuttles primarily between the controversial, dictatorial reign of Saddam Hussein and the American late 20th century multicultural zeitgeist. Despite its focus on the 1990s, the post-9/11 rhetoric of anti-Arab racism and paranoia nonetheless underpins the narrative. The novel sets out to explore the history of anti-Arab racism in America, and it puts into perspective the notion that “Anti-Arab racism has existed in the United States since the arrival of the first Arab in North America, but since 9/11 anti-Arab racism is … America’s elephant in the room—an enormous elephant at that” (Salaita, 2006, p. 6). Invoking the oral tradition of A Thousand and One Nights, the novel debunks the ways in which racism often appears under the guise of anti-racist discourse that is very much embedded in the “early settler ethos, in which the settlers had a divine mission, conferred upon them” (p. 82). In broad strokes, AbuJaber’s Crescent sheds light on the history of Arab–American relations while taking into account the role that the politics of emotions, or what Sara Ahmed (2004) calls “affective economies,” play in shaping their individual histories and relationships. Yet, in its quest for mapping and dismantling ethnocentric and racist stereotypes, the novel does not always escape feeding into, rather than subverting, the “ethnicist frenzy for global cookery” that is essential to the “rhetoric of globalism” and its “intricate [multicultural] imaginary” (Hitchcock, 2003, p. 197). This chapter investigates this intricate web of affective, socio-cultural, and racial relations by examining the interdependence between the drive for ecstatic consumption and the politics of (multi)culturalism. To parse the link between the two, the chapter draws on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) notion of

104

Chapter Four

emotion as a social and cultural practice, not just a psychological state (p. 12). Also queried in this chapter are the ways in which Abu-Jaber’s novel works around and with the multicultural imperative to “love difference,” an imperative that “works to construct a national ideal that others fail” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 133). By interrelating the novel’s gastronomic focus and the politics of Arab-American Othering with the history of Arab– American relations and the politics of emotions that have shaped them, this chapter also probes into the (post)colonial rhetoric and its appetite for alterity that Crescent strives to challenge.

The (Dis)Oriented Foreigner and the Hyphen: Co-Opting Anti-Racism as Global Fix Building on the positive reception of Abu-Jaber’s first novel, Arabian Jazz (1993), Crescent represents not so much a radical departure as a conscientious engagement with Arab-American diversity. While Arabian Jazz “creates an essentialized Other—the Arab American—who interacts with other marginalized characters so that the essentialist tendencies of the dominant society can be mitigated and ultimately restructured” (Salaita, 2011, p. 99), Crescent probes into the various layers of Arab–American (multi)cultural politics. The novel focuses on characters whose identities are fragmented by displacement and who search for a sense of belonging through their engagement with the Arab community. Their cultural traditions and expectations inevitably include culinary practices and traditional dishes such as stuffed grape leaves and baklava. As Abu-Jaber notes in an interview with Andrea Shalal-Esa, food has always been an essential factor in her community. She states that food is “one of the most immediate and powerful ways of creating the metaphor of the hearth and a gathering place, a place where the collective forms” (qtd. in Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 408). Not only is food an important signifier of cultural belonging but it also shapes both the diasporic and global imaginary. The interaction between the diasporic and the global, its asymmetrical but also intertwined dynamics, are central to the novel’s examination of multicultural politics and its co-optation of colonial and colonizing discourses through diverse, yet frequently essentializing, metaphors of consumption. Well-received by critics, Crescent continues to be celebrated for its empathetic treatment of the Arab-American diaspora. Given that acts of consumption and their diverse calibrations inform the novel, it is unsurprising that most studies to date focus primarily on Abu-Jaber’s exploration of exilic identity in connection to food as a cultural memory that must be cherished and cultivated. Carol Fadda-Conrey (2006), for

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

105

example, praises Abu-Jaber’s symbolic use of food as a “connective bridge that transcends the limitations [of difference]” (p. 202). Similarly, Lorraine Mercer and Linda Strom (2007) align Abu-Jaber’s gastronomic metaphors with a vehicle facilitating “a way back to ethnic history, culture, and roots” (p. 39). While Brinda J. Mehta (2012) argues that food facilitates the characters’ negotiations of their hyphenated identities,56 Nouri Gana (2008) defends Abu-Jaber’s nostalgia for the great American past as a poetic strategy that nourishes “the promise of an Andalusia of cultural diversity” (p. 245). In sum, the general focus remains on food as a bonding mechanism and the “constructive space” of hybridity that it creates (Fadda-Conrey, 2006, p. 186). Although the connection between food and exile, longing and identity, pervades diasporic literature, it is important to acknowledge that the cultural exchanges underlying diasporic identity are not always linear or monolithic; rather, they can be described as “an internally contradictory process, the effects of which are differentiated geopolitically and along gender and ethnicity lines” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 3). Such a process generates its own, often intricate, power asymmetries and politics of affect (Braidotti, 2006, p. 33). Moreover, as the spaces of resistance are increasingly co-opted by the global economy and capitalist consumption, the very sites of transformation are frequently compromised (Ahmed, 2000; 2004; Shohat & Stam, 1994). This chapter traces the ways in which such sites of transformation can be complicit in homogenizing immigrant subjects as victims of cultural nostalgia by characterizing immigrant homesickness as informed, if not “healable,” by frenzied, culture-specific consumption. Ethnic restaurants and immigrants flocking to their culinary enclaves have become common clichés of multiculturalism. Not only do (multi)cultural discourses generally promote such forms of nostalgic consumption; they also dissemble the various asymmetries that exist among the immigrant community and their collective, but also among their individual performances of alterity. Crescent reveals that the (multi)cultural appetite is not only regulated and promoted by ethnocentric cookery, but it is also supported by a whole range of affective, colonizing politics that are disempowering and frequently toxic. Undoubtedly, physical or psychological dislocation generates its own affective topographies, as it entails an experience of loss, severance, and hyphenation. Cultural dislocation is thus inevitably an emotional encounter. One of the main protagonists in the novel, Han, echoes this sentiment when he speaks to his lover Sirine: “exile is bigger than everything else in my life. Leaving my country was like … a part of my body was torn away. I have phantom pains from the loss of that part—I am

106

Chapter Four

haunted by myself” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 182). The absence felt by the exiled subject cannot be filled, merely negotiated. This negotiation is socio-cultural but also physical in nature. The bond that Han and Sirine progressively develop is an important signifier of the diverse and asymmetrical hierarchies of emotion that not only inform the ArabAmerican community but also speak to and, in many ways, recycle the (post)colonial politics that inform Arab–American relations. Crescent unfolds as a love story between an exiled Iraqi professor (Han) and an Arab-American chef (Sirine), but the significance of the characters’ bond extends to a much wider context. Their strong yet tensely intimate bond becomes symbolic of the ways in which relationships— between two people, but also between the nation and its citizens—can be nourishing and fulfilling, but also consuming and oppressive. More specifically, however, Sirine’s and Han’s relationship becomes a metaphor for the ways in which multiculturalism invokes an “imperative to love difference [and/as loss]” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 133). As Sara Ahmed (2004) emphasizes, “a narrative of loss is crucial to the work of national love: this national ideal is presented as all the more ideal through the failure of other others to approximate that ideal” (p. 137). This national ideal not only demarcates Others as different but also as those who will be loved only if they share their difference by “giv[ing] it back to the nation” (p. 134). Failure to give back is then perceived as “failure to love [the nation]” (p. 139). Crescent reinscribes this identification of the Arab exile with the failure to love the nation while simultaneously exposing this so-called deficit as a precarious, homogenizing symptom of multicultural discourses. From the beginning of the novel, Han Al Eyad is described as “Professor Handsome,” whose “dark as chocolate” skin parallels his Arab mystery—that is, his difference (Abu-Jaber, 2003, pp. 18, 24). Newly hired in the Near Eastern Studies department at UCLA, he fits the stereotypical profile of an exotic: he is “the big, dark romantic soul” (p. 222) whose difference is reduced to a “collector’s item” in the global museum of Otherness (p. 122). Although he falls in love with Sirine at first sight, their love is persistently mitigated and tested by his, as well as Sirine’s, cultural baggage. Han is adamant about how much he loves her, but Sirine insists that he is not quite capable of a committed relationship, even though she is the one who admits to “her inability to lose herself in someone else” (p. 40). Sirine’s projection of her own emotional ineptitude on Han’s presumed inability or, in Ahmed’s (2004) terms, “failure” to love, is key to understanding the novel’s engagement with the racialized topographies of multiculturalism—topographies that do not always receive

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

107

the kind of rewriting or subverting for which Abu-Jaber continues to be lauded. Although Sirine’s uncanny projection reinforces the critique of multicultural tokenism that Crescent strives to challenge, it does provide a salient insight into the various asymmetries of transnational relations and diverse performances of multiculturalism, which Ahmed (2004) delineates with an invitation to “love the ideal” (i.e., the nation; p. 139). Consequently, Crescent serves as an intriguing study of how love of difference is very much a part of the (post)colonial rhetoric of ecstatic multiculturalism. In the novel, Sirine becomes the embodiment of the multicultural ideal. As a blonde with pale skin and “sea-green eyes” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 20), she easily “passes” for a white American. In fact, during their first dinnerdate together, Han says to her: “You seem so American to me” (p. 78). Sirine, a daughter of an American and an Iraqi, was born in the U.S. and is fully assimilated into the American nation; she represents the “ideal” of American multiculturalism in the sense that she acknowledges and shares her difference, first through the making of Arab food as a chef in Nadia’s Café and, second, as Han’s lover. During their first date, Sirine is mesmerized by Han’s strangeness and feels “disoriented by his scent and proximity” (p. 78). Sirine’s interest is genuine; nonetheless, her lack of trust and her focus on Han’s “mystery” frequently play into the orientalizing rhetoric that the members of the Arab community who frequent Nadia’s Café decry. At the same time, Abu-Jaber refuses to simplify the complexity of diasporic layering. As Regina Lee (2004) emphasizes, diasporic identities are “fraught with tension” and “disjunctive aspects” (p. 74). In Lee’s terms, “(ambivalent) transnationality is predisposed towards those (diasporic subjects) already in a position of privilege and access” (p. 73). As Lee (2004) emphasizes, not all diasporic subjects have the same access to the ideals of multiculturalism. Furthermore, this access is further complicated by (multi)cultural and psychological forms of displacement that are asymmetrical to the issues experienced by political exiles, for example. Yet, their experiences are no less painful; in fact, diasporic subjects are frequently more troubled by a sense of guilt. Abu-Jaber pays attention to these layers by drawing comparisons between Han and Sirine while simultaneously keeping Sirine’s zone of privilege in check. Like Han, Sirine feels displaced and haunted by grief. Orphaned at a young age, she was brought up by her Iraqi uncle who ushered her into an imaginary world of stories in order to assuage her grief of having lost her parents at a young age. Sirine’s uncle’s strategy is to teach her how to work through her grief by telling stories, either literally or figuratively (e.g., by finding a different language, such as cooking, to tell a story without telling). His

108

Chapter Four

teaching backfires in the sense that it shields Sirine from the reality of her grief rather than initiating her into the reality of homesickness that consumes her from within, even though she blatantly denies it. In the novel, storytelling and food-making are interchangeable as acts of consumption. Both actions require a willing consumer of a kind. Sirine views her uncle’s stories as a form of figurative sustenance that feeds her soul but also her (lacking) sense of identity. Similarly, the customers frequenting Nadia’s Café use food as a means of belonging. Both food and storytelling provide an imaginary rather than a palpable comfort—they provide a comfort that displaces rather than mitigates their grief. Stories based on Arabian Nights and carefully crafted recipes based on a medieval cookbook (The Book of the Link with the Beloved) and a 19th century cookbook (On the Delights and Transfiguration of Food) serve as important affective markers that produce a whole range of emotional responses motivated primarily by loss and cultural displacement. Just as food serves as a metaphor for storytelling and vice versa, grief delineates an emotional bond with unresolved cultural heritage and unacknowledged pain. Sirine’s and Han’s attachment to each other not surprisingly stems primarily from the sense of loss and displacement that has shaped each of their identities. Their proximity is thus built on nostalgia as well as their difference. Unlike Han, who is, as she calls him, “dark as chocolate” (AbuJaber, 2003, p. 24), Sirine passes easily for an American “with her skin so pale it has the bluish cast of skim milk” (p. 20). Regardless of her Arab background, Sirine’s white features mark her as a white American. In her white Arabness, Sirine represents the nostalgia for assimilation that many members of the Arab community voice, including Han, whose childhood dream was to make it to America, the land of promise. Passing for a white American thus represents a source of conflict in the novel. As a form of assimilation whereby the subject participates in a kind of cultural mimicry, such an “assumption of an image [of whiteness]” dissembles the problematic cultural relations and histories underpinning it (Ahmed, 2000, p. 127). In Ahmed’s (2000) terms, “passing as white supports a national desire to assimilate difference into a generalized white ‘face of the nation’” (p. 127). In passing for white, Sirine represents the ideal multicultural subject to whom others, like Han, look up to. However, she finds it difficult to embody this role due to her own unresolved ArabAmerican heritage. Although Abu-Jaber encourages her readers to see Sirine’s and Han’s different experiences as sites of alternative sources of compassion out of which (multicultural) love can grow, Ahmed (2004) is skeptical about the

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

109

potentially colonizing nature, not to mention the often problematic history, of such bonds. Passing, Ahmed (2000) argues, is a form of affixing difference by assimilating it into the national ideal (p. 127). The bond between Sirine and Han is thus contentious from the very beginning: Sirine is an Arab American born in America; Han is an Iraqi. As a political exile, Han is “haunted by himself” and his “phantom parts” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 182). Sirine, who was orphaned at a young age and raised by her Iraqi uncle, is, on the other hand, conflicted about her origins and lacks a sense of belonging. Both Han and Sirine are strangers to themselves, yet their strangeness is of a different degree. Representing the various class, racial, and interethnic asymmetries that exist within diasporic communities, their life stories speak to the many calibrations of Otherness informing the affective topographies of hyphenated subjects. As Abu-Jaber suggests, each diasporic community produces their own set of cultural and ethnocentric hierarchies that are not always easily distinguishable or identifiable. Sirine’s uncle echoes this concern during one of his storytelling frenzies in which he narrates the adventures of Abdelrahman Salahadin, specifically his journey from the great Abbasid Empire, the cradle of ancient civilization, to Hollywood. Abdelrahman’s story becomes not only an allegory of (multi)cultural ideology, but also of the exile’s divided nature, illustrating his need to identify with the lore of his culture of origin but also his desire to belong to the new country. As Sirine’s Uncle eloquently puts it, No one ever wants to be the Arab—it’s too old and too tragic and too mysterious and too exasperating and too lonely for anyone but an actual Arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, it’s an image problem. (p. 64)

This “problem,” Sirine’s uncle tries to explain, is related to the long history of (post)colonial encounters that inform Arab–American relations. It might be useful to pause here briefly and outline some of the historical issues underpinning Arab–American relations. While anti-Arab racism has intensified since 9/11, its roots are deeply entrenched in the colonial history of America. Steven Salaita (2006) emphasizes that antiArab racism goes back to the 18th century encounters off the Barbary Coast, “which prompted a firestorm of vitriol among America’s Founding Fathers against what they deemed to be Islamic barbarians” (p. 12). In Salaita’s (2006) terms, the American engagement with the Muslims off the Barbary Coast and “the insidious moralizing against supposed Arab slave traders produced a consciousness that was reinvigorated when Arabs migrated to North America decades later” (p. 13). Originating in colonial

110

Chapter Four

America, anti-Arab sentiment continues to permeate American consciousness through a whole system of racial(ized) discourses and stereotypes. Salaita (2006) explains: The origin of American racism is a combination of European colonial values and the interaction with Blacks and Indians; the racism became uniquely American as the relationship among white settlers and slave owners and those they subjugated evolved from a seemingly one-sided display of power to a complicated (and usually discordant) discourse out of oppression and resistance, capitalism and egalitarianism, stereotype and self-representation. (p. 6)

Since the early settlers’ idea of the Middle East was primarily influenced by the orientalizing rhetoric of the British Empire and stories from A Thousand and One Nights, most 18th century Americans subscribed to the Arab stereotypes promoted by the Founding Fathers (Little, 2009, p. 12). In addition, several decades of maritime warfare with the Barbary pirates further contributed to the cliché of Arabs as “beset by oriental despotism, economic squalor, and intellectual stultification” (Little, 2009, p. 12). Moreover, 18th century captivity narratives such as Caleb Bingham’s Slaves in Barbary and plays including Susanna Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers added to the heightened orientalist discourse spreading through America (Little, 2009, p. 12).57 Abu-Jaber’s Crescent strives to rewrite these narratives through the adventurous journeys of Abdelrahman Salahadin, whose protean quality and “incurable addiction to selling himself and faking his drowning” evoke the captivity romance formula; however, Abdelrahman’s journeys also echo slave narratives in which the master-slave dynamic is persistently recreated (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 17). By drawing a connection between captivity and slavery, Abu-Jaber speaks to the tragic history of the rise and fall of the Arab Abbasid Empire (8th– 13th centuries). Sirine’s uncle argues that Abdelrahman was his distant cousin, but as the narrative progresses, it is clear that Abdelrahman’s role is to serve as a signifier of the history of the Arab world and its cooptation by the West. Not surprisingly, Abdelrahman Salahadin performs a dual role. He is, on the one hand, “the lost Secret King of the Arab Empire” trying to reclaim the Abbasid’s lost glory (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 172). The novel thus locates the grief shaping the characters’ psychological topographies in the history of conflict pervading Arab–American relations. For example, in their descriptions of Iraq and its history, Baghdad, and its centrality to the Abbasid civilization, both Sirine’s uncle and Han invoke the historical significance of Iraq as “one of the birthplaces of human civilization,” a

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

111

place credited for the invention of writing, poetry, math, astronomy, law, and architecture (Foster and Pollinger-Foster, 2009, p. xi). Sirine’s uncle also persistently draws parallels between the issue of world dominance as a connecting point between the West and the ancient Arab world and their socio-political dynamics of conquest. He relates: There was once an Arab empire that dominated the world. The glorious Abbasid Empire reigned from the eighth until the thirteenth centuries— five hundred years. And Baghdad was its celestial capital. Now you blink: it is seven or eight centuries later and the world has turned upside down in its usual way. The Abbasid Empire dissolved. But a few Arabs have a long, long memory and like to believe that someday the world and everything in it will be returned to them. Most other Arabs would settle for a little bit of peace. … And then there are the Arabs who feel that no matter what it is they want … America seems to be dedicated to keeping it from them. (Abu-Jaber, 2003; p. 171).

In Crescent, the rise and fall of the Abbasid Empire symbolize the ways in which both freedom and power are dependent on, but also vulnerable to, inaccurate forms of representation and discursive inflections. In his stories of Abdelrahman, Sirine’s uncle returns to the sensitivities arising from different ideological calibrations by pointing to the tangential relations between Americans and the Arabs but also between Arabs and their communities themselves. By highlighting the cross-cultural, as well as interethnic, relations that continue to dominate the Western and MiddleEastern imagination, Abu-Jaber notes the duality of cross-cultural interaction. Drawing on the literal meaning of Iraq as a “Land between Rivers” and its key role as an “important business route and communication route” (Foster & Pollinger-Foster, 2009, p. 6), Abu-Jaber uses this dual quality as a way to explore (multi)cultural consciousness as split between nostalgic alliances and aspirations for the future. Throughout the novel, this split—symbolized by Han’s and Sirine’s relationship and reflected in the history of Arab-American adversity—is delineated as the effect of western colonization of the Middle East. The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in particular marked the beginning of the cultural appropriation of the Middle-Eastern antiques, “piqued by the undeciphered scripts,” tablets, and other cultural artefacts of the Middle East (Foster & Pollinger-Foster, 2009, p. 193). From the wars with Iran (1856) and Lebanon (1860) to the occupation of Egypt in 1882, the Middle East became the playing ground for the West. AbuJaber’s novel probes into the colonial history of the Arab world through the incessant retelling and reworking of Abdelrahman’s story.

112

Chapter Four

Abdelrahman is a man who willingly sells himself into slavery, only to make an escape by pretending to drown. Like a sea nymph, Abdelrahman slips through the cracks, representing the porosity of meaning while simultaneously pointing to the ways in which the Arab cultures succumb to, but also resist, orientalist commodification. Related to Abdelrahman’s act of “slipping” is his mother Camille’s quest to find her long lost son. In order to find her son, Camille is forced to exercise similar forms of slipping, specifically in the way she herself becomes an object of colonial interests. As an Arab female, she is the embodiment of the western fantasy of the Orient as a “sexually depraved” harem full of belly dancers (Little, 2009, p. 13). Given the 19th century Victorian interest in orientalism, it is not surprising that Camille’s suitor and colonizer is none other than Sir Richard Burton—a diplomat, translator, and explorer, but also an “amateur slaver” and a collector with an “aptitude for ownership, an attachment to things material and personal, like colonies and slaves” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 121). As a collector, Sir Richard Burton exemplifies colonialism, but he also becomes an emblem of its multicultural appetite for the exotic. Collecting people as commodity artifacts, Sir Richard Burton anticipates discourses of globality that deploy Others as consumable objects. Abu-Jaber thus exposes the ways in which colonial discourses continue to shape the postcolonial situation by pervading the post-9/11 socio-political consciousness. Accordingly, Sirine’s uncle draws a clear connection between the imperial quest for an exotic collection of Otherness and the post-9/11 antiArab sentiments plaguing America. For Abu-Jaber, the connecting point between the two are the early (but also continuing) Hollywood representations of the Arab as a cultural cliché. From his complicated (post)colonial journey of enslavement to self-reclaiming and reinvention, Abdelrahman is the embodiment of the exile who adapts to the many challenges of displacement by facing them head-on. The exile’s ability to adapt can be aligned with Ahmed’s (2000) notion of passing. However, as an expert in disguise, the exile is particularly skilled in putting on and taking off his mask; yet, his disguise does not always save him from being appropriated and replaced by others. When Abdelrahman arrives in America, he is “smitten with the acting bug” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 321). He is desperate to be a part of the Hollywood scene or, in Abu-Jaber’s terms, the “Hal’Awud,” scene (p. 321). But as he soon realizes, all the main Arab parts are played by white actors in Arab costume. Even the “plum role” of The Sheik was “given to an Italian! Some know-nothing named Rudy So-and-So, because no one in Hollywood wanted anything to do with an actual Arab” (p. 336). Sirine’s uncle strives to draw Sirine’s

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

113

attention to the ways in which the Arab identity has been appropriated by the West. While he attempts to teach Sirine how to be sensitive to the many different calibrations of Arabness, Sirine remains, for most of the novel, quite ignorant of the ways in which the West has claimed difference as a part of its (multi)cultural conquest, as well as to how much the ArabAmerican community itself has been socialized to coalesce with the assimilationist ideal of passing for white Americans.58 Consequently, Sirine’s lack of trust and her suspicion of Han’s emotional availability is tied up with the assimilationist discourses into which she has been socialized. Even when Han passes on his sister’s scarf to her as a gift, as well as a token of his intimate bond with her, she interprets his gesture as a threat rather than a space of “border-crossing” (Fadda-Conrey, 2006, p. 198). She is haunted by dreams of Han having a “hidden wife” and a secret family in Iraq (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 175). Eager to “know more about him” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 175), she searches through his drawers, desperate to penetrate the unknown. Han thus becomes equated with the inaccessible unknown. As the impenetrable “dark soul,” he takes on the role of Freud’s “dark continent” that must be unveiled and known (Shohat & Stam, 1994, p. 147). Accordingly, Sirine’s quest mirrors the pioneer settlers’ quest for the Other, but it also feminizes Han by reducing him to a “threatening darkness,” a trope associated with women of colour in colonial discourses (Shohat & Stam, 1994, p. 147). Sirine approaches both Han and the Arab customers of Nadia’s Café through the same ethnographic lens. Socialized into Arab clichés, Sirine frequently projects the racialized discourses of Otherness onto Han, but also onto other people like Rana, a Muslim woman who believes in wearing her veil as a vehicle of empowerment which shelters her from being objectified. Consequently, Sirine frequently takes on the role of an ethnographer whose assimilationist gestures of proximity are facilitated by her position of (multi)cultural privilege. As Sirine pines to “uncover” the mysteries of Arab subjects like Han and Rana, she inevitably resuscitates the colonizing tropes of white dominance. These tropes include the polarity not only between the self and the Other but also between the white and the non-white, between safety and threat. As Abu-Jaber writes, Sirine needs to “know if it is safe [emphasis added] to feel this way about [Han]” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 174). When she realizes that the letter that she finds in one of his drawers is from his sister, she acknowledges her discovery as a “way to believe in him” (p. 179). Here, Abu-Jaber illustrates that the Arab-American subject does not always escape complicity in the ecstatic consumption of alterity. Sirine’s gesture mimics the ethnographer’s desire for proximity or

114

Chapter Four

closeness to the unfamiliar by familiarizing the Other. In Ahmed’s (2000) terms, “the other becomes imaginable as familiar (assimilable) or strange (unassimilable) as a mechanism for establishing permeability of the boundary lines of the body-at-home or the home-land” (p. 119). In other words, Sirine’s effort to discover and know Han’s difference evokes the ways in which the multicultural Other is subsumed into the narrative fabric of the national (and, it must be added, transnational) ideal. Sirine thus brings to the surface the many narrative nuances that drive the multilayeredness of Arab–American relations while simultaneously resuscitating their (post)colonial history of what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) call a “culturally overdetermined geographical and symbolic polarity” (p. 148). This polarity drives the consumerist rhetoric that finds its point of ecstasy in the visual spectacle of Hollywood imagery and war photography, which continue to feed the western gaze.

Food for the Gaze: Cinema, Photography, and the (Post)Colonial Spectacle Diverse acts of consumption frame the characters’ politics of love and difference, but these acts of consumption also speak to the power differentials that define their identities. As many critics have noted, food serves as a multi-layered metaphor of “the presence and absence of cultural and familial bonds” in Crescent (Mercer & Strom, 2007, p. 33). Not only is food an important “contact zone” (Mercer & Strom, 2007, p. 39), but it also “provides access to global politics” (p. 38). Similarly, Mehta (2012) argues that gastronomy serves as “the essential link between the ancestral land and its diasporic configuration in the USA” and is tied to Sirine’s and other characters’ processes of cultural and personal recollection (p. 208). But while much of the critical focus remains on the culinary metaphors as sites of cultural reinvention and border-crossing, this section delves into other avenues of consumption that the novel explores, specifically the ways in which the culture of spectacle treats or, figuratively speaking, feeds off the (post)colonial subject as an exotic and consumable commodity. These avenues include figurative means, rather than literal forms, of consumption like photography and cinema that have historically contributed to the cultivation and promotion of oriental(ized) imaginary by pandering to the visual imperative of the ethnographer’s travelling gaze. As postcolonial critics have emphasized,59 ethnography and travel have played an important part in “the production of ‘strangers’” as knowledge or, in other words, in shaping discourses of alterity (Ahmed, 2000, p. 57). In Crescent, both ethnography and travel are represented as

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

115

vehicles of visual caricature, a kind of exotic “food for thought” that is racialized but also offered up for public consumption as entertainment. Viewed in this context, photography and cinema play an important role in the novel’s gauging of orientalizing and consumerist discourses, as well as in Abu-Jaber’s (de)construction of multicultural identity and the binary politics of alterity that frequently defines it. Considering photography and cinema as figurative “food” and alternative forms to be consumed, this section highlights the non-linear, asymmetrical power relations that exist not only within but also outside the Arab community. It emphasizes that while certain characters like Sirine occupy a position of privilege, others, like Han, an exile from Iraq whose life has been decimated by Hussein’s dictatorial regime and western imperialist aggression, do not necessarily have the same access to multicultural politics. The novel additionally leverages the abstruse lens through which the Arab community perceives the American subject, exposing the charges against a wholesale celebration of hybridity or border-crossing. It debunks postcolonial hybridity as “power-laden” and “co-optable” through “hypocritically integrationist ideologies that have glossed over subtle racial hegemonies” (Shohat & Stam, 1994, p. 43). Consequently, it exposes the ways in which the visual gaze traffics in racial tokenism and homogenizing strategies. How to see the Other therefore becomes about tasting and eating, appropriating and (de)fusing the Other’s difference. In Crescent, the customers of Nadia’s Café are defined by the food they eat. They are “attached to a delicate, golden thread of a scent” (AbuJaber, 2004, p. 56)—as they taste Sirine’s food, they are transported to their homelands. Mercer and Strom (2007) argue that such happy returns provide the “possibility for imagining blended identities and traditions” (p. 33). This section, however, queries the alignment of the ethnic with/as food by exposing the colonizing and essentialist ideologies that underpin the imperative to eat and to simultaneously share one’s difference in the “name of the narrative of loss,” to put it in Ahmed’s (2004) terms (p.137). What happens to those who do not eat? What other forms of consumption participate in the co-opting of the multicultural ideal? If nostalgia is a crucial modus operandi of the multicultural nation, as well as of the Arab– American relations investigated in the novel, what role do the gaze and its interpretations play in leveraging the politics of loss? As this section proposes, the narrative of loss becomes the common ground upon which various political, individual, as well as racialized emotions are projected. As discussed in the previous section, the Abdelrahman story that Sirine’s uncle reforms throughout the novel is a story that emphasizes how bilateral these affective topographies of loss and belonging are. While

116

Chapter Four

embodying the glorious past of the Arab Empire and the Arab nations’ adaptability to adversity and western colonization, Abdelrahman, like Han, cannot escape the lure of American consumer culture. After his turbulent journey of escape and survival, Abdelrahman finds himself yearning for a Hollywood career. Although he has “never acted before”, he is eager to transform his “devil-man good looks, smooth skin and smooth eyes” into a Hollywood celebrity (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 336). Despite his grand aspirations, Abdelrahman is reduced to playing minor roles, since the major roles of Arab characters are played by white or European actors in blackface. Here, Abu-Jaber points to Hollywood’s tokenism and Othering of non-white actors promoted by the racial censorship of the Motion Picture Promotion Code.60 She also cautiously raises the issue of the diasporic community’s yearnings to become an active part of the American Dream. Such becoming is problematic in its own right as it panders to the assimilationist ideal. Han, for example, openly acknowledges his own complicity in pandering to the American (post)colonial emphasis in proximity to the Other when he confesses to Sirine about his early affair with the wife of an American diplomat, Janet, who, out of her own white guilt, paid for his education abroad. He says: When I grew older, some of my school friends started saying that America was the great traitor, consuming goods and resources—and never really giving anything back but baubbles, cheap entertainment. Smoke and mirrors. And I began to understand. The street signs in Baghdad are written in Arabic and English, and you see Disney characters and American-style T-shirts everywhere. Trinkets. Junk. But America had also sent me to my new life and I couldn’t imagine turning back from that. I wanted to be a writer and a visionary—like Hemingway—I was excited about the possibilities of languages and world travel. (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 329)

Han admits that his personal desire to travel and study abroad compromised his commitment to his country and his family. Peeping at the white women sunbathing by the swimming pool at the Eastern Hotel in Baghdad, Han’s gaze participates in the kind of ethnographic surveillance that is informed by unequal power relations, but nonetheless, it represents a form of pandering to western consumerism. His admiration for Hemingway’s transatlantic journeys sweeps the author’s frequently racist depictions of non-white Europeans and Americans under the carpet.61 In examining Crescent, it is therefore important to scrutinize such asymmetries since they provide insight into how much interpretation shapes the very production of knowledge.

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

117

Interpretation is a multifaceted process, and so is the production of knowledge. As Edward Said (1981) notes in Covering Islam, interpretation is not only “situational,” but it is also interest-laden (p. 164). In his words, “such unscientific nuisances as feelings, habits, conventions, associations, and values are an intrinsic part of any interpretation. Every interpreter is a reader, and there is no such thing as a neutral or value-free reader” (p. 164). Crescent builds on this notion of socio-historical, but also interpretative, culpability of knowledge production. Not surprisingly, the novel frequently engages, affectively so, in the tangential dynamic defining Arab–American relations by deploying the acts of cultural appropriation and consumption as multi-directional rather than unidirectional. It locates Arab–American conflict in the extensive (and continuous) history of cultural imperialism and nostalgia. In response, Crescent strives to flesh out some of the contradictions and ironies of cross-cultural relations by exploring the ways in which stereotypes are not solely an American or Arab issue but rather a global epidemic. In this, Abu Jaber’s novel can be lauded for attempting to construct the diasporic community as an ambiguous site of fluctuating (multi)national affects. Although Han and his compatriots bemoan the collapse of the Abbasid Empire, the Persian Gulf war, and the American bombing of Iraq, they also aspire to become American “like everyone else” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 191). Some students in Nadia’s Café openly admit that although it is “painful … to be an immigrant,” it is something they “wanted all [their] li[ves]” (p. 22). This is exemplified in Han’s life story as well as in his precarious attachment to Sirine. Since his early childhood, Han has been similarly mesmerized by America, the so-called land of promise and honey, and fascinated by the wives of English and American diplomats sunning themselves by the pool of the Eastern Hotel in Baghdad. Han recognizes that his desire has been cultivated by literary writers who “slipped easily between national identities” like Hemingway, and since “the media is saturated with the imagery of the West” (p. 110), it might not even be “possible—or desirable—to have an identity apart from this” (p. 110). As Han suggests, Arab–American relations are defined by conflicting politics. Nonetheless, they share certain affective topographies which are driven by the ethnographic gaze that is mutual and multidirectional yet simultaneously asymmetrical. The mutual co-optation of (multi)national stereotypes and ideologies is exemplified in Abu-Jaber’s portrayal of the one and only “white” American character in the novel: Nathan Green62, one of Han’s students. Nathan raises concerns among the Arab-American community; his scrawny appearance and travelling gaze generate suspicion. An avid

118

Chapter Four

photographer, Nathan snaps pictures wherever he goes. Unlike everyone else in the café, Nathan hardly eats. Suspicious of his activities and what he calls his “X-ray vision” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 62), the community suspects Nathan of being a secret agent. They base their assumption on a 1990s incident, when the café, then belonging to an Egyptian cook, was infiltrated by intelligence, “two grown men in business suits” who ended up arresting the cook and a few others for, presumably, participating in “terrorist schemes” (pp. 20–21). While most of the members of Nadia’s café are consumed by their sense of displacement and homesickness, Nathan is consumed from within. He admits to Sirine, “I don’t really like food much” (p. 59). He calls himself “an overgrown student in search of a life” who is “made out of powder” (p. 62). Like James Finley from Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, Nathan is consumed by his art but also by the complex cross-cultural history that informs it. Nathan’s works, titled “Photography against Art: Real Seens by Nathaniel Green” and “From a Small Image,” delineate the orientalizing tendencies of American exhibition fairs where alterity is on full display. Abu-Jaber here demonstrates the ways in which photography and cinema have played a historical role in promoting the colonial perspective through “a combined narrative and spectacle [of alterity]” whereby “the culture of empire authorized the pleasure of seizing ephemeral glimpses of its ‘margins’” (Shohat & Stam, 1994, p. 104). From the 19th century landscape artists like Minor Kellogg and Edward Troye with their depictions of the Middle East to the Columbian World Exhibition in Chicago (1893) with its popular Ottoman Pavilion, showcasing a harem of belly dancers in Hollywood films including The Thief of Baghdad (1924), Kismet (1944), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) (Little, 2009, p. 13), photographic imagery has simulated an Arab presence by simultaneously transforming it into an arab absence.63 Nathan’s life story, like the stories of most of the characters in the novel, involves a progression from the colonial, orientalizing pictography to the realization of culpability and complicity. During his “From a Small Village” exhibition, Nathan confesses to Sirine that his first trip to the Middle East was motivated by America’s anti-Arab policies: So, when I was twenty-one, I didn’t know about the world at all. But I had this idea about cowboys and Indians and submarine commanders and Russian spies. … I came home thinking, oh good, there’s still terrorists! So I thought of that as my mission. I mean don’t we all want to have missions? I started dreaming of going to someplace like Lebanon or Iraq and hunting down terrorists. … I had this thought about going over to the

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

119

Middle East and uncovering terrorist spies. I would take their photos and send them to the C.I.A. or someplace. (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 283)

Nathan’s naive mission to “hun[t] down terrorists” in the Middle East evokes the (post)colonial quest for Others who are imagined as a threat to the nation. The Arab subject is thus “poselocked in portraiture, intaglio, photogravure, captivity narratives, and other interimage simulation of dominance” (Vizenor, 1998, p. 145). Such “locking” or captivity is further reinforced by the photo as a framing device that transforms the Other into an “illusion of [colonial] consensus” (Sontag, 2003, p. 6). Thus captured, the foreign Other is transformed into a spectacle that no longer feeds the ethnographer’s gaze only, but also the global gaze at large. From early photographs of the Middle East to the camera-mediated footage of the Gulf War and the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq, the Middle East has been deployed as a politically backward seat of terrorism. Coopting the racist rhetoric of consumer imperialism, the media, including anchors and newscasters, have deployed the wars as an “awesome pyrotechnics of apocalypse,” allowing spectators to become active (albeit couch) participants in the military conquest of terror (Shohat & Stam, 1994, p. 126). Not only did the camera lens turn into a weapon, but so did the spectator’s gaze.64 Abu-Jaber’s description of Nathan as a white American racist who takes photographs of ethnic subjects evokes the racialized history of America’s nativist policies, but it also fails to escape the kind of essentialism that it strives to undo in relation to Arab stereotypes. Undeniably, Nathan becomes the prime example of American imperialism in the novel. Raised on American clichés about the Middle East, he finishes college, and though he abandons his youthful dreams of hunting down terrorists, he chooses to travel to and photograph the Middle East. Given the historical baggage attached to western travel in the Middle East, it is not surprising that when he arrives, he encounters a different world altogether: “a beautiful world” where everyone “sipped tea and talked all day long” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 284). Nathan’s exhibition “From a Small Village” is a testament to this “discovery.” As he says to Sirine, the Middle East is a very, very lovely place. There were terrible sights to see—starving children and poverty and broken buildings—but today’s exhibit is meant to be a celebration of the beauties I found and my own process of education. I never found my terrorist, though, unless … it was me. (p. 284)

120

Chapter Four

Regardless of Nathan’s recent knowledge about the real lives of the people in Iraq, what he calls his process of education is nonetheless still couched in the same orientalizing rhetoric that informed his younger days. Nathan’s representation of the Iraqi people is meant to reveal “what Americans don’t want to look at” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 284). In his words, “they don’t want to know what is happening out there” (p. 284). However, no matter how much Nathan justifies his “shots,” his photos are a simulation of western consumerism. They represent the kind of “visual code” that participates in, rather than defuses, the “predatory” spectacle of power (Sontag, 1977, p. 14). A photograph, Susan Sontag (1977) emphasizes, is a “sublimated murder” (p. 15). Moreover, taking a picture is in itself an opportunistic act that does not change or in any way interfere with the status quo. Photographs are about possessing the image, locking the person into a frame (Sontag, 1977, p. 15). Drawing on Sontag’s work on photography, Gerald Vizenor (1998) similarly observes that war photographs frequently contribute to “the treacheries of racialism” (p. 154), but they also serve as “instruments of institutive discoveries and predatory surveillance [that] … reduce a sense of native presence to an aesthetic silence and dominance” (p. 154). Such diverse forms and performance of dominance occupy the novel’s narrative register. The diverse performance of dominance and surveillance is further exemplified in the characters’ individual (and emotional) reactions to Nathan’s exhibition. Observing Nathan’s exhibition, Sirine finds his shots “perverse and revealing, even a little pretty” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 283). Removed from the real-life situation in Iraq and safely ensconced within her Westwood neighbourhood, Sirine’s proximity to her cultural background is not only compromised but also compromising. She is reduced to the spectator whose agency is limited by her location. Han, on the other hand, is insulted by Nathan’s claim to proximity based on his self-proclaimed immersion in an Iraqi village. Sighting a picture of his cousin, Han views Nathan’s photographs as a racist violation of his people. Outraged, he yells at Nathan: “It’s not bad enough that your country is bent on systematically destroying mine? Must you use my family for your personal amusement as well?” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 285). In his indictment of Nathan’s “art,” Han inevitably incriminates American consumerism as couched in the spectacle of power asymmetries rather than their equalization or negotiation. Photography thus becomes an extension of Abdelrahman’s experience of racialized “Hal’Awud,” delineating cinema as dependent on the spectacle-driven pictography.

(Multi)Cultural Difference and Global Appetite in The Crescent

121

From Affect to Pathos: (Dis)Oriental(izing) (Re)Turns Affect—how visitors react to Nathan’s exhibition and thus to the spectacle of such power asymmetries—provides further insight into the ways in which the novel does not always succeed in challenging the socio-cultural inequities that it attempts to reform and rewrite. But these feelings also extend to the larger issues that the novel broaches. How the characters cultivate their attachments to others and negotiate their proximity is related to their ability (and inability) to interpret the Other’s narrative of loss. This (in)ability often results in a desire to know the Other, a gesture that risks bleeding into its more oppressive form—appropriation and ownership of the Other’s historical and socio-cultural agency. Romance thus becomes subject to reworking, but also reinstalling, the multicultural imperative to “love [and share] difference” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 134). Han’s relationship to Sirine is partly motivated by her ability to recognize his immigrant loss in the recollection of her own parents’ background. Her father’s Iraqi background and the Arab cuisine and traditions cultivated by her American mother serve as a syncretic model for a working multicultural partnership. While Mehta (2012) proposes that Sirine’s mother’s cultivation of transnational cookery is a form of feminist activism, this chapter has argued that such affective gestures are not always free of power asymmetries and “historical hegemonies” (Shohat & Stam, 1994, p. 43). Emotions not only shape personal relationship, but they are also the bread and butter of racialized politics. Their interpretations are not always prone to reversibility, nor is such reversibility desirable. Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, however, persistently strives to find a middle ground; this is reflected in the novel’s avowal of a syncretic relationship between Han and Sirine, a (potential) happy ending by a different (re)turn. The novel ends on a positive note: a year after Sirine has accepted that Han might have been killed in Iraq and will never return, she receives a phone call from none other than her long-lost lover. Having fulfilled his mission to return to Iraq and atone for his guilt for having abandoned his family, Han is, figuratively speaking, (con)scripted to return. His return not only seals his syncretic mission of living and working in America but also confirms his ability to love. At first sight, such an ending appears innocuous, and yet it is not without its challenges. Echoing the Han-Sirine coupling is Nathan’s tragic love story. When travelling in the Middle East, Nathan falls in love with Han’s sister, Leila. He is so enamoured with her that he is caught “walking all over town, taking pictures, looking for the girl he saw in the market,” and he is thought to be a “spy” (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 373). He begs Leila’s father to

122

Chapter Four

employ him so that he can be close to Leila. Nathan tells Sirine that he “wanted to marry her. But I was just a guest in her world—her parents, her brothers. I couldn’t take her away” (p. 374). Instead, Leila gets arrested for harbouring an American. The tragic fate of Nathan’s love story stands in contrast with Han’s Ulyssean character. While Han, like Ulysses, finds his way back to his Penelope (Sirine), Nathan, the presumed American “spy,” is denied such a happy (re)turn. Though the novel’s strategy is to indict the American (post)colonial politics and advocate for Arab–American relations, Abu-Jaber does at times fail to address the ways in which the affective encounters co-opt colonial politics as a romantic(ized) quest for the exotic other. Such celebration of syncretism as a way out of the asymmetrically racialized quagmire that informs Arab–American relations risks pandering to, instead of reforming, the cultural stereotypes that define them. Consequently, the extent that Abu-Jaber actually circumvents the kind of co-optation of hybridity that she sets out to undo often remains an unchallenged issue in Crescent, as well as in critical scholarship. While Abu-Jaber calls for an open-minded approach to multiculturalism, and perhaps even invokes the kind of “polycentric” approach that Shohat and Stam (1994) define as “reciprocal” and “dialogical” (p. 49), Crescent is not entirely free of the tokenizing tendencies that homogenize not only Arab but also American subjects. The community that gathers at Nadia’s Café is deployed as a diverse group of Arab and non-Arab immigrants who come from all over the world: Egypt, Kuwait, New Jersey, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and so on. The novel emphasizes the diversity of the Arab nations and strives to exercise a kind of hybrid, bordercrossing approach that acknowledges the characters’ narratives of loss and pain through a compassionate engagement with their affective topographies. However, marginalized American subjects—including the one tokenized black policeman who attends Nadia’s Café—remain absent in the novel. While the readers might get their “global fix” through a rigorous introduction to an exotic Arab-American cookery, the danger of the multicultural proximity depicted in Crescent is the kind of “‘touchyfeely’ sensitivity toward other groups,” as Shohat and Stam (1994) put it (p. 48), that reaffirms rather than defies the kind of orientalizing relations that it sets out to dismantle.65

CHAPTER FIVE RACING ALIENATION AND THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE IN CHANG-RAE LEE’S NATIVE SPEAKER

… a majority of white Americans subscribe to a color-blind narrative of society where institutional racism has been eliminated and the American Creed of “racial equality for all” has been achieved. —Charles A. Gallagher (2014), “Color-Blind Egalitarianism as the New Racial Form,” p. 40 Traditional racism, and the practices associated with it, have changed and become covert, subtle and seemingly non-racial. These new racial practices are the central cogs behind modern-day racial domination in America. —Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2015), “Getting Over the Obama Hangover: The New Racism in ‘Post-Racial’ America,” p. 57 Hybridity has never been a peaceful encounter, a tension-free theme park; it has always been entangled with colonial violence. … Hybridity, in other words, is power-laden and asymmetrical. Hybridity is also co-optable. —Robert Stam (1999), “Palimpsestic Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage,” p. 60

Though being a multicultural nation, America continues to struggle with one of its many blind spots: minority ideologies that legitimize racism under the guise of all-inclusive and emancipatory consumer rhetoric. Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003) not only speaks to these struggles, but it also points to the lapses of emancipatory multiculturalism. While AbuJaber’s novel strives to make peace with the consumer rhetoric of multiculturalism by challenging the alignment of ethnic cultures with food, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) examines the multicultural discourse from a more hybrid, intercultural, interracial, as well as interethnic perspective, as a site of not only productive but also alienating, if not violent, contact.

124

Chapter Five

Native Speaker explores the tenacious aspects of multiculturalism through the biases of the primarily white-driven American electorate and a Korean-American diasporic politician, John Kwang, whose rise and fall is filtered through the experiences of the “surreptitious B+ student of life, illegal alien,” and a “Yellow Peril-neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy,” Henry Park (Lee, 1995, p. 5). Debunking the myth of emancipatory hybridity, the novel spotlights the emergence of “new racism,” specifically its increasingly “covert nature” that derives from the “color-blind ideology … [that] race is no longer a major detriment to minority advancement” (Bonilla-Silva, 2015, p. 58). This ideology emerged in 1960s America, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Act of 1965, and the Housing Rights Act of 1968 all endorsed the notion that affirmative action annihilated racial inequality (p. 62). However, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2015) argues, this colour-blind ideology has merely reframed the already-existing racial structures by making them seem “non-racial” (p. 58). Expanding this theory further, Charles A. Gallagher (2014) defines colour-blindness as a “new racial form” or a “new normal” (p. 42). This new normal is cultivated by white guilt and claims of reverse racism, as well as America’s consumer culture and its conspicuous commodification of the ethnic experience. Co-opted by the rhetoric of consumer bliss, American multiculturalism can be described as complicit in perpetuating racism through its uses and abuses of the emancipatory discourses of freedom and advancement that are instrumental to achieving the American Dream. Such an achievement, however, is dependent on the ethnic subject’s willingness to assimilate into the (white) American nation and thus pass as white. In her recent study on Asian-American diaspora, Erika Lee (2015) notes the precarious and often contradictory position of Asian immigrants and their Americanborn children. Historically, Asian Americans were viewed “as unassimilable and racially inferior foreigners who were threats to the United States” (p. 373). This view, however, changed in the middle of the 20th century, and since the late 20th century on, Asian Americans have been celebrated (and marketed by media) as “the poster children of American success and are sometimes even called ‘honorary whites’” (p. 373). Media representations of Asian Americans as hard workers and beacons of socio-economic success further cultivate the consumer attitude to ethnic cultures by tokenizing and commodifying ethnic subjects as private citizens who willingly disappear into the nation’s fabric, thus fostering America’s consumer republic. The critique of minority politics as consumer racism figures prominently in Lee’s Native Speaker. The novel demonstrates how consumer ideology

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

125

naturalizes the ethnic experience through the seemingly non-racial marketing of Otherness (Barber, 2007, p. 124). Targeting the ways in which minority politics blurs the line between racist and anti-racist politics, Lee (1995) taps into some of the most intricate psychological and physical forms of race violence, which reduce the diasporic subject to a “site of differentiation rather than inclusion” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 48). Critiquing anti-racist politics as implicated in producing new, neo-colonial racial structures and attitudes that continue to plague America, Native Speaker indicts ideological violence as a source of race ostracism and hate crime. The general view today is that xenophobia is a matter of the past, but Lee showcases that consumer culture has merely repackaged the figure of the xenos (stranger/foreigner) as a symbol of wholesale diversity. As a Korean American married to a white American, the novel’s main protagonist, Henry Park, serves as an intriguing mirror of what I refer to as contemporary America’s (multi)cultural xeno-bind (or xenophobic bind). Through Henry’s personal and professional struggles, his ever-growing identity crisis, and a sense of duplicity, Lee strives to unearth the tacit, yet no less atrocious, forms of racial prejudice that continue to go unchecked in contemporary America. Henry Park works for Dennis Hoagland, who runs a private company that investigates business corruption. Narrated from Henry’s point of view, the story focuses on the firm’s spying activities that are “determined by some calculus of power and money,” but are more or less driven by the “fluid motion of capital” (Lee, 1995, p. 17). As “secret arbitrageurs” of the market, the investigators, including Henry, are primarily traffickers of human foibles, “deal[ing] in people … foreign workers, immigrants, firstgenerationals, neo-Americans” (p. 17). They are the ultimate product of globalization: the trackers and traffickers of unfamiliar peoples’ struggle and survival. The novel opens with Henry falling into a figurative abyss as he finds himself on the precipice of life as he knows it: his wife Leila has left him, and their son Mitt is dead. Confronted by a long list of Leila’s grievances about his inability to fit in to her “map” of expectations, Henry finds himself annihilated by his wife’s “executing language” and her tendency to “trace [them] back like some evolutionist” (Lee, 1995, p. 11). Apart from Henry’s involvement in Hoagland’s investigative firm, which specializes in “aliens,” “immigrants,” and “neo-Americans,” the novel confronts the increasing co-optation of racist politics by consumerist and multicultural discourses alike. In broad strokes, Native Speaker targets the biases that plague a hyphenated family, consisting of a Korean American (Henry) and a white American (Leila)

126

Chapter Five

who have lost their child (Mitt) to racial intolerance. More deeply, however, the novel bursts open the bubble of the so-called anti-racist politics that American multiculturalism celebrates by drawing attention to the new and rampant forms of racism that masquerade as discourses of affirmative action, advancement, and equality. Consequently, the novel anticipates the dystopian climate of American politics and its consumption of and addiction to what John Kwang, the Korean-American politician Henry investigates, calls white guilt: “an old syntax, … a minority politics … that barely acknowledge[s] the diasporic subject” (Lee, 1995, p. 196). Minority politics as an “old syntax” is crucial to understanding Lee’s casting of the process of American elections as corrupt and covertly (and at times flagrantly) racist. Lee depicts the process as the spectacle of power clad in minority clothes, a long-standing cultural imperative that is also indicative of the alienating and exploitative practices that haunt diasporic communities. In his recent study of the 2009 American election process, Charles A. Gallagher (2014), for example, speaks to the precariousness of what Lee in Native Speaker portrays as a white middleclass American’s bias. Gallagher (2014) locates this bias in the post-1960s climate, which encouraged the attitude that “white privilege is a prerogative of the past” (p. 41). However, as Gallagher cautions, the idea that “most whites now view race as a benign social marker” is a myth that propagates rather than alleviates the “color-blind perspective” (2014, p. 41). This perspective merely foments “the belief that the universal enforcement of civil rights in the 1960s and the rising socio-economic status of racial minorities that accompanied the dismantling of discrimination in the labour market [signalled] the end of institutionalized racism” (p. 41). Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), however, rejects the superficiality of America’s Benetton society by tracing the intricate geographies of multicultural, racial, interethnic, as well as intrapersonal conflicts to address the symbolic and physical violence that such ecstatic “racing” of alienation disguised as voluntary assimilation generates. Tapping into the secret reservoirs of white power, but also uncovering the Asian-American communities’ own intercultural conflicts, Lee investigates hybridity as a dystopian landscape co-opted by neo-colonial politics and rhetorical strawmen.

Trafficking in Colour-Blindness: The Countergeographies of (Multi)Cultural Bias Recipient of the Pen/Hemingway Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of five novels,—Native Speaker (1995), Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004),

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

127

The Surrendered (2010), and On Such a Full Sea (2014)—Chang-Rae Lee is a well-established presence in American literary circles. Exploring the challenges of Asian immigrants living in America, Lee’s novels map the challenges of immigrant acculturation while simultaneously exposing the insidious controversies of minority discourses and the politics of violence that define them. As Lee mentions in his 2004 interview for The Telegraph, “most people don’t think about race as much as I do. They don’t have to” (Bradbury, 2004, n. pag.). At the age of three, Lee and his family emigrated from South Korea to the United States. Although Lee confesses that he does not “feel uncomfortable in America,” he concedes that, from time to time, he is made aware of his racial difference: “I’m reminded that people don’t see me the way I see me. It doesn’t change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it” (Bradbury, 2004, n. pag.). The celebration of difference and Otherness is perhaps one of the most prominent indicators of a multicultural colour-blindness that insists on equality of races. But by ignoring the various inequalities arising from individual and cultural histories of whites and non-whites, new forms of racism that are frequently disguised under the banner of politically correct discourse are inevitably cultivated. Like Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003), Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) critiques orientalist discourses while indicting colour-blind racism that informs American multiculturalism as one of the most dangerous sites of conflict and potential violence. The main characters, John Kwang, the Korean-American politician whose ambitions lead to his demise, and Henry Park, the highly invisible, underground “biographer” of immigrant lives, illuminate the tense yet hidden topographies and undercurrents of racial ostracism. Paralleling Henry’s disintegrating marriage and his multicultural identity is Kwang’s rise to power as a minority politician who joins the electoral process to become the mayor of New York. Both Henry and Kwang are victims of different degrees of racial attachments and betrayals. As Henry’s marriage crumbles, Kwang’s popularity soars. Similarly, as Kwang’s career declines, Henry slowly finds his way back to Leila. Accused of interethnic money laundering and corruption, Kwang is forced to disappear off the radar while Henry, attached to his wife’s maps, quits his investigator job to become his wife’s assistant, or as he calls himself, a “Speech Monster” (Lee, 1995, p. 348). In many ways, like Kwang’s rise to power, Henry’s marriage to a white American is doomed from the start. Lelia is aggrieved by what she calls his “Henryspeak” (p. 6). Henry, on the other hand, resents her attempts to define their intimate relationship and to “trace [it] back like some evolutionist” in her desperate quest to fit him

128

Chapter Five

into her “maps” (pp. 13, 3). Describing her as a “woman of maps,” he notes: She was traveling heavy. She had dozens of them, in various scales. Topographic, touristical, some schematic—these last handmade. Through the nights she stood like a field general over the kitchen counter, hands perched on those jutting hipbones, smoking with agitation, assessing points of entry and encampment and escape. Her routes, stenciled in thick deep blue, embarked inward, toward an uncharted grave center. (p. 3)

Henry’s description of Lelia recalls America’s settler beginnings.66 Like Captain John Smith arriving on American shores and surveying the purviews of soon-to-be Virginia, Lelia is a lover of uncharted landscapes, which she subjects to a set of well-defined parameters. Failing her generallike expectations, Henry is dismissed as the “emotional alien” and “stranger” (Lee, 1995, p. 6). As an English teacher for second-language learners, Lelia relishes in acculturating her young students by [giving] them some laughs and then [reading] a tall tale in her gentlest, queerest voice. It doesn’t matter what they understand. … she wants to offer up a pale white woman horsing with the language to show them it’s fine to mess it up. (p. 349)

Throughout the novel, Lelia is portrayed as the embodiment of America’s colour-blind ideology: married to an Asian American, she cultivates affective attachments to Others, insisting on the kind of proximity that is neo-colonial at best. This form of proximity is based on what Jean Baudrillard (1993) calls the “melodrama of difference,” a spectacle whereby the Other is linguistically and affectively marked for exclusion and thus subjugated to the white subject’s “psychodrama” (p. 140). By turning difference into a melodrama, the majoritarian subject reduces the Other to an absence, a kind of figurative death whereby the Otherized subject becomes “indifferent to his own subjectivity, to his own alienation” and is thus reified in his denial of self (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 143). Henry exemplifies Baudrillard’s notion of the Other as a displaced (in)difference. As a market spy, he is the embodiment of absence but also of “the other that results from [his own] denial” (Lee, 1995, p. 143). Alienated from within but also from his surroundings, Henry represents the negation of multicultural presence in America. Lelia’s obsession with getting to know Henry’s family only furthers his sense of being negated, “raced,” and, consequently, erased. Henry resents her way of “[tracing] them back like some evolutionist” and her father’s

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

129

discontent that Lelia has married “some bright Oriental kid” (Lee, 1995, p. 2). In response, he cultivates his alienation as a form of subversive agency. By owning his alienation as a “goddamn UNICEF poster” (p. 123), to use the words of Leila’s father, Stew, Henry becomes what Baudrillard (1993) calls “the Alien-monstrous metaphor for the corpse-like, viral other: the compound form of all the varieties of otherness” (p. 147). In this becoming, Henry also evokes the Nietzschean “will to nothingness” (Deleuze, 1962/1983, p. 65). Gilles Deleuze defines Nietzsche’s concept as an “active negation” or “active destruction” of the “reactive forces” (p. 65). For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s will to nothingness is a necessary submission to one’s self-negation which, by the way of acknowledging destructive forces within, transforms into a positive affirmation (p. 66). As a spy and a son of Korean immigrants, Henry persistently navigates reactive forces (specifically, his deep sense of cultural alienation and displacement), but he does not always succeed in practicing what Friedrich Nietzsche (1909), for example, preaches in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, an active negation of the self, whereby “turning against oneself” represents a form of transmutation, affirmation, and becoming (Nietzsche, 1909, p. 66). Instead, Henry embodies the kind of “partitions” that stem from multicultural homogenization of racial and ethnic groups (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 147). Through a self-adopted spectrality, however, he uncovers the less than ideal facets of hybridity, specifically its (post)colonial inflections of power and cultural topographies that expose the (racial) prejudices of American multiculturalism as controversial sites (and seeds) of aggression. Henry’s “study” of John Kwang, the rising star of a councilman, serves as a testament to the unflattering aspects of American multiculturalism, specifically its reliance on discourses of inclusion and exclusion that precipitate rather than eliminate both racial and interracial conflicts. Such conflicts are part of what Saskia Sassen (2004) calls the “countergeographies of globalization” and its informal circuits of labour and capital flows, whereby the ethnic subjects are, on the one hand, promised a degree of emancipation while, on the other hand, they are rendered invisible (p. 264). These countergeographies are sites of rampant racism as well as symbolic and physical violence, promoted in the name of the “global fix” (Hitchcock, 2003, p. 196)—be it literal, as reflected in the increasing trend of mail order brides and sex worker trafficking, or figurative, wherein the issue of proximity is a matter of a symbolic contract. Through Kwang, Henry realizes that the proximity between the white American majority and the Korean minority is vexed at best. Kwang dismisses Henry’s colour-blindness as an act of self-hate. He advocates for

130

Chapter Five

the importance of knowing rather than denying one’s history. He calls on Henry to “remember” his heritage, to acknowledge the historical oppression of his race: I am speaking of histories that all of us should know. Remember, or now know, how Koreans were cast as the dogs of Asia, remember the way our children could not speak their own language in school, remember how they called each other by the Japanese names forced upon them, remember the public executions of patriots and the shadowy murders of collaborators, remember our feelings of disgrace and penury and shame, remember most of all the struggle to survive with one’s own identity still strong and alive. I ask that you remember these things, or know them now. Know that what we have in common, the sadness and pain and injustice, will always be stronger than our differences. (Lee, 1995, p. 153)

In his call to remember, Kwang glosses the U.S. recruitment of Korean immigrants for cheap labour at the beginning of the 20th century, the racial violence resulting from the anti-Asian laws, and also the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910–1945), which has “turned Koreans abroad into stateless exiles” (Lee, 2015, p. 138). Kwang suggests to Henry that this exile continues through minority structures and mechanisms that steer immigrants into particular neighbourhoods and communities, reinforcing ethnic ghettoization, albeit in the name of multiculturalism.67 He emphasizes that “soon there will be more brown and yellow than black and white. And yet the politics, especially minority politics, remain cast in terms that barely acknowledge us” (Lee, 1995, p. 196). But while Kwang is eager to expose the neo-colonial ideologies that drive minority politics, he is equally ready to exploit them for his own benefit. In this, he represents what Rosi Braidotti (2006) calls the “schizoid political economy” of globalization that, on the one hand, advocates the emancipation of minorities and, on the other, redistributes, if not intensifies, their racial, inter-racial, class, and gender inequities. Kwang’s initial electoral success not only speaks to this redistribution but also exposes the complex and systemic “racing” of the minority vote. As a multimillionaire, Kwang is able to leverage the Korean community’s ggeh, the so-called “money club” where “members contributed to a pool which was given out on a rotating basis” (Lee, 1995, p. 50) as a pathway to success but also as an endorsement of the American Dream wherein white superiority is reinforced through the minority’s invocation of their so-called difference. But as Baudrillard (1993) reminds us, “difference is itself a utopia” (p. 143). It is a form of homogenization that increases intolerance and, in turn, violence. Similarly, as he calls on his community

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

131

members to remember their history, Kwang invokes this utopian attitude by interpellating, if not playing up, their alterity. In this regard, Kwang performs an interesting role of what Rey Chow (1993) calls a “third world intellectual,” whose use of minority discourse to address the economic and racial disenfranchisement and physical alienation of so-called “minority positions” in fact replicates exploitative, colonizing tendencies. Chow emphasizes that “their resort to ‘minority’ discourse, including the discourse of class and gender struggles, veils their own fatherhood over the ‘ethnics’ at home even while it continues to legitimize them as ‘ethnics’ and ‘minorities’ in the West” (p. 118). Drawing on Stanley Fish’s (1997) notion of “boutique multiculturalism,” Regina Lee (2004) defines such diasporic consciousness as a “boutique multicultural manifestation” whereby minorities “market” their difference for economic and/or personal gain (p. 55). In her words, “the diaspora knows what the host society wants, and feeds it to them, by selfconsciously re-enacting for the dominant community their ethnicity” (p. 55). Kwang’s popularity in and outside his community soars, primarily because he is able to tune into the race-motivated expectations of the multicultural nation state. Consequently, he reignites the very ecstasy of racial Messianism that defines America’s settler history.68 Kwang’s ability to manipulate the immigrant community therefore allows him to turn politics into something sacred. Henry describes Kwang’s campaign as a “church drive” and notes that the “mood in the office was messianic” (Lee, 1995, p. 143). Invoking a sense of togetherness, Kwang assumes the role of the Messiah, the minority JFK who is a “devotee of memory” and who sees politics as a vehicle for “captur[ing] imagination” (pp. 177, 196). What he provides is a politics of hope that is merely a fabrication, a secular utopia at best. As Harald Wydra (2015) has emphasized, much of contemporary political discourse relies on fabricated invocations of “the escape from reality through radical or utopian projects and the powerful turn to memory” (p. 49). The hopeful quest for the ideal state—be it a “political utopia” or the “sacred”—allows for a temporary transformation of exclusion into inclusion and displacement into belonging. As Chang-Rae Lee suggests in Native Speaker, multicultural ideology is a form of secular utopia that promises the possibility of ethnic and racial inclusion on the basis of cultural homogenization that is inevitably exclusive. Not only does Kwang repackage the minoritarian status of his Korean community in Flushing, but by patronizing its members, he also takes on the role of the state (or body politic). Henry refers to the community of Flushing as “John Kwang’s people” (Lee, 1995, p. 83).

132

Chapter Five

Kwang refigures nationalism into a “racing” spectacle by minoritizing the already minoritarian status of the Korean immigrants of Flushing and by submitting them to the same kind of racist agenda he vows to reject in the first place. As a proud minority leader, but also as an “honorary white,” to use Erika Lee’s (2015) words (p. 373), Kwang embodies the duplicity that Henry (quite unsuccessfully) strives to don. According to Regina Lee (2004), what white multiculturalism and white racism share is the interest in containing the Other (p. 63). This containment is performed through what Sara Ahmed (2000) calls a “double and contradictory process of incorporation and expulsion” (p. 97). In Native Speaker, this double process is evident in Kwang’s casting of the Korean “platoons” as, on the one hand, integrated into the American (multi)cultural fabric as a site of cheap labour and assembly-line market production. As such, the ethnic’s labour is consumed by the state that, in turn, contains the subject through the labour-alienation-product dynamic of “countless unheard nobodies, each offering to the marketplace their gross of kimchee, lichee, plantain …” (Lee, 1995, p. 83). On the other hand, by augmenting and exploiting his community’s subjection to the self-commodifying principle (or identification as labour), Kwang simultaneously points to the ways in which multicultural inclusion is often predicated on a form of exclusion— typically, on the basis of race, class, or gender, but also, most importantly, on the basis of language. As the child of immigrants whose language skills are wanting, Henry knows that language becomes a crucial marker of immigrant success; Kwang confirms this as well in his messianic speeches. The ability to speak eloquently legitimates agency. Without proper language skills, firstgeneration immigrants like Henry’s father are frequently castigated to the “invisible” sector of assembly line workers or small businessmen who have been transformed into (alienated) labour. Such automatization of the ethnic subject further highlights the intensity of multidirectional racial exploitation. Rey Chow (1993) suggests that being “automatized” means being subjected to social exploitation whose origins are beyond one’s individual grasp, but it also means becoming a spectacle whose aesthetic “power” increases with one’s increasing awkwardness and helplessness. The production of the “other” is in this sense both the production of class and aesthetic/cognitive difference. (p. 61)

But while Chow proposes that such an automatization of the other is beyond the individual’s control, Lee’s Native Speaker uncovers deeper

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

133

layers of the ethnic’s own complicity in turning into a labour-consumer automaton. Henry points to these layers by noting that “John Kwang’s people” are not necessarily the victims of Kwang’s swagger; rather, they are complicit in their self-automatization/commodification. Henry’s father is a case in point. Educated as a civil engineer, he finds himself running a small grocery store day and night. While proud of his success, he is ashamed of “talking about fruits and vegetables” (Lee, 1995, p. 56). Instead, he translates his pain and a sense of injustice into economic success, increasingly exploiting other newly arrived immigrants. Asserting his experience and “minority” power, Henry’s father employs Mr. Yoon and Mr. Kim, both college graduates with no English skills, who work 12 hours a day, six days a week for $200 cash. As Henry concedes, “my father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own” (p. 54). This interethnic exploitation is also what drives Kwang’s empire. However, what causes Kwang’s downfall is not that he exploits other, less advantaged members of minority groups, but that he forgets to keep his own minority position in check. In his climbing to power, he becomes a “father” and a “dictator” who does not shy away from blowing up his own offices with staff members in it (p. 293). When a bomb explodes in one of his offices, he cold-bloodedly says to Henry: “It’s the way civilized man now encumbers his territory, not with great walls or stretches of wire but with a single well-placed device …” (p. 265). Kwang’s willingness to use any possible measures to secure his run for Mayor—including murder—becomes indicative of the problematic countergeographies of minority politics that both blur and reenforce the line between difference and similarity/sameness. Therefore, Kwang’s fall is not caused by his iron rule and his undercover dealings but by his larger-than-life persona that approximates white authority. As long as he remains ensconced within his ethnic community, he is the “John King” of Flushing, the Minority Messiah (Lee, 1995, p. 165). The moment he starts challenging the xeno-bind of American politics and exposing its countergeographies, however, he turns into “the great enemy” of both the oppressed and the oppressors. Exposing the colour-blind racism that permeates contemporary America and American electorate, Kwang says: They’re still living in the glow of civil rights furor. There’s valuable light there, but little heat. And if I don’t receive the blessing of AfricanAmericans, am I still a minority politician? Who is the heavy now? I’m afraid that the world isn’t governed by fiends and saints but ten thousand dim souls in between. (p. 196)

134

Chapter Five

Kwang’s rebuttal of minority politics indicts the binary ideology of the West. He ridicules the assumption that the 1960s civil rights movement has eliminated racism. By contrast, he emphasizes that it has been transformed into more subterranean, or what Baudrillard (1993) calls “viral,” forms of anti-racist rhetoric that “whitewash” the minority populace (p. 143). These forms are governed by “the logic of multiplying differences,” a logic that “triggers a consumerist or vampiric consumption of ‘others’” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 46). This consumption, however, is multidirectional and no longer defined by “the traditional dialectical relationship” between racism and anti-racism, the oppressor and the oppressed (p. 56). In refusing to downplay these new racial structures, Lee (1995) anticipates the critique of Barack Obama’s de-racing of race as a defining factor of American multiculturalism. As Gallagher (2014) emphasizes, Obama’s Audacity of Hope (2008) and his call for “reclaiming the American Dream” have merely played into, rather than subverted, the colour-blind media-frenzy and its call for the end of racism in America as we know it. Citing articles from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Gallagher (2014) highlights the “racism as myth” line (p. 43). Native Speaker, however, identifies such approach as the root where the polarities and inequities between the white majority and visible minorities become radicalized. Lee shows that the white electorate turns its own complicity in radicalizing such polarities against Kwang, whose entrepreneurial spirit makes them visible (rather than keeping them conveniently hidden and under-cover) through his uncanny exploitation of the disadvantaged. As Baudrillard (1993) puts it, “the radical other is intolerable … [because] he cannot be exterminated, but he cannot be accepted either, so the negotiable other, the other of difference, has to be promoted. This is where a subtler form of extermination begins” (p. 152). In other words, Kwang’s radicalization stems from his close proximity to the white majority: his fall is precipitated not so much by his becoming-radical, but instead by what is perceived as his (fundamentalist) aspiration to embody the Messianic ideology of the white settler. Therefore, his quest must be terminated and his larger than life persona exterminated. Such “vampiric consumption” of difference (Braidotti, 2006, p. 46) then speaks not only to the minority politics Lee critiques but also to his concerns about the ways in which discourses of hybridity continue to be the primary sources of racism turning radical and violent.

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

135

Asphyxiating Ethnic Presence and Hybridizing Hate: The Politics of Violence In Native Speaker, one of the primary sites of violence—both symbolic and physical—is minority rhetoric, particularly its structural silencing of ethnic presence in the name of transnational hybridity. When John Kwang speaks of minority politics as an “old syntax” (Lee, 1995, p. 196), he refers to the ways in which minority rhetoric has been complicit in the denial of racism and, in turn, has contributed to the development of new, more intense racial structures. These new structures produce multiple nonlinear economies of affect, bodily encounter, and hate, which are often extended not only to ethnic and racial groups but also to people of mixed race. In spite of the post-1990s celebration of hybridity as a marker of transnational globalization of economic, political, and cultural borders and boundaries, mixed race continues to represent the uncanny of multiculturalism. Reflecting on Kwang’s downfall, Henry realizes that his reluctance to teach his son Mitt how to speak Korean reflects his “assimilist sentiment” (Lee, 1995, p. 261). As he concedes, his insistence on Mitt’s blending in was “part of [his] own ugly and half-blind romance with the land” (p. 267). Henry’s admission is crucial to his acknowledgment of his own complicity in celebrating hybridity, a colour-blind gesture that plays into, rather than subverts, racial prejudice. As Juliana Chang (2012) notes, such a “romantic citizenship” or commitment to “the fantasy of romance between immigration and nation” that, in turn, reflects the U.S. nationalist euphoria, figures prominently in Native Speaker (p. 27). Drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant (1997), Chang (2012) considers Henry’s “romantic citizenship” in terms of the affective economies of love for the nation or his wife, Lelia, who becomes the metaphor for the nation. While Kwang refuses to participate in such a romanticization of minority politics and to act “like every American man, faking, dipping, joking” (Lee, 1995, p. 179), Henry struggles with his racial identity, whitewashing his own and his biracial son’s ethnic presence. Chang (2012) argues that Native Speaker reveals how “immigrants are romanticized through a fetishization of their commodity objects, a metonymic process in which they themselves are figured as commodities” (p. 118). Taking Chang’s argument further, this section investigates the ways in which the so-called multicultural romance with racial difference is not solely defined by the politics of love for the nation but rather is centered on the intricate dynamics between negative affect (hate) and negation. It specifically highlights how multiculturalism inflects love for the nation as a form of

136

Chapter Five

structural hate rather than cultural inclusion, whereby those who are not easily integrated or assimilated into the nation are automatically excluded. This form of exclusion masquerades in media and government discourses as cultural inclusion and promotes hate as an intimacy of its own kind, an intimacy that binds the nation together while it simultaneously rejects those who are viewed as radical (a code word for “racial” and “racialized”) Others. Sublimated as syncretism, hate is thus paradoxically hybridized into a defining feature of anti-racist, colour-blind rhetoric, whereby anti-racism becomes the very ecstasy of (denied or whitewashed) racism. Lee’s (1995) depiction of the death of Henry’s seven-year-old son Mitt evokes the treacherous economies of structural violence (both symbolic and physical) that are connected to the celebration of hybridity as a nonpolitical site of bodily and cultural encounters. Lee’s novel suggests that colour-blindness depoliticizes hybridity as well as racism. As Ella Shohat (2006) emphasizes, “a celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated in conjunction with questions of hegemony and neocolonial power relations, runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accomplit of colonial violence” (p. 245). Similarly, according to Bonilla-Silva (2014), what intensifies racial structures are the seemingly “non-racial” ways of expressing xenophobia. Minimizing racism is a primary modus operandi of colour-blind racism. In Bonilla-Silva’s words, “racism otherizes softly,” as in the expression, for example, that “these people are human, too” (p. 3). This subtle form of racial Otherization not only produces but is also instigated by a whole spectrum of hate economies that include homogenization, name calling, and ultimately, violence. These economies inform multicultural ideology, but they also constitute a particular “form of intimacy” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 50). Ahmed explains that hate is an “investment in an object” of hate/love: this investment is predicated on “an intimate relationship between a subject and an imagined other” (p. 49). This form of negative intimacy asphyxiates ethnic presence by co-opting anti-racist rhetoric as a means of silencing address and thus hybridizes hate in the name of multicultural love for the nation. In exploring how multicultural ideologies and their minority, as well as majority, politics produce diverse yet interconnected countergeographies of racial prejudice and violence, this section examines the murder of Henry’s young son Mitt, not only as the novel’s “heart of darkness” but also as an allegory of contemporary America’s subtle yet intense racial structures of hate violence. On the surface, Mitt—as a son of an Asian American and a white American—serves as the poster child for American multiculturalism. His

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

137

hybridity speaks to the fantasy of a post-racial or raceless America that emerged in the 1990s and was affirmed by Barack Obama’s “emergence on the national scene … [as a] symbol of equality, progress, and [raceless] utopia” (Carter, 2013, p. 195). As Greg Carter writes in The United States of the United Races (2013), Obama’s rise to power was predicated on his reluctance to speak to the issues of race directly. Carter (2013) notes that, “commenting on race only when necessary, Obama practiced a sort of symbolic ethnicity that one usually associates with ethnic whites” (p. 17). However, as Carter acknowledges, the identity politics of mixed-race subjects is far more complex than a quantifiable allegiance to a particular race allows—no matter how much the U.S. census has been encouraging biracial and multiracial self-identification. Frequently, mixed race subjects find it difficult to align themselves with one particular race. This is partly due to America’s unresolved relationship to race. Specifically, America’s colonial history of racial ostracism continues to “shape experiences and expressed identities of people of mixed race” (King-O’Riain, Small, Mahtani, Song, & Spickard, 2014, p. xi). Lee’s Native Speaker locates these patterns in the intersection of the private and the public spheres, specifically in the transnational family dynamic that reflects the ambivalence of the multiracial state as a site of both impotence and aggression. However, in addition to the private-public relationship that the novel parses and which many critical studies have addressed,69 Native Speaker also strives to capture the ambiguous topographies and economies of affect that define mixed race relations in America. Globalization has contributed to a rise of transnational families in America. In this light, racial intermixing is not only an important, though tangential, part of America’s (post)colonial history, but it has also become an essential aspect of globalization. Since the 1990s, diasporic families have become the “face of America” but also the ultimate landmark of ecstatic consumption. Carter (2013), for instance, quotes Calvin Klein spokesman, John Leland, who, during a Calvin Klein campaign, confirmed that “companies like Nike, Calvin Klein, and Benetton are working ethnicity as an idiom of commerce” (p. 198). Similarly, he notes that casting executive Paula Sidlinger, for instance, described the casting requests of the “mixed look” as “[conjuring] up an immediate sense of globalization and technology” (p. 197). Lee’s novel evokes this global(izing) attitude in Henry’s confession that he has been complicit in his own symbolic asphyxiation. Mitt’s tragic death thus speaks to the toxic triangulation of racial patterns that permeate colour-blind racism; more importantly, it exposes the often

138

Chapter Five

contradictory flows of internalized racism that pervade both minority and majority politics. The novel reveals that, despite America’s 1990s celebration of a postracial utopia, Americans of mixed race continue to find themselves locked in the xeno-bind: they can choose either to identify their races or to identify as whites. Each choice represents a form of co-optation. From the Pocahontas myth as a diplomatic merger of two races70 and the history of anti-miscegenation laws to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the attempt to quantify a multiracial category through the 1990s project R.A.C.E., mixed race has been an important site of difference, polarizing American consciousness.71 As a son of a Korean immigrant and a white American, Mitt represents an important racialized symbol of multicultural politics in Lee’s (1995) Native Speaker. Although Mitt’s tragic death exposes the trajectories of extremism and hate that continue to plague America, it also speaks to a much deeper issue. His death also highlights how the colour-blind discourses of post-racial America reinscribe the kind of universalizing rhetoric that, paradoxically, institutes prejudice as a tool of defense, whereby the utopia of America as a multicultural yet assimilated nation is upheld. This ideal inevitably contributes to the politics of racial hate and violence that it strives to eliminate in the first place. Although Lee (1995) dedicates very little time and space to Mitt’s murder, the tragic event constitutes the most sensitive core of the novel, as it reflects on the excrescence of racial structures that extend to both national and private levels. In Native Speaker, Mitt’s tragic passing is preceded by another common event: racial taunting and name calling. At the age of seven, Mitt finds himself being teased and called names such as “Chink, Jap, a Gook, … mongrel, half-breed, banana, [and] twinkie” by children in the neighbourhood (p. 103). When Henry finds out about this name-calling incident, he and his father decide to speak to the children’s parents. As they approach their houses, they are confronted with “manicured streets,” the socio-political markers of cultural denial residing within. As Henry and his father face the parents, they are met with excuses that dismiss the incident as their children’s lack of understanding of the gravity of their actions or as mere play (p. 104). A year later, Mitt is accidentally killed during his birthday party by children piling on top of him—a “stupid dog pile,” as one of the culprits recalls (p. 105). A boy to my side was crying fitfully and telling me between gasps how they didn’t mean to stay on him as long as they did. It was just a stupid dog pile, he kept shouting, it was a stupid dog pile. And then my father came out from the sliding porch door and saw me, a cordless phone in his hand,

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

139

and he yelled in Korean that the ambulance was coming. But before he made it to us his legs seemed to fold under him and he sat back unnaturally on the matted lawn, his face so small-looking, arrested, so short of breath. (p. 105)

Suffocated by a pile of other children’s bodies, Mitt dies before the ambulance arrives. One of the children keeps apologizing, blaming the incident on a silly game. This intense moment defines and speaks to the excessive yet sublimated economies of hate that stem from the celebratory, though increasingly depoliticized and deracialized, tenor of multicultural ideologies. However, it also exposes some of the ways in which colourblind racism perpetuates racial prejudice and hate crime. Lee specifically zooms in on the rhetoric that minimizes racism as an accident or, in relation to children, simply as a matter of misunderstanding or, worse, horseplay. Native Speaker reveals, however, that such minimization, or downplaying of racial prejudice, lies at the root of racial violence and hate crimes. As Ahmed (2004) points out, hate is a “bodily encounter”: it functions as a projection of an imaginary Otherness or radical difference onto another human being and thus “work[s] on the surfaces of bodies” (p. 53). Hate crimes are embedded in histories of injustice and power inequities that see other bodies as a dangerous threat or a pollutant. In Ahmed’s terms, “trafficking the history of hate involves reading the surfaces of bodies [as objects of hate]” (p. 60). Drawing attention to the various institutions of racism,—be they a state, an electorate, media, a family, or a school— Native Speaker locates the trafficking of unresolved histories and racial experiences, ironically, in early childhood. Mitt is a victim of the ideologies that shape not only his but also his peers’ upbringing. As noted earlier in this section, the incident in which Henry and his father confront the parents of the children who have been name-calling and bullying Mitt provides a springboard to more treacherous enactments of prejudice as hate. In indicting both the parents and children alike, Lee (1995) creates an alternative space where politically correct behavior is called into question. The novel not only debunks the “politically correct” attitude to racism as a minimizing strategy or a tool of denial that perpetuates it. It also shows that excusing violence away—whether the violence is symbolic or physical—merely redoubles its incendiary effects. The most daring aspect of Lee’s novel is perhaps his exploration of children’s behavior as evocative of a larger national and institutional scene: the process of socialization. Refusing to participate in the denial of ambiguous and sometimes obscure racial structures, Lee suggests that children as young

140

Chapter Five

as Mitt are affected by various policies and politics that they see implemented at home. Recent studies of child development support Lee’s concern that excusing children’s xenophobic behavior is the first step in condoning and enforcing the perpetuation of racial oppression. According to Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin (2001), children as young as three years of age are capable of understanding race dynamics (p. 2). Although the general view is that young children are incapable of distinguishing racial difference or the meaning of racial slurs, the authors argue that “children are actively reproducing in their everyday lives matters and realities of race and racism” (p. 3). Similarly, Van Ausdale and Feagin (2001) note that when adults suggest they are naive and unknowing, such an attitude “neglect[s] children’s present, active reality and fail[s] to understand that children’s actions also create and re-create society” (p. 3). Accordingly, children reenact what they see at home or on TV and what they hear and experience in their daily life. They proceed to act out these experiences through play. Mitt’s death is indeed the result of such interactive roleplaying; after all, the children were just playing at a “dog pile.” Rhetorical turns like denial, digression, and displacement of blame contribute to the notion that racism is no longer real, it is just horseplay. Unsurprisingly, justifying racism as hyperbole has become one of the marketing strategies of global, post-industrial consumerism. From mass media advertising to clothing industries like Abercrombie & Fitch and Urban Outfitters, companies have been accused of selling derogatory slurs as “fun” or as a “political stance” (Fudge, 2006, p. 324). Rachel Fudge (2006) notes, for instance, the frequent marketing of racial slurs by Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts, displaying messages such as “Two Wongs Can Make It White,” referring to the history of Asian dry-cleaning businesses in America, or ethnic slurs like “Everybody Loves a Jewish Girl” (p. 323). Similarly, during the 2012 Obama-Romney campaigns, the elections persistently invoked racial themes. On August 17th, 2012, the U.S. News published an article by Rebekah Metzler, outlining the intricate racial play where both candidates were “engulfed in racial politics”: Mitt Romney called Obama “angry” and “hateful,” while Joe Biden referred to Romney as a reformed slaveholder (n. pag.).72 Native Speaker reveals the culture of what Rachel Fudge (2006) calls “retroracist bigotry” (p. 323). It strives to undermine and expose the deep-seated mechanisms of racial ostracism that are marketed as spectacle or play. And yet, Lee (1995) at times fails to undo the racial structures he laments. While Mitt’s death signals a seismic shift in Henry’s and Lelia’s marriage, it is not always clear that their internalized attitudes towards

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

141

their own “romance” with mixed America, as Henry puts it, have radically changed. The ending of the novel is particularly striking given the lengths to which Lee goes in order to expose the many diverse countergeographies of minority politics and their impact on the immigrant and mixed race population in America. At the end of the novel, Henry finds his way back to Lelia, the ESL instructor; moreover, rejecting his profession as a spy of immigrant experiences, he takes on the role of a “Speech Monster,” poking fun at language and “[gobbling] up the kids” (p. 348). Each day, Lelia assigns a “secret phrase” that the children will learn. The novel concludes with the children repeating “Gently down the stream” as Lelia praises each and every one for having been a “good citizen” (p. 349). In the final paragraph, the children lined up in front of Lelia are identified with stickers, their names inscribed “inside the sunburst-shaped badge” (p. 349). Though most critics, including Chang (2012), who aligns this gesture with the immigrant’s “tragic enjoyment” of America’s assimilationist politics (p. 8), acknowledge that the ending has Henry “interpellated” by the white American and thus assimilated into the affective economy of the nation (p. 8), interpreting Henry’s return to Lelia solely as a form of capitulation and subjection seems to be missing the point of Lee’s exquisite use of irony. To parse what, in fact, might be Henry’s attempt at confronting his own “bullshit autobiography,” to use the words of Lauren Hartke in DeLillo’s (2001) The Body Artist (p. 34),73 it might be useful to recall Gerald Vizenor’s (1998) theory of “fugitive poses” discussed in the previous chapter. In Fugitive Poses, Gerald Vizenor (1998) discusses the erasure of an indigenous presence through a simulation of an indian or, in other words, through an asphyxiation of racial difference by means of an superimposed “interimage” (p. 147). Similarly, Lee’s ending could be critiqued for performing or reducing the Asian presence to the same kind of inter-image mimicry that it strives to annihilate. However, a more in-depth reading of Henry’s transformation into the Speech Monster who gobbles Leila’s young students as they sing “gently down the stream” suggests that Lee’s ending accomplishes the kind of eternal recurrence of displacement that the novel interrogates. While most critical studies deploy Henry’s return to the fold of the nation by reclaiming his marriage to Lelia as a form of cooptation on his part,—as his submission to the assimilist fantasy of the American Dream—this conclusion fails to account for Lee’s use of irony as a means of dismantling the racial dialectic that depends on binaries such as minority versus majority, white versus non-white, and colonizer versus colonized. From the very beginning of the novel, Lee (1995) strives to disentangle his characters from the western reliance on binaries; instead,

142

Chapter Five

he points to the ambiguous trajectories and flows of the xeno-bind generated by globalization—flows that at times veer from traditional hierarchies and accepted socio-political dogmas. As Rosi Braidotti (2006) emphasizes, globalization has created diverse, not always hierarchical, and easily distinguishable polarities between cultures, races, and genders. The “schizoid political economy” that governs “our times” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 64) has transformed dualistic thinking into what Baudrillard (2008) calls the “pataphysics of existence” (p. 33). Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s 1911 notion of absurd writing,74 Baudrillard (2008) defines this form of existence as a “dead point” wherein “every system crosses this subtle limits of reversibility, contradiction and doubt and enters into noncontradiction, into its own exalted contemplation, into ecstasy …” (p. 33). Lee’s (1995) emphasis on Henry as the Speech Monster, gobbling up children as they sing a nursery rhyme about life being “but a dream,” reflects the ways in which America’s march towards a post-racial utopia has accomplished instead a kind of dystopia of racial absence, whereby the racial Other continues to be symbolically “gobbled up” by the “vampiric consumption” of difference (Braidotti, 2006, p. 46) or what Baudrillard (1993) refers to as the universalizing “murder” of the (radical/racial) Other. In this, Lee (1995) might have his last laugh by conjuring an ironic, pataphysical strategy to deliver the final punchline that the American Dream is just that: an illusion. Consequently, Baudrillard (2008)’s call for using pataphysics as a means of undermining the ecstatic, immoral form of contemporary consumerism summarizes Lee’s intentions. In the ecstasy of simulated interimage, we have transgressed everything, including the limits of scene and truth. … Everything is here, heaven has come down to earth, the heaven of utopia, and what existed in profile as a radiant perspective is now lived as a catastrophe in slow motion. We can almost taste the fatal flavour of material paradises; and transparency, which was the ideal maxim for the age of alienation, is realized today in the form of a homogenous and terrorist space—hyperinformation, hypersensibility. No more black magic of ecstasy, fascination, transparency. It’s the end of the pathos of law. There will be no Final Judgment. We’ve passed beyond it without realizing it. Too bad. We’re in paradise. Illusion is no longer possible. It has always braked the real, but now no longer holds …. (p. 97)

Baudrillard’s emphasis on the dystopian world of the material paradise achieved by globalization and, in turn, by America’s claims to a postracial utopia evokes Lee’s ending as an ironic, albeit fatal, strategy. Henry, confronting the eternal return of his own displacement, but also of his

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

143

wife’s (post)colonial heritage, becomes the ultimate “monster”: the radical Other eating his young. Lee’s (1995) final gesture can be viewed as an avowal of the uncanny becoming familiar, the dream qua nightmare. In affirming his difference, but also in the conflicting monstrous ideology of Otherness that reduces him to an interimage or a fabula rather than a human being, Henry is inevitably forced to face his own denial. Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, he “confront[s] the paradoxical task of affirming life-denial, of willing the eternal return of the life-negating forces he most despises” (Hatab, 2005, p. 69). As Regina Lee (2004) emphasizes, if the diasporic subject is to move beyond the “boutique multicultural manifestation” that reduces them to a consumable commodity (p. 71), they need to be willing to accept their liminality as a form of transformative becoming. Whether Henry moves beyond the liminal abyss of affirming his “monstrous” identity, however, remains open to interpretation and is thus subject to the politics of return that Lee’s novel invokes.

The “Eternal Return” of Displacement: From Cultural Amnesia to Racial Awareness? The ending of Native Speaker returns to the socio-cultural origins of perception: is perception a reality? Is reality a form of perception and thus an illusion? Race, as Part II of this book has argued, is both a social construct and an experiential reality that shapes lives. To ignore the specifics of racial and mixed-race experience is to insist on a traditional (hegemonic and primarily western) understanding of socio-political relations. As Minelle Mahtani (2014) suggests, the attempt to gather the ambiguous geographies and family histories of racial experience under the universalizing term “hybridity” merely intensifies rather than addresses the various “forms of cultural amnesia or strategic forgetting” underpinning multicultural policies (p. 4). Similar to Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003), Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) raises red flags about the racial anxieties that inform America’s multicultural politics; the novel critiques the post-1990s denial of white privilege and its cavalier imperative to know others through conditional (and not always reciprocal) proximity. As Lee’s novel demonstrates, this perennial denial not only converts proximity into a site of power, but it also potentially supplements sameness with difference, making the two a matter of an artificial reversibility where the white subject’s passing for the Other is celebrated as an inclusive gesture. Affirmative action co-opts this power dynamic as it hails difference as a marker of cultural belonging. But it also, paradoxically, transposes

144

Chapter Five

universalized Otherness into a global sameness that ignores the singularity of the racial subject’s experiences. The racial subject is thus “cleansed,” albeit subtly and imperceptibly, in the name of national intimacy. Lee’s focus on Lelia’s gentle indoctrination of the new generation of immigrants into the fabric of America’s Benetton-like illusion of sameness through nursery rhymes and a “day’s secret phrase” speaks to the ways in which national histories are frequently communicated and fostered through emotional appeals that cleanse the nation of difference by lauding the virtues of sameness: song and poetry (Lee, 1995, p. 348). As Steve Sweeney-Turner (2001) argues, song and poetry are crucial to celebrating and establishing the history of nationhood: “the power of song to define the limits of the nation, almost a bardic power, is at the very least equal to the power of the political sphere itself” (p. 212). Like songs, nursery rhymes are products of culture-specific ideologies, wherein the function is to affirm national pride and educate future citizens in the ways of the nation.75 Not surprisingly, Henry “cowers when anyone repeats the day’s secret phrase” (Lee, 1995, p. 348). Refusing to repeat the phrase of the day, “gently down the stream,” Henry performs an interesting transversal of affirmation. He affirms that which does not wish to be affirmed: the postindustrial, colour-blind racism that masquerades as an anti-racist rhetoric of inclusion. Henry mirrors the eternal return of displacement and thus transforms what Mahtani (2014) calls “cultural amnesia and strategic forgetting” into a process of willful negation of the nation that would have preferred to remain blind (p. 4). In a true Nietzschean manner, Henry’s monstrous subjection performs the kind of “overcoming” or “surpassing” of self that Nietzsche invokes in his work. As Zarathustra says in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the pitting of good against evil is merely a formula for wielding love as power: “With your values and formulae of good and evil, ye exercise power, ye valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparking, trembling, and overflowing of your souls” (Nietzsche, 1909, p. 88). As the Speech Monster, Henry becomes an active force in transvaluing racial trajectories and economies that are frequently reframed as reactive forces rather than indicted as existing dynamics of hate. In his “monstrous” enactment of the will to power, he, paradoxically and pataphysically, returns the racial (and imagined) projections back to the nation in the form of a spectacle that mouths the injuries of the (hate) speech that killed his son. Lee’s Native Speaker concludes with the notion that although hate is transferred by “mouth,” it begins with ideological violations and territorializations of the soul—whether through home, school, or larger

Racing Alienation and the Politics of Violence in Native Speaker

145

political influences. Albeit these violations are symbolic forms of murder, they represent the first step to physical and full-fledged hate violence and crime. Assimilation is a form of cultural appropriation that asphyxiates the ethnic presence by the “adoring mob of hands and feet, … necks and heads” (Lee, 1995, p. 106). In becoming the Speech Monster in Lelia’s classroom, Henry thus provides a glimpse into what Lee calls “the scariest dystopias … of the soul” (Naimon, 2014, p. 124).76 As Lee says, “Acceptance is not only more realistic; it’s more chilling. It’s a simpler struggle when you can see the adversary. But what happens when one no longer senses that there’s even a conflict?” (Naimon, 2014, p. 124). The denial of the very existence of racial conflict represents one of the primary symptoms of what Bonilla-Silva (2015) refers to as “new [colour-blind] racism” (p. 57). What is new about it is not that racism exists but that it unfolds and infiltrates in diverse, yet imperceptible, ways. Consequently, in keeping with this message, the ending of Lee’s novel preempts a tidy conclusion. Despite negating the universalizing tendencies promoted by American multiculturalism, tendencies that strive to exterminate Otherness in the name of freedom and cultural inclusion, the ending merely faces the difference that eternally returns.

PART III THE GLOBAL APPETITE FOR DYSTOPIA

CHAPTER SIX CONSUMING THE HOLOCAUST: THE POSTMEMORY RE-PRODUCTION OF HUMAN TRAUMA AND THE FIRE OF FORMAL INDIGESTION IN SHALOM AUSLANDER’S HOPE: A TRAGEDY

In the wake of the Cold War, the lessons of the Holocaust provided a moral compass. Removed from its original national and ethnic context, the Holocaust—or, specifically, the memory of the Holocaust—was compared to other events. This led to the creation of moral guideposts that were used, among other ways, to legitimate political and military interventions. This is not to say, however, that all of this unfolded in a linear fashion. On the contrary, what we are dealing with is a highly contested terrain on which various groups attempt to claim the memories of the Holocaust as their own. —Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006), The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, p. 132 The Museum is indeed the symbolic place where the work of abstraction assumes its most violent and outrageous form. —Maurice Blanchot (1971/1999), Friendship, p. 147 A misconstruction of history begins right in the parking lot: visitors think they have arrived at the periphery of Auschwitz I; in fact they are already in the middle of the camp as it existed in 1945. … A visit to Auschwitz I takes time, and visitors from abroad who spend the preceding night in the relative comfort of the Holiday Inn in the somewhat distant city of Cracow have little time left after their arrival in Auschwitz, their lunch and guided tour, to undertake a cursory trip to the enormous [gas chamber] site at Birkenau. —Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt (1994), “Reclaiming Auschwitz,” pp. 234, 242

150

Chapter Six

Violence—both symbolic and physical—is perpetuated by conflicting intimacies and projections of radical or, as this book has so far argued, ecstatic difference that finds its expression through spectacle, through being put on display for others to see and, thus, inevitably to mis-see. The act of mis-seeing relies on hatred as a form of intimacy. Such intimacies generate complex politics of hatred that court public consumption while simultaneously radicalizing difference as the exclusive site of Otherness that is interpreted as a threat or violation but also as a titillating fetish. War atrocities and genocides are not immune to the mass culture’s glut enterprise, “in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source value” (Sontag, 2003, p. 23). Unsurprisingly, “the iconography of suffering” pervades American mass culture, from reality TV and Hollywood history genre films to TV news (Sontag, 2003, p. 42). Similarly, so-called artistic representations of genocide and traumatic events as a personal and personalized act mostly trivialize rather than challenge the post-memorial reproduction of suffering and pain on which global discourses of emancipation and success paradoxically depend (Sontag, 2003, p. 41). As Susan Sontag (2003) writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, “the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked” (p. 41). Not surprisingly, the pornographic portrayals of the Holocaust memory have been sanctioned by critics who have bemoaned the mythologization of the traumatic experience as a trite souvenir encounter with the past, which remains blind to the core complexities of historical events as such. In Native Speaker (1995), Chang-Rae Lee aligns this blindness with multicultural discourses and their xenophobic perpetuation of racial hatred sublimated through “cultural amnesia” and “strategic forgetting” (Mahtani, 2014, p. 4). Jean Baudrillard (1995) suggests that such strategic forgetting often rides under the banner of “artificial memory,” a memory that “restages” traumatic moments through discourses of survival (p. 49). Baudrillard emphasizes that “forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way—it is achieved in retro, finally elevated here to a mass level” (p. 49). As remembering morphs into forgetting and forgetting into remembering, historical atrocities and genocidal events become casualties of bombast-driven visual imagery, cinematic sound bites, pieta tourism, and global consumerism. On December 11th, 1986, when Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel delivered his Nobel Lecture titled “Hope, Despair, and Memory,” he anticipated what he saw as the “aberration of ‘civilization’” caused by globalization and its penchant for “scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism,

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

151

racism, [and] mass hysteria” (Wiesel, 1986, n. pag.). In the lecture, Wiesel pondered the significance of memory and hope in the age of global forgetting. While he acknowledged the linguistic and semantic impossibility of representing genocidal events, he insisted that “hope without memory is like memory without hope” (Wiesel, 1986, n. pag.). In his speech, Wiesel also noted that memory, like hope, has become a casualty of mass consumerism and its ecstatic glut of identifying and reducing the pain of others to a consumable fetish or a tourist souvenir. When in the summer of 2014, the New York Post ran an article titled “Smiling Auschwitz Selfie Sparks Twitter Outrage,” Wiesel’s concern about the aberration of contemporary civil society came to pass. The story of Breanna Mitchell, a 20-year-old woman who toured Auschwitz to commemorate her father, produced a controversial Twitter-war: some defended Breanna’s “selfless” act of remembrance while others dismissed her gesture as an act of cruel ignorance.77 Breanna’s story, however, encapsulated the general ethos or lack thereof of contemporary American society: that genocides are fair game for the global consumer appetite.78 The Holocaust as a media consumable and a “universal [moral] imperative” has ironically become an ecstatic rite of passage for many young Americans who are generations, as well as landscapes and cultures, removed from the experience (Levy & Sznaider, 2006, p. 133). In America and Israel, but also in Europe, the memory of the Holocaust is increasingly being subject to “the denationalizing of collective memory” and is thus reduced to an individualized, albeit universalized, memory (p. 133). From world museums and memorials to history films and documentaries, the iconography of the Shoah and the deaths of more than 1.5 million people continue to be the subject of persistent resuscitation of memory, prepackaged as a sanitized form of bathos, nostalgia, and forgetting. Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider (2006) note that since World War II (WWII), the U.S. has “appropriated” the experience through the so-called “Americanization of the Holocaust” by transforming it into a “universal imperative” through mass media, art exhibitions, museums, memorials, and so-called Holocaust tourism (p. 132). Generations of young Americans have travelled to Cracow to experience “the Jewish culture that was wiped out by the Nazis” by touring Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz and Birkenau (Levy & Sznaider, 2006, p. 137). According to a 2015 Daily Mail Online article, over 1,534,000 people visited Auschwitz in 2014, making the memorial site the “world’s most unlikely tourist hot spot” (Payne, 2015, n. pag.).79 However, as Levy and Sznaider (2006) emphasize, just as Cracow profits from such unorthodox and morbid tourism, young Americans participate in transforming this horrific event

152

Chapter Six

into an act of selective remembering, a kind of remembering that appropriates the memory that belongs to those who have not been able to communicate it and thus turn it into yet another form of consumable or worse, narcissistic, identification (p. 137). Challenging this identification, Elie Wiesel in his 1986 Nobel speech presents hope as an essential “call to memory,” a “noble and necessary act” to foster a peaceful rebuilding of a society gone mad (n. pag.). In his debut novel Hope: A Tragedy, Shalom Auslander (2012) takes Elie Wiesel’s call for hope and/as memory to task by asking whether forgetting, if only as a respectful form of working through and keening of authentic memory, can be a possible corrective to artificial memory or the kind of memory that sensationalizes pain and suffering for the sake of personal narcissism and cheap collective identification. Following the tragic journey of Solomon Kugel, the hopeful everyman or, as critics like Roberta Rosenberg (2013, p. 112) have called him, schlemiel, the novel sets out to explore the intricacies of the American appropriation of the Holocaust,80 specifically through Kugel’s mother and her “editorializing” of their family history, as well as through the unwelcome yet famous guest who assumes residence in Kugel’s family attic in the upstate New York town of Stockton: an aging and “horribly disfigured” elderly woman, Holocaust survivor Anne Frank (Auslander, 2012, p. 25). Whether Anne Frank is merely a figment of Kugel’s imagination or his Holocaust-crazed Mother’s doppelgänger remains ambiguous. For Auslander, the image of Anne Frank as a forever-hopeful survivor and writer of best-sellers provides a springboard for a biting and in-depth critique of the American Dream and its “Promised Land” utopia, an idyllic Stockton writ large. Pervading the novel is Auslander’s tongue-in-cheek humour, which cuts through the “fiction” of the so-called utopian idyll and offers instead a necessary insight into the messiness of being and its “horrible nonfiction” (Auslander, 2012, p. 291). Hope: A Tragedy interrogates hope as an insatiable hunger for fulfillment that is forever deferred. The more Kugel pursues his “search for some unattainable truth” (p. 67), the more conflicted he becomes. Turning to books and “voracious” reading, “hungry for facts and knowledge,” Kugel feels confined to a life of indigestion that symbolically evokes not only his identity crisis (about the complexity of his Jewish heritage) but also his mental and bodily discomfort with the consumer world. For Kugel, this world of endless consumption becomes a symbolic toilet, promising catharsis yet containing filth (Auslander, 2012, p. 291). Through Kugel, the repressed romantic-turned-cynic who suffers from gluten intolerance and consumer indigestion, Auslander comments on the increasingly global appetite for

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

153

agony—be it in the form of tragic events or, what Kugel calls in reference to his mother, “Misery Olympics” (p. 76). Married to an aspiring writer named Bree, Kugel is a man who is “hellbent on life, … expect[ing] too much of it,” as his therapist, Professor Jove, says (Auslander, 2012, p. 4). Tired of the hard-strung life of New York and decimated by nearly losing his toddler son to pneumonia, Kugel decides to move his family to the small rural village of Stockton, population 2,400, in upstate New York (p. 12). “Looking for a home unencumbered by history” (p. 12), specifically his mother’s Holocaust lessons and historical segues into the tragic Jewish fate, Kugel is eager for a “new start” (p. 13). To his chagrin, his relocation is marked by more drama than he could have ever imagined: his Holocaust-crazed mother and an unwanted attic occupant called Anne Frank dominate his new abode. Both are unrelenting in their demands. No matter how much Kugel strives to escape his past,—his heritage and its (unwanted) transgenerational phantoms, whether in the form of the elderly Anne Frank or his mother’s endless kibitzing about Holocaust victims—his Jewish heritage always finds him. The moment he realizes that there is no escape, he burns to death while trying to rescue Anne Frank from the attic that his own mother set on fire. For Kugel, hope is deadly. The novel’s tragic arc lampoons the ancient Greeks, specifically their understanding of hope, as tantalizing yet inaccessible to humankind; as the Greek myth would have it, hope (elpis), of all things, remains trapped at the bottom of the jar that Pandora opens, only to release evil and calamities into the world.81 As Aeschylus says in the famed line of Persians, “if a man rushes to his own doom, then the gods will help him” (Aeschylus, trans. 1998, line 742). Extending this notion to the consumer spirit of the global age, Auslander’s novel similarly suggests that if a man wishes his own destruction, consumerism will be there to assist in his gradual, and sometimes instant, descent and demise. Consequently, rejecting the global sensationalization and appropriation of the Holocaust memory as the primary aspect of American Jewish identification, Auslander interrogates this consumer politics as a burning guilt that has nothing to do with remembering and more to do with forgetting. Echoing Baudrillard’s (1995) notion that “one no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and image track, the universal screen and the microprocessor” (p. 49), Hope: A Tragedy (2012) not only mocks the “commodification of Jewish trauma” (Barkin, 2013, p. 132), but it also debunks the ways in which the Holocaust memory paradoxically feeds the consumer appetite for images of war and atrocities and has thus been reduced to a visual

154

Chapter Six

“food” for the gaze. The novel also examines the parallel between the Holocaust as a sacrificial “burnt offering”82 and the global consumerism manifested in Kugel’s mother’s burning desire to remember the Holocaust that she never experienced, Anne Frank’s appetite to create more bestsellers, the continual acts of arson in Stockton, and Kugel’s indigestion. This parallel delineates the novel’s concern with America’s appropriation of the Holocaust memory as well as with the increasing personalization of the traumatic experience of those whose voices cannot be heard or documented. The novel thus debunks American mass culture’s preoccupation with remembering as a perpetual restaging of violence and amnesia in which all genocides, including the Holocaust, originate. Part parody, part tragedy, Auslander’s novel combines postmodernity’s self-consciousness about the limitations of history with a biting critique of the ways in which media (and individuals) feed off historical genocides and brutalities to suggest, in the words of Auslander’s character Pinkus, that “we are getting better” (Auslander, 2012, p. 203). Invoking the ghost of Anne Frank as an elderly Holocaust survivor living in his protagonist’s attic, Auslander broaches the unbroachable by adopting the perspective of the generation who has inherited the memory but not the experience. Although Auslander frequently blurs the line between Kugel’s mother’s and Anne Frank’s antics, his rendering of the archetypal “woman in the attic,” the dark haunting presence of the suppressed past, embodies what Giorgio Agamben (2002) refers to as the “lacuna” of bearing witness (p. 39). As the haunting but also commodified presence of historical atrocities, Auslander suggests that Anne Frank’s story has become subject to an extermination of its own kind: a media cleansing whereby visual images of violent history are used to canonize rather than critique and expose “radical evil” (Badiou, 2006) or “the iconography of suffering” (Sontag, 2003, p. 42). What the novel uncovers is the Disneyfication of genocides as a fodder for the spectacle that feeds ecstatic consumption, whereby the viewer/tourist achieves an exaltation by proxy—through a morbid identification with the victims, an identification that allows the viewer/tourist to remember selectively and thus, ironically, to “feel better” by comparison.

“Misery Olympics”: From Memorials, Museums, and Mementos to the Ecstasy of Postmemory Born in Momsey, New York to an orthodox Jewish family, Shalom Auslander is interested in dismantling any kind of family, religious, philosophical, or political dogma. Author of a memoir called Foreskin’s

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

155

Lament (2007) and a collection of short stories, Beware of God: Stories (2005), Auslander is the sort of writer this century desperately needs: he is eloquent, inspiring, and daring. His first novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012), is a testament to his incredible literary agility and desire to parse through the nonessential in order to punctuate the core. Refusing to be a master of ellipses, Auslander aspires to be a “shit-stirrer” like the writers he admires—Voltaire, Beckett, Roth, Kafka, and Bruce.83 Hope: A Tragedy not only disturbs; it also dares to challenge the society bent on the spectacle, defined by Guy Debord (1983) as “nothing more than its desire to sleep” (p. 21). Striving to awaken the consumer culture from its slumber, Auslander delves into its social basement, releasing the hope that is also a tragedy, relentless in its abstractions of evil and hell-bent on universalizing truths that are safely ensconced within the confines of artificially-constructed mementos, memorials, and museums—hot spots where cultures are surveyed by the tourist gaze and assimilated into a global collection. As Hope: A Tragedy reveals, such assimilation is a form of extermination, leaving no space for alternative interpretations or questions. Subject to a diaspora of victimhood and media banalization, the Holocaust memory itself has fallen prey to the hegemonic institutionalization of the “miracle of survival” and the possibility of liberation (Sontag, 2003, p. 87; Levy & Sznaider, 2006, p. 141). Both are a form of rewriting or fiction that, as Kugel’s real estate agent, Eve, insists, is an essential part of consumer society’s appetite for the “fake,” because “the nonfiction is too damned much to bear” (Auslander, 2012, pp. 17, 291). The human penchant for fiction-making, for dissembling, is what makes Auslander’s “tragedy” incisive yet comic. While critics such as Roberta Rosenberg (2015) have recently applauded Auslander’s sense of “diasporic humour” and his parsing of “icons of suffering and persecution that represent barriers between American Jews and gentiles” (p. 117), this section argues that Auslander’s representation of the Holocaust memory and its increasing reduction to a tourist consumable or a collective souvenir expands well beyond the diasporic identification. The novel provides an intriguing insight into the American appropriation or “Americanization” of the Shoah (Levy & Sznaider, 2006, p. 134). However, it primarily explores the wider, more concerning phenomenon of contemporary culture, specifically its ecstatic drive for the spectacle of pain and suffering—be it in the form of state politics, racial hatred, or mass consumption. What makes Auslander’s novel particularly poignant and relevant to the 21st century is his pataphysical emphasis on the ecstatic tenor of the .

156

Chapter Six

postmillennial society, wherein atrocities are regularly transformed into media sound bites and tourist curios, where “agony [is] ecstasy, ecstasy agony” (Auslander, 2012, p. 58). Echoing Baudrillard’s (2008) notion of contemporary society as being “caught up in a … passion for intensifying, for escalation, for an increase in power, for ecstasy” (p. 27), Auslander’s novel questions the ways in which hope and happiness have been co-opted by the lust for the tragic but also by the global (and frequently universalized) “morality tales” of pain and suffering that culminate in liberation and survival. Pain and misery, as Auslander’s novel suggests, have become a common currency in the global “game of thrones,” where those who partake in hope die and those who dissemble win. Kugel’s mother is the embodiment of this dialectic. Born in Brooklyn to a middle-class family, she experienced a relatively idyllic childhood. As Kugel learns from his grandmother, “the Kugels were fifth-generation Americans; none of them had been in the war. They had lost family in the Holocaust, of course, but most had been cousins, and most of those quite distant” (Auslander, 2012, p. 68). Regardless of her “cheerful youth in Brooklyn, … playful adolescence in the Catskills,” and her “contented” life as a “wife in northeastern suburbia” (p. 68), Mother’s idyll crumbles when her marriage and subsequent divorce leave her stranded with two young children, Kugel and his sister Hannah. Unwilling to accept her dystopian suburban reality, Kugel’s mother resorts to compensating for her loss and pain with what Kugel refers to as “fabrications” and “myths” (p. 68). From then on, she becomes addicted to suffering. At bedtime, she reads books about the Holocaust to Kugel, who is traumatized by “the photographs: of mass graves, starved prisoners, piles of naked corpses” (p. 64). As his Mother subjects her past to a constant “rewriting” and “editorializing” (p. 106), Kugel grows up fearing “inanimate objects” such as a bar of soap or his lampshade, which Mother anthropomorphizes to teach him about his Jewish heritage (p. 65). In her persistent attempt to identify with the victims of the Holocaust, Kugel’s mother inevitably performs the kind of hegemonic mimicry whereby she appropriates the pain and suffering of others in lieu of coping or working through her own suffering. Kugel’s mother inevitably subscribes to what Levy and Sznaider (2006) refer to as “comparative victimhood”: a generalized appropriation of the victim’s experience as a personal and personalized event extended to others. Such comparative victimhood underpins what they identify as the “twofold role [of] … the Americanization of the Holocaust” (p. 132). Levy and Sznaider emphasize that

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

157

on the one hand, the American media have turned the Holocaust into a product for consumption; on the other hand, they have transformed it into a universal imperative, making the issue of universal human rights politically relevant to all who share this new form of memory. (p. 133)

Thus stripping the historical event of its deep psychological, ethnic, and cultural significance, the universalization of the experience not only globalizes the event but also subjects it to increasing personalization and privatization. However, as scholars including Theodor W. Adorno (1974), Dominick LaCapra (1994), and Geoffrey Hartman (1994) have emphasized, historical trauma, like history itself, can be merely approached or mediated through narrative. As Hartman (1994) writes, “what the narrator [of historical trauma] offers as unmediated reality is already a historical artefact” since “the Holocaust remains inaccessible” (p. 57). In this context, history postulates “a problem” (LaCapra, 1994, p. 26). Survivors themselves are unable to relate their experience in a way other than through what Giorgio Agamben (2002) refers to as a “lacuna … [in] bearing witness” (p. 21). While the survivor’s responsibility is to remember or “call to memory” (Wiesel, 1986, n. pag.), their testimony is bound to attest to “something like an impossibility of bearing witness” or, in other words, “to something [that] is impossible to bear witness to,” because it cannot be expressed or narrativized (Agamben, 2002, p. 34). The danger of examining or attempting to represent historical events lies in the inevitable displacement caused by personalization. The survivor’s traumatic content is thus subject to mediation through the process of (individualized) translation and repetition. The postwar as well as the postmillennial generations are hence relegated to a repetitive, if not compulsive, historicizing of the Holocaust genocide. An essential part of such compulsive historicizing involves the production of comparative narratives, whereby other genocides are viewed and deployed as comparable or through “the increasing canonization of the Holocaust” as a global event relatable to other genocidal events (LaCapra, 1994, p. 23). Imagination thus steps in to compensate for “lack of direct experience” (Hartman, 1994, p. 57). Historians like Marianne Hirsch (2012) have recently argued that the role of imaginary compensation can serve as a positive means of dealing with cultural trauma via “postmemory” (p. 3). Suggesting that traumatic historical events continue to have an impact on many generations, Hirsch argues that “in certain extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not actually there to live an event” (p. 3). In other words, postmemory consists of an inherited series of narratives, visual snapshots, or none of the above:

158

Chapter Six

it becomes a personal and personalized archive produced by a family member, scholar, or an artist. Before exploring Hirsch’s argument further, it might be useful to define the term “postmemory.” Hirsch (2012) defines postmemory as the “relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experience they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up” (p. 5). Hirsch emphasizes that “postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (p. 5). The very structural aspect of postmemory thus speaks to the lacunae and ruptures created by traumatic events passed on from generation to generation or inherited by the nation. In most postmemorial documents, the family album becomes a primary trope of reactivation of memory. As Hirsch (2012) suggests, family images provide a means of connecting with a wider public and thus serve in cultivating a public memory: this “adoption” of public, anonymous images into the family photo album finds its counterpart in the pervasive use of private, familial images and objects in institutions of public display and museums and memorials like the Tower of Faces in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or certain exhibits in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. (p. 35)

While Hirsch acknowledges that the generalization of the traumatic experience via “familial images” can be a form of “obfuscation,” she insists that they allow for a “mutual recognition that define family images—narratives” (p. 35). However, it is this so-called familial recognition as an inevitable form of postmemorial misrecognition and universalization that Auslander’s novel calls into question. In Hope: A Tragedy, Kugel’s mother becomes the paragon of Hirsch’s notion of postmemory. Desperate to imbue her life with a meaning, she sets out to assemble her family album, which strives to “reactivate and reembody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (Hirsch, 2012, p. 33). These familial forms and aesthetic expressions consist of some authentic family photographs but mainly of newspaper clippings and images of Holocaust victims. Throughout Kugel’s childhood, Mother resorts to cutting out photographs and images from newspapers and magazines to create a complete family album for her children. While her intention is to teach her children about their Jewish background, her constant “editorializ[ing]” backfires, as it is

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

159

based on her own fictional and fictionalized rewriting of her immediate family history (Auslander, 2012, p. 106). When Mother insists on creating a family scrapbook for Kugel’s son Jonah, Kugel is frustrated and annoyed. Her album contains not only the “faded black-and-white photos of families playing in the sand at the beach, beaming brides and proud grooms, sepia-toned families enjoying a round of badminton … ” but also “a news photograph of prisoners at Buchenwald, some press clipping about pogroms in the Soviet Union, a collage of Kristallnacht, corpse piles at Dachau, [and] mass graves at Auschwitz” (Auslander, 2012, p. 106). As Kugel’s mother tries to balance the idyll of her immediate family album with her ancestors’ tragic reality, her news photos and clippings “[outnumber] … the photographs of any actual Kugels” (p. 106). Consequently, Mother’s attempt at editorializing or narrativizing the events to which she lacks access can be viewed as an attempt to pay respect, but it also generates acknowledgement that traumatic historical events continue to have an impact on generations to come. On the other hand, her postmemorial narrativization of such events also risks globalizing them, making them subject to both personal and public, as well as mass appropriation. The globalization and increasing universalization of the Holocaust memory as a familial and personal postmemory is what Auslander critiques in his novel. Levy and Sznaider (2006), on the other hand, suggest that although critics typically indict mass culture for turning the Holocaust into a consumer spectacle, it is important to acknowledge the role that mass culture plays in educating the masses, albeit as a “lifeaffirming pagan ritual” (p. 138). And yet, Auslander’s novel refuses to provide any such aesthetic apologia for mass culture. Even though Auslander acknowledges in his interview with Killian Fox (2012) that he is “the last person in the world who ever thought [he’d] write a Holocaust book” because “[he] was raised on it so much and [he’s] sick of it” (para. 1), his protagonist is eager to search for meaning even though “there isn’t one” (Fox, 2012, para. 5). In this search for meaning, the novel parodies the ways in which society and media turn historical atrocities into a spectacle of suffering, a spectacle in which the viewer identifies with the victim and remembers, as well as “feel[s] better” by comparison. Echoing LaCapra’s (1994) concern that the “increasing canonization of the Holocaust” merely “involves the mitigation of covering over of wounds” rather than expressing them (p. 23), Auslander takes issue with the kind of compensatory role that imagination plays in media but also in discourses grappling with the very politics of genocide. Hope: A Tragedy is particularly critical of the ways in which globalization has contributed to

160

Chapter Six

repackaging genocidal events—be they related to the Holocaust, Kosovo, Rwanda, or 9/11—as a consumable tourist, albeit shocking, experience of pain and suffering. Auslander exemplifies the consumption of historical narratives of suffering and agony through his incisive shredding of the postmillennial Holocaust tourism through Kugel’s mother, who chooses to take Kugel to Jerusalem for his bar mitzvah and then, on a stopover in Berlin, insists on touring one of the German death camps in order to provide her son with a few morality lessons on his “unbearable lightness of being” American or, as she puts it, to awaken him from his “comfortable American life” (Auslander, 2012, p. 175). After spending the night in Berlin, Kugel’s mother realizes that “all the really famous death camps were far away, much too far away for a day trip, so she had to settle for the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen” (Auslander, 2012, p. 175). Mother is disappointed, agonizing that “they don’t want us to see the real death camps” (p. 175). When they finally reach the camp, she is adamant about documenting the experience by photographing Kugel with his head in one of the ovens (p. 177). Dismayed by his mother’s behavior, Kugel resists, but she insists: Open it, she said to him. So we can see. Kugel reached over, pulled the heavy door open, and faced the camera. What are you doing? She asked. What? Stop smiling. Oh. Look into the oven. Not all the way in, Solomon, just with your eyes. (p. 177)

Uncomfortable and bamboozled by his mother’s behaviour, Kugel spends most of his time trying to accommodate his mother’s demands. Whenever he tries to interject, she interrupts him, saying that he “wouldn’t last five minutes in Auschwitz” (p. 174). Upon their return to the airport, she reprimands him: “you completely ruined the whole concentration camp for me, you know that? You ruined the whole damn camp” (p. 175). The scene not only exposes the lacunae of memory recall, but it also challenges the ethical issues related to the kind of postmemorial bearing witness of which Hirsch (2012) writes. Emphasizing the incredulous consumerism of the Holocaust mass tourism, Auslander exposes the challenges that postmemory poses ethically. Is it a form of remembrance or a compensatory narcissism, whereby the very magnitude of historical trauma and its atrocities are reduced to a populist, albeit private, photo capture? As Susan Sontag

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

161

(2003) eloquently argues, the problem with photographs is that, while they frequently masquerade as evidence, they “[eclipse] other forms of understanding, and remembering” (p. 89). In addition, while their original function is paradoxically to bear witness, they “lose their power to shock” (p. 89).84 Death camp photographs instead objectify and reduce the trauma subject to a museum exhibit and a mass spectacle. More importantly, as Sontag reminds us, the “perpetual recirculation” of Holocaust memorabilia through Holocaust museums fails to account for the suffering and pain, the unresolved grief, and the inaccessible traumatic lacunae (p. 87). According to Sontag (2003), the spectacle of mass suffering captured in and through photographs does the very opposite: instead of bearing witness to death, it evokes the “miracle of survival” (p. 87). The very notion of survival, however, pushes the traumatic event into the background, reducing it to a narrative backdrop rather than a serious wound that requires healing and working through. In contemporary culture, the emphasis on survival as a leitmotif of genocide reigns supreme. In its “image” or simulated form, this so-called “miracle of survival” serves as the mass beacon of hope. This leitmotif permeates the Holocaust genre of Hollywood films, including Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), as well as more recent productions like Jan HĜebejk’s Divided We Fall (2000), Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), and Brian Percival’s The Book Thief (2013). Not only are such films oriented towards the future, but they also downplay the trauma of the event itself by redirecting attention elsewhere: to the potential or hope for survival. The main focus in such mass-mediated narratives of the Holocaust remains on the victims and perpetrators, but there is also a focus on the spectators, who are called upon to save the victims from their plight. In Film and the Holocaust, Aaron Kerner (2011) argues that not only is the victim/perpetrator/ spectator triad an essential part of “major thematic tropes of a Holocaust film” (p. 4), but the use of such well-established dramatic formulae highlighting action and a thriller-like feel also distracts from the real content. In Kerner’s words, “the Holocaust in many cases only serves as a backdrop or narrative alibi for dramatic conflict and/or a test of a character fortitude that fosters his or her transformation” (p. 32). Reduced to a dramatic spectacle, the magnitude of suffering remains occluded as it becomes a fodder for the gaze. Museums, however, are also susceptible to the agonistic consumption that feeds the ecstasy of suffering. Walter Benjamin (1968) in his Illuminations warned of the collector’s drive and the occlusive, exterminating aspect of collecting.85 Similarly, in 1971, Maurice Blanchot

162

Chapter Six

spoke of the “museum sickness” as “something insuperably barbarous” (Blanchot, 1971/1999, p. 41). Like Benjamin, Blanchot associates modern society’s preoccupation with museums and memorabilia with domination. In his view, “technical advances give us art,” but they also “give us possession of everything and access to everything through a power of domination that scares some and drives others but can be stopped by no one” (p. 41). According to Blanchot, museums collect information and evidence, but by selectively placing them within a collection or exhibition or a visual frame, they inevitably exterminate the historical content. Blanchot calls this process “abstraction”—in his words, “the Museum is indeed the symbolic place where the world abstraction assumes its most violent and outrageous form” (p. 47). The detailed yet amended reconstructions of the former death camps for tourist purposes are a case in point. Although the goal of converting former death camps into national and international museums is to never forget, the tourist agenda—which includes attending restaurants where tourists gorge on food before undertaking a tour of the camp, including the gas chamber sites—is far from respectful and “almost pornographic” (Dwork & van Pelt, 1994, p. 241). As Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt (1994) substantiate in their study, the reconstruction of Auschwitz as a museum required certain amendments and omissions of the original site. For example, what was formerly a prisoner’s bath has been transformed into a cafeteria (p. 238). The bookstore similarly omits the original history of the building. As Dwork and van Pelt (1994) emphasize, visitors are not told that what they see is a postwar reconstruction … [or that the] committee felt that a crematory was required at the end of the memorial journey, … [so] Crematory I was reconstructed to speak for the history of crematoria at Birkenau. (p. 239)

In their study, Dwork and van Pelt (1994) further detail the sophisticated plan of this reconstruction or simulacrum of the gas site. Emphasizing that Auschwitz I “was designed to be the permanent exhibit” as a PaĔstwowe muzeum OĞwiĊcim-Brzezinka to cement the historical tragedy of Polish (rather than Jewish) history, since the “fate of the Jews did not have an important place on the national agenda of post-war Poland” (p. 240). In other words, the museum offers a sanitized memory of the Holocaust, a memory that is in itself an elision and thus, inevitably, a redoubled form of symbolic extermination that appropriates and reassigns the memorial value elsewhere.86 But it is also exemplary of the imaginative “powers” of postmemory.

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

163

Auslander’s novel has no patience with such nonchalant usurpation sold as postmemory to the masses. When Mother takes Kugel on a tour of Sachsenhausen, she insists on seeing the whole camp but is aggravated by how extensive it is when looking at the map. She says, “Well, I’m never going to see it all now. … I can forget about seeing the Jewish barracks, they are the way hell over there. And the medical center is a twentyminute walk all by itself” (Auslander, 2012, p. 176). Despite her goal to provide Kugel with a lesson on morality, Mother is more concerned with the effort that the so-called tour through the camp will require. Pressed for time and eager to catch a train back to their primary destination, Mother opts for the gas chambers only, given “the limited time they had” (p. 176). Desperate to get her experience “in,” she interrupts the tour guide and asks: “Pardon me, … can you direct me to the gas chambers?” (p. 176). To Kugel’s surprise, the tour guide is nonplussed by the query, retorting, “This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen” (p. 176). Throughout Hope: A Tragedy, Auslander indicts Holocaust tourism as an obfuscation of the memory it strives to reconstruct. The novel takes issue with the very premise of postmemory as a postmodern simulation of atrocities that are thus left in the dust, forgotten, only to be resurrected again through what Kugel calls sarcastically “this cheap [mass] pseudo-mourning” (p. 207). Hope: A Tragedy complicates the very process of narrativizing memory, speaking to its lacunae and potentially unethical iterations. What does it mean to remember? Who has the right to remember? If narrative is the only vehicle a man has to remember, a vehicle that is, by its very origin, a form of translation and hence incomplete, what role can mass culture play in remembering? To question any aspiration at remembering correctly or ethically, Auslander uses terms such as “editorializing,” “fictionalizing,” and “rewriting” (Auslander, 2012, pp. 106, 287). Kugel’s mother is an expert at rewriting the past, but, as Auslander suggests, none of us has direct access to the past, no matter how idyllic or traumatic it might have been. Hope: A Tragedy thus refutes its own schism: hope is a tragedy only so far as it is understood as a future-oriented phenomenon.

Phantom Pains and the (Dis)Embodied Texts: From Agony to Heartburn Postmemory, Auslander suggests, cannot escape the complex dialectic between the nostalgic turn and hope for the future, presenting the spectator/reader/survivor with a lacuna that invites persistent attempts at narrativization and mediation. This lacuna represents what remains unsaid but also what is ultimately bound to return or “haunt” in the form of a

164

Chapter Six

cryptic memory that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994) refer to as a “transgenerational phantom” (p. 126). According to Abraham and Torok, the phantom is “the symbol of what cannot be symbolized” and thus recurs in the form of memories or words and scenes that speak to “the gaps left within [next generations] by the secrets of others” (p. 172). The phantom symbolically entombs an unresolved grief in the form of a “secretly perpetuated topography” or fantasy that takes on a life of its own (Torok & Abraham, 1994, p. 172). In Abraham and Torok’s (1994) terms, the phantom is “reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive … as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography” (p. 130). Abraham and Torok’s concept of the phantom is particularly relevant to Auslander’s conceptualization of the (dis)embodied memory that comes back to haunt members of post-Holocaust generations like Kugel’s mother; however, this phantom memory also haunts Kugel, his wife Bree, and their child Jonah, who is directly affected by his grandmother’s constant “editorializing” (Auslander, 2012, p. 106). In Hope: A Tragedy, the transgenerational memory takes on the form of an imagined presence—both bodily and textual—of an elderly tenant who calls herself Anne Frank and occupies Kugel’s Stockton home’s attic. Surrounded by hundreds of pages of an unfinished manuscript, Anne Frank is a daunting and grotesque presence. When Kugel one afternoon discovers her in his attic, he does not know whether he has gone mad or is dreaming. Not surprisingly, the time of his “phantom” discovery—when Kugel realizes that an “old hag” lives in his attic—is parallel to when his mother moves in. But while Anne Frank becomes the phantom embodiment of Kugel’s mother’s “emotional hoarding” and all the “ghosts and regret and longing and loss” (Auslander, 2012, p. 19),87 she is also the “secret topography” of Kugel’s own transgenerational guilt. This topography surfaces in an intriguing convergence between the attic as a topos, a site where the past is stored, and the ghost-like presence of Anne Frank, the body historic (and hysteric) coming to life. In the novel, the unspoken, redacted history of the Holocaust takes on an anthropomorphic form, whereby the line between the body historic and hysteric is blurred. Anne Frank is thus both a text and a body, both a historical and hysterical presence. When Kugel confronts her, Anne Frank is “hideous, horribly disfigured, and terribly old,” but she is also extremely vocal and neurotic (Auslander, 2012, p. 25). … the white of her eye yellowed with age, the left eye clouded with cataracts, dead, unseeing. Her skin, sallow and gray, was thin, almost transparent; the hair on her head, what there was of it, was sparse in some

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

165

places, bare in others. Her shoulders hunched up around her ears, and a massive hump on her back forced her skull forward so that she faced the ground, head bowed, even when looking straight ahead. (p. 25)

Anne Frank’s decrepit body evokes the lacunae of the past that cannot be accurately remembered. A grotesque objectification of transgenerational mourning that cannot be assuaged, Auslander’s Anne Frank represents the American usurpation of the Holocaust, as well as a more global tokenization executed by museums, media representations, and individuals. Invoking her memory as a survivor living in Kugel’s attic, desperate to write her next bestseller and prove herself as a serious writer rather than a memoirist, serves as an incisive socio-political commentary on the American and global appropriation and persistent editorializing of the Holocaust memory. Juxtaposing the larger-than-life persona of the simulacrum with Anne Frank, the real human being, the novel indicts the universal canonization of Anne Frank’s story as a paragon of hope and survival, or as Auslander (2012) puts it, “the most recognizable symbol of Jewish suffering … Miss Holocaust, 1945” (pp. 260, 266) . Exposing the co-optation of Anne Frank’s tragic story as a symbolic marker of the Holocaust memory, Auslander lampoons the consumer appetite for a good tragic story that stipulates the power of hope in dark times, a beacon of utopia shining bright. Hope: A Tragedy particularly critiques the ways in which Frank’s story has been fetishized by media and literary texts alike. Having inspired many Broadway renditions, TV shows, and films, as well as appearing in novels as a memory trace, Anne Frank’s personal diary has been reduced to a “motivational” story about the young writer’s tragic aspiration of becoming a writer. This hope was squashed when Anne and her family were discovered in the Annex by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz on September 3rd, 1944; later, she and her sister Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died in 1945. Born Annelies Marie Frank (1929–1945), Anne started writing her diary at the age of 13, when her father Otto gave her a red, grey, and tan cloth diary on June 12th, 1942 as a birthday present (Prose, 2009, p. 16). Anne’s diary in fact consisted of three separate notebooks (the original cloth diary and two exercise books) and spanned the period from June 12th, 1942 to August 4th, 1944. Anne, an aspiring writer, conceived two versions: a confessional diary, written in an epistolary form, and a revised, fictionalized form, in which she played with imaginary characters and worked through intricate revisions (Prose, 2009, p. 16). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (2012) note that Anne’s diary is a “text with a complex (and, until the mid-1980s relatively unknown)

166

Chapter Six

history of writing, rewriting, and editing, which involved not only Anne but also her father and others, who encountered the text only after her death” (p. 3). In this respect, the diary must be viewed as an “open text” and “an unfinished work, just as her life was cut short by her murder at the age of 15” (p. 5). Similarly, Auslander’s novel imagines Anne’s diary as a figurative living, breathing text that comes alive in the form of the “unkempt” and “gnarled” Anne Frank, the “old woman” in the attic, who stares back at the postmillennial consumer generation untouched by WWII trauma and suffering (p. 52). As a revenant,—reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha or Jean Rhys’s Antoinette, the mad woman in the attic88— Anne Frank becomes a spectre of the past but also a celebrity hiding from the public’s burning gaze. She is adamant about overcoming her reputation as a memoirist as well as correcting all the rewrites and editorializing done by others to her narrative. Critiquing how Frank’s life story has been hijacked by her father Otto, as well as many others, Auslander exposes the ways in which the author loses agency over the text and where, in the moment of its conception, writing takes a life of its own, separate from the author’s intentions or realities. In his interview with Killian Fox (2012) from The Guardian, Auslander admits: I hated Anne Frank when I started. When I was six or seven years old my parents would show me Dachau newsreels every Holocaust memorial day, and there’d always be this smiling little girl who symbolized man’s inhumanity to man and my eventual fate. (para. 2)

But after he finishes reading her diary, he realizes that he “dig[s] her fictional older self. She was … a shit-stirrer, a troublemaker, not some sad little victim” (para. 2). Auslander’s Anne Frank is a gutsy woman who writes into her old age, unwilling to give up, adamant about living up to, if not surpassing, her reputation. As she says to Kugel, “I’m a writer, Mr. Kugel! I am not a child! I’m not some goddamned memoirist! I am a writer!” (Auslander, 2012, p. 61). In Hope: A Tragedy, Anne becomes obsessed with writing her next best-selling novel, a text that keeps growing and multiplying into many iterations, which are stored in the boxes in Kugel’s dark and dusty attic. In her desperate drive to revamp her image as a child writer, Anne, the mad woman in the attic, types away her stories on her typewriter while eating matzoh. As she writes, she becomes hungrier and hungrier. She asks Kugel for more matzoh, as well as herring, gefilte fish, borscht, and a mini fridge to store her food in (Auslander, 2012, p. 61). Her hunger becomes symbolic of her desire to rewrite her past and thus reclaim control over her

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

167

life as text/text as life. Through Kugel’s and Anne Frank’s fictional encounter, Auslander envisions what Anne as a grown-up would think of the constant elisions and revised editions of her text. The fictional Anne tells Kugel that, while flattered by the attention to her diary, she is horrified by its trajectory from this “terrible thing, hideously conceived” to a symbol of the Holocaust (p. 59). Here, Auslander critiques the ways in which Anne Frank’s story has been not only objectified but also fetishized in the form of bookshop curios and mediations. The Anne Frank as a “paradigm but also something akin to a brand” comes under fire in Auslander’s novel (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett & Shandler, 2012, p. 12). Auslander indicts the ecstatic consumption of the Anne Frank “experience,” whether it pertains to numerous rewrites of her diary, the miniature keychains with Anne Frank’s picture, or the oversized replicas of her diary and souvenir excerpts of her writing on display in the Anne Frank House Museum. As this section has argued, the Anne Frank in Hope: A Tragedy, an elderly guest in Kugel’s attic, signifies the phantom memory haunting the postwar generations in the form of a textual body whose physical presence is grotesque and decrepit, yet palpable and daunting. In this context, Anne Frank’s diary is the disembodied text, murdered by numerous, unauthorized rewrites. Auslander embodies the text through the elderly “tenant” in Kugel’s attic. In the novel, the line between Anne Frank, the phantom, and Kugel’s mother, the unwanted tenant (and so-called survivor) is deliberately blurred to expose the ways in which memories, texts, and also physical bodies can be appropriated and commodified. This liminal schism symbolizes the redoubling of Frank’s original text-turned-palimpsest of texts or textual (albeit disembodied) bodies. As such, the “original” diary—like Anne Frank herself, the teenager who died in Bergen-Belsen— represents the lacunae and elisions of (post)memory. Abraham and Torok (1994) state that these lacunae sublimate in postgenerations in the form of the “phantom” as “a whole world of unconscious fantasy …, one that leads to its own separate and concerted existence” (p. 130). Not surprisingly, as the symbol and textual embodiment of unresolved mourning, Anne Frank blurs the line between the textual body and a (dis)embodied text. When Kugel discovers her in his farmhouse attic, her body is shrinking, her hair is “wiry,” and “her gnarled hands were capped with yellowed, talonlike fingernails” (Auslander, 2012, p. 52). Her twisted and bent body represents the tortured and contorted history of her diary gone rogue. Auslander’s novel thus sutures not only Anne’s life but also her complex textual trajectory and thus conceives an alternative, albeit grotesque, space where Anne Frank’s (textual) encounters can be confronted and, to an

168

Chapter Six

extent, allowed a repose from consumer glut. The novel thus documents the global mythography and mythologizing of Frank’s diary, which has been usurped by the masses. The strenuous history of Anne Frank’s diary’s “life” has been welldocumented. First discovered by Miep Gies, Otto Frank’s friend and assistant who helped the Franks hide in the annex, and then subjected to many revisions by Otto himself, it was published (under Otto’s watchful editorial eye) as Het Alterhuis in 1947.89 While Otto’s edits of Anne’s accounts were meant to serve as an “eyewitness document, a war testimony and Holocaust narrative” (Prose, 2009, p. 8), the revised manuscript elided the rigorous process of Anne’s rewriting and rethinking of paragraphs and lines, her constant redrafting and cutting. In her diary, Anne mentions her desire to become a journalist, but she also speaks to her writing process, commenting on the challenges of being a good writer (Prose, 2009, p. 13). Moreover, as Prose (2009) emphasizes, Anne technically wrote two books: her diary and her own revision or “edited version” (p. 18). This edited version underwent further redrafting under Otto’s heavy pen. Interestingly, Anne’s desperate attempt to outwrite her first manuscript becomes the heart of Auslander’s novel. As mentioned earlier in this section, the elderly Anne Frank in Auslander’s novel sets up camp in Kugel’s attic to finish her book. Surrounded by boxes of drafts that have accumulated over her 60 years of residence, Anne is adamant about fighting against her image of a Holocaust memoirist. Although flattered that “thirty-two million copies” of her diary have been read, she emphasizes that she is “not some goddamned memoirist” (Auslander, 2012, p. 61). Outraged by the way in which she has been reduced to a “martyr”, Anne insists that she is “a writer” (p. 61). And yet, her work continues to be promoted and edited to fit the needs of the market. Although Anne acknowledges that “thirty-two million copies … is nothing to sneeze at” (p. 61), she is insulted by the editor who emphasizes the importance of martyrdom and death. She tries to tell him that she is a survivor, but the editor advises her to “stay dead” (p. 60). Here, Auslander refers to the speculations about Anne Frank’s potential survival, stories about her being rescued and spending her life in hiding.90 The novel raises the question of survival as dependent on human compassion. Without mentioning their names, the novel ponders the courage of those who stand up to injustice, like the assistants in the Frank family’s attic hideaway: the Opekta bookkeeper, Johannes Kleiman, and Victor Kugler, who became the so-called proxy director of Otto’s Opekta company, later renamed as Gils & Company (Prose, 2009, p. 30). Both helped hide the Frank family, risking their own lives. Auslander’s novel

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

169

suggests that the courage to risk one’s life to save others is a noble act, an act that is increasingly lost on consumer society hungry for tragedy, drama, and gore. Hope: A Tragedy also speaks to the challenges of bearing witness, as presented by the arduous publication process of Anne’s diary. Although Otto Frank strove to remain loyal to Anne’s desire to change the names of the “protagonists,” he retained the names of the Franks, even though Anne insisted on calling them the “Robins” (Prose, 2009, p. 76). In 1947, many publishers rejected the manuscript until Contact Publishers published it as The Annex: Diary Notes June 12, 1942–August 1, 1944. U.S. publishers, like Knopf for example, found the manuscript “too dull” and described it as a “typical record of family bickering” (Prose, 2009, p. 81). Later on, however, a young assistant at Doubleday, Judith Jones, helped Otto learn the ropes of the publishing business; although he realized that the diary was “becoming not only a commodity, but a lucrative one,” he believed in the work’s success and accepted that Anne would become “a fictional character” (Prose, 2009, p. 83). Prose (2009) mentions Anne’s complex “afterlife” as a fictional character in the form of Broadway shows, films, and literary appearances. Hope: A Tragedy, however, parodies the nonchalance of rewriting numerous drafts of Anne’s stories without her ability to have a say. In the novel, Auslander openly and bitingly laments Anne’s lack of agency in the ways in which posterity interpreted her accounts. To expose the irony of the mass rewriting of Anne’s diary as a populist “survivor” story (i.e., a story of a teenage girl murdered by the Nazis), the novel sets up a running narrative between Anne Frank, the memoirist and writer, and Kugel’s mother, the rewriter of her own past. When the two meet each other, they are both delighted and aggravated by the other’s presence. Anne sees Kugel’s mother as a typical example of a generation ridden with guilt for “not suffering the atrocities” (Auslander, 2012, p. 54). In his sympathetic yet ironic animation of Anne Frank as an attic resident, Auslander derides the ways in which the media have manipulated and continue to manipulate her story.91 In his indictment of the historical fetishization of celebrity figures, Auslander spares no punches at the kind of postmemorial work that “strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by re-investing them with resonant individual forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (Hirsch, 2012, p. 33). In his emphasis on the melodrama of suffering, Auslander inevitably evokes Chang-Rae Lee’s concern with the marketability of Otherness as a universal token in the global curios cabinet. In his reimagining of Anne

170

Chapter Six

Frank as a Holocaust survivor and a serious writer, rather than the juvenile memoirist to which she has been reduced over the past century, Auslander sets out to dismantle the media-hungry, but also literary, cannibalizing of her life story. He envisions her as a challenger or, as he puts it in his interview with The Guardian, as a real “pain in the ass” (Fox, 2012, para. 2). Hope: A Tragedy thus makes space for the alternative lacunae of interpretation and silences that speak to the impossibility of capturing historical events in situ—in other words, in bearing witness without being confronted by the very impossibility of signification. Condemning the Anne Frank tourism as a means of patronizing hysteria/history, Auslander not only questions the use of the familial narrative as a cultural cliché; he also exposes the consumer culture’s need to house pain neatly by policing its excesses and confining it to assigned spaces (like archives, museums, and other tourist sites), where memories can be regulated and contained. As Giorgio Agamben (2002) has emphasized, while archives and museums strive to designate and assign a possible and finite interpretation to a historical and/or tragic event, they simultaneously exterminate the subject that they strive to remember. In his words, “in opposition to the archive, which designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said, we give the name testimony to the system of relations between the inside and the outside of language …” (p. 145). The space in-between, however, remains inexpressible and thus open to interpretation and renarrativization. As Auslander (2012) bemoans, the narrativization itself is a precarious form of remembrance, since its very process is a form of revision that both recreates and destroys. In the novel, Wilbur Messerschmidt, Sr., the initial owner of Kugel’s house, echoes Agamben’s (2002) words when he says to Kugel: There comes a point in your life when you realize that this is it; more of your life has been rewritten than there is left to write, and you’re not at all enthused about the pages you’ve got so far. Maybe it’s too sad and you wish it happier, maybe it’s too happy and you feel bad, wishing it were sadder. So you start to rewrite. We all do it. Add a little here, take away something there. (Auslander, 2012, p. 155).

Wilbur Messerschmidt’s emphasis on rewriting as a drive that represents both creation and destruction, hope and despair, permeates Auslander’s narrative. In many ways, Auslander could be accused of succumbing to what he is critiquing: the persistent rewriting of a phantom fantasy to overcome or surpass the limitations of humanity. But such a critique of Hope: A Tragedy is premature, if not hopeful.

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

171

Underwriting the consumer glut that underpins contemporary society, Hope: A Tragedy refuses to reconcile history by housing its unresolved grief in the literary house of Auslander’s own writing/making. Instead, he explores the ways in which hope and/as tragedy is a form of hunger for reconciliation and (symbolic) consumption. While Kugel’s mother continues to feed on the tragic, Kugel’s stomach is on strike. It refuses to consume the Jewish history his mother ladles, and, by giving him indigestion and constant heartburn, provides an ambitious and courageous commentary on the ways in which cultural and historical appropriation of tragic events has become as commonplace as a “click to add to cart” or a “rush delivery” (Auslander, 2012, p. 223). As Auslander emphasizes, historical atrocities are increasingly being reduced to symbolic food on which the gaze of the masses persistently feeds. Kugel spends most of the novel suffering from indigestion or sitting “on the toilet with the worst case of shits in human history” (p. 270). Kugel’s purging is symbolic of the novel’s attempt to eliminate the waste of historical myth-making, but it is also crucial in understanding Auslander’s refusal to participate in the culture of historical and literary tokenism. Instead of housing the stories of atrocities in his metaphorical “house” of fiction (his novel), he sets both Kugel’s stomach and his house/body on fire.

The Burning House/Text: From Desire to Hope and/as Tragedy The symbolism of the burning desire to consume ecstatically pervades Auslander’s novel. From its emphasis on the media appropriation of the Holocaust memory and its commodification to the complex concerns plaguing the very ethics of postmemory, Hope: A Tragedy explores the desire to consume as a multifaceted metaphor that speaks to the global hunger for titillating images and narratives of suffering through the correlation between desire and the burning body/house/text. Throughout the novel, Kugel suffers from indigestion, which sets his stomach on fire. He moves his family to Stockton, hoping to escape his mother’s postmemory, only to find himself in a town founded by Germans escaping from their own transgenerational guilt and, as Messerchmidt, Sr. emphasizes, “atoning for something [they] didn’t do” (Auslander, 2012, p. 154). Advetising the town as a kind of “Promised Land” away from the consumer hell is the town’s well-known real estate agent, Eve, who represents the Stockton Office of Promised Land Properties and persistently panders to the idea of the rural idyll as a counterpoint to the consumer lifestyle of the city (p. 85). However, the mysterious incidents of

172

Chapter Six

arson are wreaking havoc on the “idyllic” nature of this town, exposing the burning issues of its community’s unresolved past. Similarly, the external events of arson in Stockton further mirror the internal dysfunction of Kugel’s digestive tract. The connection between the town’s burning houses and Kugel’s heartburn thus serves as an important metaphor for the all-consuming, destructive nature of consumer guilt. The novel’s connection between consumer guilt and fire, but also between memory and body, converge in the symbolism of the house doubling as body/text: as a site of contentious history but also as a physical and textual body wherein burning appetite is put to question. Images of appetite, indigestion, and burning as an extension of the body/house/text triumvirate pervade Hope: A Tragedy. Kugel is a voracious reader, an avid consumer of history, but he is also a sufferer of what appears to be chronic bouts of indigestion. He is gluten intolerant and cannot eat matzoh or unleavened bread. Despite being Jewish, his stomach is, as Kugel jokingly says, “anti-semitic, assimilating, and self-hating” (Auslander, 2012, p. 77). Traumatized by his Holocaust education taught by his mother, Kugel is desperate to escape her grip; yet, he finds himself “sandwiched between Mother and Anne Frank” (p. 173). His body, like the house to which he moves his family, is thus a site of confinement that consumes Kugel’s existence. Marilyn R. Chandler (1991) emphasizes that houses as “embodiments” but also as “incarcerations” figure prominently in literature (p. 6). In American literature, in particular, the figure of the house becomes an “extension of self,” as well as a site of historical, cultural, and socio-political encounters (p. 2). Chandler refers to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1925/2013) The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner’s (1936) Absalom, Absalom!, and Edgar Allen Poe’s (1893/1945) “The Fall of the House of Usher” as literary texts that rely on the metaphor of the house to engage with larger socio-political, as well as psychological, aspects of American history—from the rise of consumerism and America’s colonial heritage to slavery. In his use of the house/body/text alignment, Auslander’s novel evokes the American literary preoccupation with houses as a bodily edifice—a breathing organism that spans life and death, good and evil. The novel frequently borrows from Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic works to highlight the uncanny and melancholy aspects of the Holocaust memory—for example, Anne Frank’s “rat tap tapping,” and the imagery of the house as body/text (Auslander, 2012, pp. 43, 46). As Chandler (1991) points out in her discussion of Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839/1945), the house as body reflects “the psychological structure of the main character or the social structures in which he or she is entrapped by

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

173

the structure of the text itself” (p. 3). Similarly, in Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, the house is first and foremost a psychological space that connotes “the ambigious interrelations of body and soul, material and spiritual reality, … good and evil” (Chandler, 1991, p. 47). Kugel’s house, invaded by the eerie, ghostly presence of Anne Frank and his mother “peeing and shitting” in the vents, accordingly evokes his own bodily and psychological conflict (p. 130). As part of a post-Holocaust generation, Kugel’s only access to the Holocaust is through postmemory experiences—be they historical or individual (and individualized) narratives and images or, in other words, texts. No matter how much he reads about the past, his “voracious” appetite to understand the nature of hope as tragedy or evil as fate cannot alleviate the transgenerational guilt he has inherited (Auslander, 2012, p. 57). Regardless of the extent he tries to separate fact from fiction and memories from historical events, Kugel finds himself confronted by constant redoubling of reality as fiction, fiction as reality. To parse this fact-fiction conundrum, Kugel assembles a list of Holocaust books that he purchases at a discount, only to realize that the burning realities of Anne Frank, the young teenager desperate to survive the Nazi regime and become a well-established writer, have been subjected to the consumer ethic, thus reducing her work to a redacted cameo of Holocaust initiation. These burning realities are manifested in the novel’s fictional Anne Frank and her desire to write a corrective to the “tragicomic burlesque” to which her diary was diminished (Auslander, 2012, p. 58). However, as she warns Kugel, in contemporary culture, no one is immune to the burning appetite of an ecstatic consumer. “Agony,” she emphasizes, “[is] ecstasy, ecstasy agony” (p. 58). Survival is intriguing, but tragedy sells. When Kugel’s mother finds out that Anne Frank is about to undo all her historicizing (and hystericizing) by publishing a new manuscript, she burns it, and, with it, she sets the entire house, including her own son Kugel, on fire. The ending of the novel subjects ecstatic consumption to a particularly intriguing and evocative double entendre. By burning the text, the house, and the protagonist, Auslander references a whole line of writers—from Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys to Ray Bradbury—who have used the metaphor of the attic and the house on fire to critique patriarchy, social ostracism, and totalitarian regimes. While Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847/2013) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) examine patriarchal oppression of minorities, in which setting the house on fire represents a form of resistance and subversion,92 Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953/1967) imagines America as a

174

Chapter Six

totalitarian society where books are banned and burned if found. In Bradbury’s dystopia, fire is a metaphor for destruction and genocide. Evoking the Nazi’s burning of the books, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 inscribes such events as a commentary of America’s 1950s Cold War politics. Hope: A Tragedy refers to the Nazi book burning not only by setting the main protagonist on fire but also by burning Anne Frank’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript. The novel thus exposes the ways in which consumer culture evokes mass delusion and an appetite for destruction, evocative of the demagogy of the Nazi “Volk” ideology.93 Furthermore, inverting the “madwoman in the attic” paradigm, the novel also performs an interesting transgendering of the text whereby the Jewish male protagonist and Anne Frank the phantom become embodiments of the ostracized Other. Auslander thus queers the cliché of Nazi discourses in which Jewish men and women were both hyperfeminized, objectified, and thus dehumanized.94 Kugel, the male subject, burns to death—not Anne Frank. Auslander represents this history of dehumanization through Kugel’s struggle with indigestion, but it is also demonstrated through Kugel’s phantom identification with his motherturned-Anne Frank, Anne Frank-turned-Mother. Kugel struggles not only with digesting his mother’s contorted hystericization of the memory to which she has no access but also with his own heritage. He feels like a “rodent was eating him from within” (Auslander, 2012, p. 90). The state of Kugel’s body thus debunks the hope for an idyllic life that America promises; the real consequence of Stockton’s Promised Land Fine Properties is tragedy. Like Franz Kafka’s (1925/1998) Joseph K., Kugel is forced to realize that escape can be a form of entrapment, and vice versa. Hope, too, is necessary yet tragic. Kugel, who is sometimes referred to in the novel as Mr. K but whose name also recalls the Jewish kugel (noodle casserole), becomes representative of the tragic human plight: hopelessness. Kugel’s ultimate hope is to escape the entrapment of consumer culture that turns history into a hysterical commodity. Whether manifested in his own close quarters by his ever-keening and suffering mother or outside his home in the form of the society of glut, the consumer quest for more tragic regalia is something that Kugel cannot and will not stomach. As Kugel dies in the fire, many a reader could argue that Auslander feeds the consumer appetite for the tragic by reinscribing the Nazi atrocities through his protagonist’s death on the funereal pyre. But this is not where Auslander ends his novel. His ultimate punch line is Eve, the real estate agent, who glazes over the tragedy by executing the final “turning of the screw” when, in one of her sales pitches, she says to

Consuming the Holocaust: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy

175

another hopeful couple: “reality is a nightmare,” so “the fiction returns” (Auslander, 2012, p. 291). But Hope: A Tragedy refuses easy fixes. Echoing Kafka’s aphorism that there is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us” (Benjamin, 1996, p. 798),95 the novel suggests that there might be no easy way out of the consumer hell. Eve, hopeful that her sale will come to pass, asks, “Do we have a deal?” (Auslander, 2012, p. 292). However, Sharon, the potential buyer retorts: “What about the smell”? (p. 292). Exposing humankind’s appetite for fiction-making, but also its very necessity for human survival, Auslander ends his novel with an incisive note that, while fiction might return, the smell of history lingers.

CHAPTER SEVEN HISTORY AS SPECTACLE: 9/11 AND THE ECONOMICS OF SUFFERING IN ALISSA TORRES’S AMERICAN WIDOW

Honoring the lives of those who were lost is at the heart of our mission. Occupying eight of the 16 acres at the World Trade Center, the Memorial is a tribute to the past and a place of hope for the future. —9/11 Memorial & Museum, www.911memorial.org While the Bush administration never refrained from confirming America’s unrelenting strength and power, the mass media, especially television, served to install a sense of emergency expressive of collective traumatization combined with an effort to rally people behind the American flag. —Christina Cavedon (2015), Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma and Discourse Before and After 9/11, p. 1 It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which public discourse proceeds. —Judith Butler (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, p. 35

In Hope: A Tragedy (2012), Shalom Auslander examines the limits of representation that govern the process of narrativizing the lacunae of memory caused by genocide and tragic historical events. Commenting on the ways in which contemporary consumer culture feeds on the spectacle of suffering, Auslander deplores not only the very acts of destruction but also their (symbolic and often not so symbolic) perpetuation, be it in the form of American appropriation of the Holocaust or public memorials as tourist curios. Auslander’s critique of the consumer culture’s appetite for a good tragedy can be further extended to the events of 9/11—events that, like the post-Holocaust memory, continue to be subjected to a constant dramatic replay and fetishization through televised anniversaries,

178

Chapter Seven

memorialization of the terrorist attacks, and 9/11 Memorial & Museum tours. Located at the World Trade Centre site in lower Manhattan, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum provides tourists with a “walking tour” of the historical tragedy. The tour begins with the “Day of 9/11,” a reproduction of when the first plane hit the northern Twin Tower on September 11th, 2001, recounting the ways in which TV stations bore witness to the unfolding atrocity in situ, only to watch as another plane crashed into the southern tower, setting the World Trade Center on fire and killing close to 3,000 people. The very nature of this “walking tour” is reminiscent of the media blitz that provided live coverage of the day. The constant replay of the massacre not only generated its own visual attack on consciousness, blurring the line between the personal and the public, but it also transformed the events into a Debordian “spectacle” that both rendered the masses unconscious while simultaneously unifying them under the banner of national grief and public mourning.96 Within hours, the litany of violent imagery and video-montages showing the Twin Towers being hit one by one, crashing down, and then mysteriously rising from the ashes like a phoenix only to be destroyed all over again, turned into a scene reminiscent of Doug Gordon’s (1993) 24 Hour Psycho. From newspaper articles, personal commentaries, memoirs, and scholarly books to video-montages of the event, media has played a crucial role in constructing “monuments” and memorials to the 9/11 events. In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss (2012) notes the almost immediate need for temporary and handmade memorials to visualize and monumentalize the loss (p. 6). In 2016, a mere typing of the phrase “9/11 footage” into a Google search generates 13,600,000 results.97 The astonishing number of memorials, monuments, literary and scholarly narratives, online commentaries, and Google “hits” further speaks to the “mania” of recording and reliving history as spectacle. Fifteen years after the massacre, tourists from all over the world flock to the 9/11 Memorial to pay respect to the victims and their families. The discrepancy between the event and its representation raises questions about the limits of ethics. As Geoffrey Hartman (1992) emphasizes in “The Book of Destruction,” atrocities challenge the very limits of representation, but they also leave behind a shadow that posterity must, in one way or another, confront and encounter. Is healing ever possible? Is a sense of closure desirable? According to Hartman (1992), it is crucial to “allow the limits of representation to be healing limits yet not to allow them to conceal an event we are obliged to recall and interpret, both to ourselves and those growing up unconscious of its shadow” (p. 334). As

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

179

Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012) reminds us, however, recall and interpretation have their challenges, too. Any form of bearing witness asks us to consider where the limits of knowing and remembering lie. Alissa Torres, one of the many widows of 9/11, grapples with the shadows of these limits in her graphic novel, American Widow (2008). Losing her husband to the World Trade Center (WTC) terrorist attacks, Torres found herself seven and a half months pregnant and widowed on September 11th, 2001. Almost 14 years later, Torres continues to grieve, finding the government and media, but also the public’s insistence on “moving on,” very troubling. In one of her essays, Torres (2011) comments on the annual remembrance of 9/11 as a “relive the day now [that] you moved on” episode. Equally disconcerting for Torres is the increasing commodification of the post-9/11 shadows that remain. These shadows hover everywhere: at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum that offers “walking tours” of the Ground Zero site where Torres’s husband perished; the Museum’s emphasis on healing and “rebuilding”; the eager tourists taking selfies at the Memorial; the government red tape; and the media and their way of remembering through a glut of visual hyperbole.98 American Widow (2008) is a narrative of loss, but it is also a sociocultural commentary on the role that ecstatic consumption plays in the kind of obligation to “recall and interpret,” to use Hartman’s (1992) words (p. 334), that which remains foreclosed and inaccessible to our understanding or imagination. Critiquing the spectacle of 9/11 and its insensitivity to survivor families,—the reduction of their personal rather than public and publicized experience to government economics and media blitz—Torres chooses a graphic literary medium to make sense of the hegemonic iconography of her publicly rendered grief. Redoubling the visual onslaught of 9/11, American Widow challenges the almost pornographic replay of the image-driven prescription of public mourning as a form of national virility and survival in the face of a great American tragedy. The enframed form of the graphic novel allows Torres to emplace and thus entomb, albeit symbolically, the memory of her late husband, Eddie Torres—a memory hijacked by the media and the American government but also displaced by the spectacle of mourning imposed on the nation as a way to showcase its “spectacular staging of power” (Badiou, 2006, p. 28). In examining the ways in which the personal experiences of the 9/11 victims and their families were usurped by the government and consumed by the public, Torres’s novel speaks to what Geoffrey Hartman (2002) refers to as the “derealization of ordinary life” by “tele-suffering,” as well as its banalization (p. 82); more importantly, it

180

Chapter Seven

also serves as a symbolic entombment of the memories (both private and public) whose shadows linger. However, American Widow (2008) is also a testament to the limits of healing and its (im)possibility. As Torres (2015) writes in a recent essay, “nothing can eradicate [the grief], but through writing I move it outside of myself” (para. 12). The graphic novel thus serves as a contained and containable memorial of an uncontained and uncontainable sense of loss and pain but also of love. While the novel itself becomes a figurative tomb for Torres’s personal memories, it is an unfinished and, in its juxtaposition of visual and verbal hyperbole and omissions, ongoing documentary of the public appropriation of the 9/11 event as an exercise in cultural and national forgetting, as well as a hegemonic reassertion of America as a powerful, spectacular nation. What does it mean to have one’s sense of loss displaced and appropriated by the public? Are there limits to grief? What roles do the media, governments, and also the (American but also global) public play in demarcating and dictating the frame of reference by which atrocities are to be interpreted? American Widow attempts to answer these questions without presuming that there is a definite answer. For Torres, prescriptive mourning is as destructive as the insensitivity of visual imagery transformed into an (un)appetizing feast for the gaze. Similarly, for Torres, the critical and at times destructive facets of memory and forgetting are not exclusive. As American Widow reveals, they are complementary and deeply intertwined in the Gordian knot of unknowing and stubborn silences that refuse to speak.

“Life in Slow Motion”: Public Mourning and/as the (Porno)Graphic “24 Hour Psycho” When American Widow was published in 2008, New York Times reviewer Charles Taylor (2008) noted its satirical tone, pointing to its “prickly counter to the narrative of 9/11 as a time when New Yorkers came together selflessly, bound by shared tragedy” (para. 4). Similarly, literary critics emphasized the socio-political commentary driving the novelmemoir. Tim Gauthier (2010) calls the text a “narrational reclamation,” an attempt to reclaim a sense of agency over the “sanctioned forms” of public testimony and the “emplotment of the narrative transformed from one of irrefutable tragedy to one of heroism and resilience” (pp. 374, 372). Emily Martin (2012) further speaks to Torres’s choice of the graphic novel as a genre that insists on troubling the “boundary between high culture and popular culture” (p. 471). While Gauthier (2010) suggests that Torres’s “narrative works as a recuperation of self” (p. 372), Martin (2012) goes as

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

181

far as calling the text a “therapeutic release” (p. 474). Torres, however, is not entirely convinced. As she emphasizes in her 2011 article, “9/11 Widow: What I’ve Learned,” “writing for me has never been cathartic, because loss is permanent, and my grief cuts deep. Instead, it became a way to transform how 9/11 impacted my life” (para. 9). Torres thus troubles the recuperative discourses informing grief and socio-cultural expectations of mourning as limited to a particular time frame or affective topography. Instead, she emphasizes its multiplicity and narrative inaccessibility. In many ways, writing about American Widow presents critics with a challenge of ethical (ir)responsibility. As mentioned in the previous section, the graphic novel refuses to indulge the appetite of the public, the critic, or the media. It unapologetically inscribes the violence performed by the media, but also by the government, on survivors and victims through its refusal to subject the 9/11 event to a sanitized narrative and teleology. Instead, through her use of black, white, and aqua blue frames illustrated by Sungyoon Choi, Torres threads the melancholy of grief and unresolved mourning as an essential, personal counterpoint to the ecstasy of state and media narrativization of the 9/11 history-turned-spectacle. As with most graphic novels, American Widow is concerned with space, particularly the ways in which trauma, displaced by public interests, is emplaced. It also probes into the ways in which the survivor’s understanding of time and temporality is altered and put into question, as their response to the tragedy is always delayed and thus belated. In addition, the novel interrogates the ways in which the culture of spectacle, like a traumatic event, relies on a compulsive repetition that makes time irrelevant, trapped in a warp that is only bound to repeat itself, albeit belatedly so. This belatedness raises not only the issue of “the very inaccessibility of its occurrence,” as Cathy Caruth (1996) emphasizes,99 but also of the very ethics of telling and what “is ethical to tell” (p. 27). American Widow questions where the limits of telling lie: who has the right to speak on behalf of the victim and/or the survivor? What significance does the survivor’s (belated) testimony play in public mourning? Where do the lacunae of bearing witness lie? As Judith Butler (2004) notes, to speak about the Other inevitably means to speak for the Other. However, the ungraspability of the event is what Torres’s narrative persistently acknowledges as it points to what Butler (2004) calls the “emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense,” or what she refers to as a “precariousness” that is registered in its benumbed belatedness (p. 151). In

182

Chapter Seven

what follows, this section examines Torres’s novel as an inquiry into the precariousness of representing atrocities as a “life in slow motion” (Torres, 2008, p. 8) but also as an extension of the ecstatic (or, as Baudrillard calls it, “immoral”) form that results in “perforated reading” (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 90). Despite the critical suggestions that Torres uses the graphic novel as a “therapeutic” medium (Martin, 2012, p. 474) or as a way to reclaim a narratorial agency, this section examines American Widow as a belated address that confronts the unfinished business of grief by allowing the gaps of understanding to speak in their glaring silence, puncturing holes into the fabric of the public narrative that 9/11 has become. American Widow opens with a fragmented perspective of the televised coverage of 9/11. A multilingual montage of “turn on your TV” and “the World Trade Centre was just hit by a plane! Turn on your TV” slogans, translated into many languages, perforate the page-screen of the first chapter, subtitled “September 11, 2001” (Torres, 2008, p. 5). From the opening page to the end of chapter one, a sequence of harsh black and white frames flooded with aqua-marine blue speak to the anxious moments and incomprehensibility of the unfolding disaster. Seven and a half months pregnant, Torres finds herself benumbed by images, desperate to grasp the reality of having lost her husband to the World Trade Center inferno. Refusing to succumb to the violence of the imagery that bombards her consciousness, she chooses to go downtown and search for her husband. The whole month of September becomes a blur. As many trauma victims do, Torres experiences a kind of benumbing of time, reinforced by the persistent barrage of imagery that emphasizes the pain of knowing that Eddie, her husband, will not be coming home. In addition to dealing with the loss of her husband, Torres is forced to deal with the reality of public mourning and the “terror” of the public discourses, which impose a particular perforated reading of the tragedy. In one of her essays for Salon.com, Torres (2010) writes, Right after my husband died, grief constricted my throat, I couldn’t speak. Everyone, everywhere, talked about what happened: The news told me who killed my husband, what recovery efforts were occurring, where I could get resources. Meanwhile I was mute. (para. 2)

Torres here speaks to the public appropriation of the traumatic event. In the novel, Torres elaborates on the ways in which what would under regular circumstances be a private, personal event was turned into a national spectacle, or what Alain Badiou (2006) refers to as America’s “spectatular staging of [its own] power” (p. 28). As the 9/11 tragedy took on a national and global dimension, the very reality of the event was

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

183

hijacked from the survivors all over again. The redoubling of violence was precipitated by the ways in which the American government turned trauma into “a master concept informing American public discourses” (Cavedon, 2015, p. 11). Christina Cavedon (2015) indicates that the public appropriation of (national) trauma “allows for a problematic mingling of individual and collective suffering which paves the way for a wholesale feeling of victimization on a national level” (p. 11). Such national victimization, however, violated the survivors’ already victimized consciousness by turning their pain into the kind of spectacular staging of power and war retaliation of which Badiou (2006) speaks. This “staging,” however, extended not only to the national but also to the international stage. Following her husband’s burial, Torres is confronted by the persistent invasion of her privacy, but also by the government, the media, and the public framing of the tragedy as belonging to the masses rather than as an individual, traumatizing, and complex experience. In chapter eight of her novel, Torres recounts how the hegemonic discourses of America’s spectacular power and survival were mirrored in the volunteer therapists’ attempts to contain and fix the survivors pain through an endless string of platitudes. Torres (2008) writes: After the towers collapsed, I would have been happy to see the hordes of volunteer therapists straightjacketed and sedated so that they couldn’t inflict any more harm on us. … While we shared what information we had, they babbled about how they relate to our grief …. (pp. 90–91)

Revolted by the clichés, she rejects the insistence on a collective bearing of witness as being homogenizing and dangerously proprietary. Her novel categorically rejects this “mantle of ‘official’ witness” (Gauthier, 2010, p. 370). Instead, it persistently emphasizes the impossibility of bearing witness or what Giorgio Agamben (2002) describes as “the trace of that to which no one has borne witness, which language believes itself to transcribe, is not the speech of language” (p. 39). Torres best encapsulates this impossibility of bearing witness five months after the event when she visits the site of the tragedy and realizes that neither the “surrounding concrete” nor its call to remembrance provides the necessary closure (Torres, 2008, p. 118). She realizes: “Yes, I understood you died here, although this reality would continue to escape me. This visit did nothing to change that” (p. 118). The frame in which the reality of the empty site and the surrounding concrete overwhelm the visitor/survivor dominates the page, casting shadows on the very possibility of understanding the reality and scope of the tragic loss. Only the shadows remain, towering over the survivor silhouettes.

184

Chapter Seven

These shadows also refer to the public usurpation of the individual survivors’ private grief. Torres satirizes the collective appropriation and reclaiming of the tragedy through a concatenation of sharp yet identical black-and-white images of Saint Vincent’s makeshift Family Center, where the normative process and formalization of the survivors’ loss made the grieving process very difficult. Noting the public’s persistent appetite for retellings of the survivor stories, Torres points to the consumer ethic underpinning the bureaucracy of the government organizations established to help survivors cope with their tragic circumstances. She specifically highlights the ecstasy of communication, in which agencies like the Family Center revel—the need for more information, as well as the insistence on reciting the same information over and over again.100 In capturing the obscenity of the ecstasy of shared suffering, Torres debunks the appetite for retelling as a “world of ecstasy, obscenity, fascination that is cold [and vertigo-like]” that is part of America’s consumer culture (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 94) but also part of America’s larger master narrative. The larger master narrative of 9/11 encapsulates the discussions of the earlier chapters in this book, specifically their focus on the relationship between the private (individual) body and the body politic. As Torres demonstrates in American Widow, the imperative to mourn collectively not only usurps survivors’ private grief but also assumes victims’ bodies into the fold of the body politic. Before examining this notion further, it might be useful to recall Sara Ahmed’s (2000) emphasis on the cultural politics of affect and, more specifically, pain. Pain, Ahmed argues, has its own culturally prescribed politics. Moreover, how pain and suffering are narrated becomes an issue of power. According to Ahmed (2000), “narratives of collective suffering increasingly have a global dimension,” but more importantly, they ascertain that “the past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present” (p. 331). In this respect, the “other’s pain is appropriated as the nation’s pain” (p. 39). The first half of Torres’s graphic novel focuses on tracing the increasing appropriation of the survivors’ individual pain by the public and, by extension, by the nation and the world. Torres explores this public appropriation of the private through the juxtaposition of the memory of her dead husband and his (dismembered), “instantly fragmented” remains (Torres, 2008, p. 159). On September 23rd, 2001, Torres is confronted with having the “full legal rights to [her] husband’s [dismembered] body” and the reality of his disembodiment (p. 57). However, as she soon realizes, her husband’s “body” also belongs to the state. It is the body of a 9/11 victim, collectively mourned and

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

185

memorialized. Torres’s realization of the collective ownership of Eddie’s body echoes Judith Butler’s (2004) notion that “although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever our own” (p. 26). As Butler concludes, “the body has its invariably public dimension” (p. 26). Torres speaks to the ways in which individual private bodies are appropriated and consumed by the nation as she bemoans the very politics surrounding her husband’s burial. Not only is she forced to endure hours of filling out forms, but she is also subjected to the expectation that her deceased husband will be reduced to a collective fetish, his memory integrated into a symbol of (inter)national remembrance. Throughout the novel, Torres problematizes the public dimension of collective ownership of the embodied memory and the victims’ own disembodiment. Through the graphic novel medium, she strives to embody, if only figuratively, the disembodied memory in the form of textual mementos and photographs of Eddie and his life. But as American Widow pieces together Eddie’s personal narrative,—from his childhood in Colombia to his new job at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower in the World Trade Center, where he began working on September 10th, 2001—Torres also attempts to make sense of her own identity, decimated by her tragic loss but also by the notion of being a post-9/11 widow and a new mother. Juxtaposing the sense of Eddie’s disembodiment with her palpable embodied experience of being pregnant and giving birth, Torres speaks of a different pain—a pain that is also a way into her own self. Chapter seven of the novel is dedicated to the birth of her and Eddie’s son, Joshua, and to the bearing witness of the pain that is a marriage of love and loss, grief and happiness. It is also, however, a belated address to her husband, Eddie: I welcomed the grief in the screams of my hard-earned labor. I invited you into each one, mourning you each time as I had not done previously, so badly, I now wanted these moments of unfettered noise that I didn’t have to explain. (Torres, 2008, p. 83)

During labour, Torres is able to connect with her pain and her grief, which has been stifled by the collective narrative of mourning imposed on her by the state, the media, and also the public. In giving birth to her child, Torres also realizes the physicality of her loss as she labors through her grief that marks the pleasure and pain of her son’s arrival. She writes: “As my body was torn apart in the rhythmic convulsions, so too was my heart, in the sudden full realization of my loss” (p. 83). Like Lauren Hartke in DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001), Torres struggles with her husband’s sudden absence, feeling the loss in

186

Chapter Seven

and through her body. While Lauren uses her performance art as a means of reconnecting with herself, but also as a means of working through her pain, Torres turns the public usurpation of her loss into a graphic metanarrative that challenges the violence of the ecstatic gaze. Through the juxtaposition of the image and the written word, she both inscribes and critiques the dystopian appetite of the public and its “demand for a truer image, for more images, for images that convey the full horror and reality of the suffering [which] has its place and importance” (Butler, 2004, p. 146). Torres thus also problematizes what Beller (2006) calls the “cinematization of social relations,” where visual imagery dominates representation, alienating language by reducing real historical events into tragic yet hysterical fabulations (pp. 14, 15). By highlighting the relationship between terrorism and cinema, war and nationalist desire, American Widow also evokes the concerns raised by Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) and Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills (2007), in which the characters wrestle with the spectacle of war and their emotional response to it. Like DeLillo in Point Omega and Smiley in Ten Days in the Hills, Torres addresses the barrage of war (and terror) imagery as a “global state of siege” that manipulates, but also shapes, public emotion (Virilio, 2007, p. 58). But American Widow also bemoans the limits of both language and visual media to represent grief. Echoing the call for ethical engagement with trauma as exemplified in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) and Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012), Torres’s novel questions the ways in which the public, the government, and the media manipulate and endorse “the prohibition on certain forms of public grieving” by dictating the scope of grievability (Butler, 2004, p. 87). As Butler (2004) emphasizes, “Such prohibitions not only shore up a nationalism based on its military aims and practices, but they also suppress any internal dissent that would expose the concrete human effects of its violence” (p. 38). Torres challenges these prohibitions by pointing to their normative and frequently tokenizing effects. Furthermore, she comments on the public usurpation of her grief in chapter eight of her graphic novel, where she describes her meeting with the representatives of Saint Vincent’s Makeshift Family Center, where the staff tried to identify with her pain by sharing their own stories of loss. She finds the strangers’ need for identification with her pain usurpative and consuming, echoing Auslander’s notion of the “Misery Olympics,” a race for a more painful, more tragic story (Auslander, 2012, p. 76). The chapter follows the details of her painful labour, bringing together the pleasure and the pain of her son’s birth and her realization that her husband will never meet his son.

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

187

Like Chang-Rae Lee’s protagonist in Native Speaker, Henry Park, Torres struggles with the impotence of language to image the reality of her pain. Her life is best described through what Agamben (2002) calls the “nonlanguage” of bearing witness (p. 38), the disjunctions of meaning and representation that she cannot quite narrate or capture. The graphic novel genre is defined by such disjunctions. In combining text and image, close-ups and flashbacks, the graphic novel is an ecstatic medium par excellence. It relies on hyperbole and redoubling; it thrives on the kind of reversibility defined by Baudrillard (2008) as “this turning of knowledge into an enigmatic duel between the subject and the object” (p. 110). As Sidonie Smith (2011) has recently emphasized, graphic novels “traffic in stereotypes and their unsettlement” (p. 68). In her terms, they provide an “education in how to represent (for the artist) and how to interpret (for the reader) the taint of otherness attached to those who become objects against which routine violence is directed—by the West, by states, by society” (p. 68). They serve as a multiversed text whose function is to document, visualize, narrativize, but also indict and question the possibility of representing events. And yet, as this section argues, rather than providing a “therapeutic release” or “recuperation of self,” as critics like Martin (2012, p. 474) and Gauthier (2010, p. 372) suggest, this narrative medium is a testament to the lacunae of meaning that it strives to embody, but also repudiate. In other words, no matter how much the graphic novel as a medium helps to provide an avenue of bearing witness, the only testimony it can supply is the avowal of absence and its ungraspability. This ungraspability has no language, but it also defies the dystopian glut of the cinematic gaze. Accordingly, Torres’s grief remains ungraspable and unresolved, like the reality of Eddie’s death. Drawing on Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler (2004) posits that when we lose someone, we do not necessarily know “what it is in that person that has been lost” (p. 21). In the moment of losing someone, we are also losing some aspect of ourselves. Butler (2004) elaborates: Something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss. … When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I have gone missing as well.” At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related. (p. 22)

188

Chapter Seven

What Butler highlights is the uncanny relationship between loss and the (im)possibility of its narrativization. The lacking vocabulary of which Butler speaks is something that the media and the government have supplied through their official “master” (and consumer) narratives of 9/11; however, as Torres knows, there is no way to “language” the reality of the magnitude of her trauma, rendered both privately and in public. In exposing the ways in which both the media and government support centers attempt to fill in the narrative, but also feed off the stories of the survivors, American Widow indicts the global appetite for a good tragic story. Either reduced to or enlarged as a mass spectacle, grief becomes “an act of nation-building” that obfuscates, if not eliminates, the physicality of death and thus sanitizes the human experience (Butler, 2004, p. 34). Torres finds this elision unethical but also compromising and destructive. In indicting the 9/11 iconography as a singeing of the victims’ already singed body, Torres echoes DeLillo’s critique of the ecstatic gaze and its violent implications as exemplified by Lauren Hartke’s performance art in The Body Artist and Richard Elster’s dream of a haiku war in Point Omega, as well as Jane Smiley’s investigation of the media culture as war in Ten Days in the Hills. Critiquing the hunger for a tragic spectacle and its tokenizing objectifying gaze, Torres abhors the emotional appetite of the (not-so-emancipated) spectators of her grief.101 The tokenization of her grief is directly linked to the objectification and fetishization of her late husband’s remains. Not only is Torres socially marked as a 9/11 “widow,” but her late husband is also reduced to a souvenir. She recalls the dumping of the “actual pieces of the Trade Centre at Staten Island” (p. 164). She writes: “Here are some souvenirs for you, … keep the goggles if you want” (p. 164). The media merely enhance the fetishization of the dead and their surviving families. After giving birth to her son, Torres is inundated by interview requests from the media, eager for an account from a 9/11 widow who has a post-9/11 baby. She comments on the ways in which her story becomes fodder for the media but also for her neighbours, including Bertha Stahlhammer, who invites Torres to her German Church to mark the two-month anniversary of the WTC tragedy. Admitting that the German press would like to do an interview with her and her baby, Bertha keeps reiterating that, no matter what, Torres will “have a zuper, inspirational time” (Torres, 2008, p. 92). By mocking the notion that a grieving widow could have an “inspirational time” at the 9/11 event’s two-month anniversary media feast, American Widow exposes the hysteria of public emotion—its ecstatic politics but also its lack of empathy and ethics. What is ethical to say and/or to tell? How much do such anniversaries reinstate the violence that they abhor and

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

189

critique? These are the questions that Torres raises over and over again. However, whether for a story for the New York Times or at a Women’s Luncheon a year after the event, Torres refuses to give in to the appetite of the consumer machine. American Widow thus aligns the visual machinery of the 9/11 coverage and public emoting with a symbolic war on human consciousness. In this respect, she evokes Paul Virilio’s (1989) argument that the spectacle is an extension of war. Virilio states that “war can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle” (p. 8). Moreover, “there is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification” (p. 8). According to Virilio, the media has become an important part of spectacular weaponry. Butler (2004) affirms Virilio’s notion of media violence as war, and similar to Virilio, she connects the media machine with the power of the state. The awe of destruction is the ultimate leitmotif of the ecstasy of information (Butler, 2004, p. 149). Torres (2008) notes the violence and violation that the media inflicts in its appetite for her “story” and the way that it transforms her private experience into an affirmation of America’s national and global superpower qualities. Drawing a connection between the government speakers (for example, Laura Bush sending her letter and regrets) and the Women’s Luncheon held in the memory of 9/11 victims, Torres exposes the ways in which the media are “entranced by the sublimity of destruction” (Butler, 2004, p. 149) but also whereby destruction takes on a new level of reality. In its indictment of the ecstatic form, American Widow (2008) evokes the other texts discussed in this book. Like Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010), Torres’s novel uncovers the global appetite for dystopia and its emphasis on decorporealized icons/eye-cons. She also exposes the fine line between symbolic and physical violence, as well as the role that public emotion plays in nation-building, thus speaking to the concerns about ecstatic consumption and its reliance of global discourses of Othering as explored in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003). Anticipating Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012), American Widow critiques the collective appropriation of trauma and its reduction to a consumer fetish. Consequently, Torres’s use of the graphic novel as an ironic counterpoint to the (porno)graphic abuse of visual material is particularly important to her indictment of America’s collective appropriation of 9/11 and its consumer agenda. Given the comic-book origin of the graphic novel, Torres’ choice of the medium bridges the graphic worlds of popular culture with the

190

Chapter Seven

political satire with which graphic novels are increasingly associated. Authors like Art Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Henrik Rehr have contributed to redefining the graphic novel as a subversive medium that allows for a confrontation of visual and textual material while simultaneously undermining master narratives and their “distant mediation” of real-life events (Gauthier, 2010, p. 371). Moreover, as Michael A. Chaney (2011) emphasizes, the graphic form is transmedial and transgeneric in the way it engages with different textual and visual media but also with different generic forms. While autobiographical narratives and memoirs emphasize the first-person narrative perspective and often suggest a certain temporal trajectory, the graphic novel “operate[s] in a mode that is neither narrative nor strictly analogous to the prose diary” (Chaney, 2011, p. 220). Moreover, as a fragment or an embodiment of fragmented reality, the form also “deliberately stalls the forward movement of time” (p. 220), a stalling that is particularly relevant to Torres’s juxtaposition of two temporalities: individual and collective. The cinematic nature of the graphic novel also presents an opportunity to debunk the pornographic abuse of the WTC memory. Like Doug Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, the graphic novel presents a “life in slow motion” (Torres, 2008, p. 5), parsing the moments that escape comprehension and acknowledging the silences that cannot speak. By highlighting the increasing complicity of storytelling, cinema, and the mass media in the politics and consumption of warfare, testifying to the “sophisticated weaponry” of media representation (and editing) of historical events (Virilio, 1989, p. 8), Torres anticipates DeLillo’s critique of “war as an abstract form” (Badiou, 2006, p. 28). But she also questions the way in which aesthetics and politics are frequently subjected to the law of pataphysical reversibility explored throughout this book. One of the prerogatives of the postmillennial culture is its reliance on global aestheticization of politics through the hyperbole of the everunfolding, ever-rewinding image. In this context, Torres’s choice of the graphic novel medium is particularly intriguing. Given its multilayered nature, the graphic novel takes on the role of a “provocative medium,” which forces the reader to renegotiate the “boundary between high culture and pop culture,” not to mention public and private narratives and points of view (Martin, 2012, p. 471). In parodying the visual iconography of the televised “24 Hour Psycho” to which the WTC tragedy has been reduced, Torres inevitably runs the risk of reinscribing the ways in which pain and suffering have become a part of the contemporary, global “menu.” At the same time, however, Torres’s refusal to provide a coherent narrative in the form of a memoir or an autobiography speaks to the ways in which she

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

191

deploys the graphic novel as an antidote to the television as war or visual iconography as weaponry. Consequently, American Widow parallels Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, in which Gordon reappropriates Hitchcock’s film and extends it to a 24-hour experience that asks the audience to consider what motivates human desire, what drives violence, and what role time plays in the performance of violence. As Ken Johnson (2006) proposes in reference to Gordon’s performance piece, “to appropriate and alter commercial movies—as artists began doing in significant numbers in the 1990s, using new video and, later, digital technologies—could be a way to raise consciousness” (para. 5). According to Johnson, Gordon’s deconstruction of Hitchcock’s masterpiece challenges the “hegemonic order” (para. 5). The 2006 MoMA exhibition of Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, organized by Klaus Biesenbauch and displayed from June 11th to September 4th, spoke to Gordon’s interest in exploring the limits of representation, namely by examining the relationship between memory and repetition, the visual drive and the uncanny. The brief description provided on the MoMA website defines Gordon’s work as “altering and recontextualizing familiar and popular films in order to throw into high relief the relationship between film, memory, and identity” (Biesenbach, 2006, para. 2). Similarly, Torres’s American Widow not only investigates what Gauthier (2010) refers to as “a head-on collision between world history and personal history” (p. 377), but it also exposes the spectacle to which historical events such as 9/11 are frequently reduced. What role does time, but also the economics of emotion, play in restructuring the public’s desire after a traumatic event? Torres suggests that the spectacle on which America’s consumer culture depends can be dismantled through a careful reordering of temporal frames. Challenging the quest for a “zuper” tragic story, Torres troubles the very expectations of the survivor testimony by targeting not only the spectacle but also the complex economics of disaster that unfolded in responses to the WTC tragedy.

Dismembering History: Disaster Economics and the Politics of (Mis)Perception As a graphic novel, American Widow provides an intriguing commentary on the ethical implications of using the literary genre as an interventionist, satirical tool that exposes collective mourning as a mass fetishization of tragic events. Torres, however, also aligns the fetishization of victims with the government compensation funds that were set up as an “act of compassion and kindness,” only to reduce the victims and their surviving

192

Chapter Seven

families to an “economic value” (Torres, 2008, p. 132). In addition to critiquing the consumer appetite of the media, Torres exposes the corruption of charity organizations and government compensation funds. On September 23rd, 2001, Congress set up a special compensation fund for 9/11 victims’ families, called H.R. 2926; the survivors were promised financial assistance in the amount of $5 billion in grants and $10 billion in federal credit assistance (Torres, 2008, p. 129). Commenting on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) fund in particular, Torres exposes the lack of transparency surrounding the government’s support to the families of the victims, but she also unsettles the very notion that the survivors’ loss has been aligned with economics and measured accordingly. Debunking compassion as a brutality of imperialist economics, Torres represents the government’s disaster recovery politics as “burning” their victims twice over by touting the support of the compensation schemes as a form of recovery and reconciliation, yet disadvantaging some while privileging others. Torres specifically refers to the Red Cross and FEMA, led by Kenneth R. Feinberg, whose “testimony” on April 1st, 2008 further spoke to the economic tokenization of the victims and their families. In his testimony, Feinberg describes the FEMA initiative as “one of the most efficient, streamlined and cost effective government programs in American history” (para. 2), celebrating the fund for its efficiency. He emphasizes: If statistics are any barometer of success, the 9/11 Fund served its purposes in providing an efficient and effective administrative non-fault alternative to tort litigation against alleged domestic tortfeasors. Over $7 billion in public taxpayer funds was paid to 5, 560 eligible claimants. (para. 2)

Feinberg goes on to itemize the economic distribution of the government bounty to the “eligible families” (para. 2). Torres, however, reveals the complex schemes designed to assess eligibility, further victimizing the already-traumatized survivors by reducing their loved ones to “statistics” and/as a “barometer of [economic] success” (Feinberg, 2008, para. 2). To highlight the glaring discrepancies, American Widow exhibits Feinberg’s “presumed economic and non-economic loss” chart with footnotes that uncover the so-called compensation scheme (Torres, 2008, p. 135). Furthermore, Torres notes the confusion surrounding the fine print of the FEMA chart, including Feinberg’s “power to determine the fund’s ultimate generosity, in general and specifically for each of our individual circumstances” (Torres, 2008, p. 133). Not only does Torres question the inhumane character of the process, but she also exposes what Alain

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

193

Badiou (2006) refers to as the “imperial brutality” of the American superpower and its “total scorn for the everyday lives of people” (p. 31). In addition, she points to the inequities generated by the fund. These inequities highlight the ways in which the government charities and compensation funds operated on the assumption of privilege. For example, according to the RAND report by Lloyd Dixon and Rachel Kaganoff Stern (2004), the September 11th Compensation Fund based its benefit amounts on projected lifetime earnings, award sizes were higher for those with higher projected lifetime incomes. Some victims’ family members wondered why the lives of those who made less money were less valued than those who made more. (p. 2)

Torres broaches this issue when, confused by Feinberg’s “economic and non-economic loss” chart, she asks, “what is your ‘economic value,’ Eddie?” (Torres, 2008, p. 133). Tokenized as a lost earning potential, Eddie is, figuratively speaking, “burnt” again, this time by government statistics and budgetary constraints. Torres rejects the power inequities established and generated by charitable organizations like Red Cross and the September 11th government compensation funds, which, once again, attribute privilege to the already advantaged group of (former) high earners. In counterpoint to the government’s “generosity,” Torres also uncovers the disturbing reality of public envy. The widows of 9/11 in particular were compromised by the skewed and highly mediatized (mis)perception of the compensation bounty allocated to the victims’ families. While the media touted Feinberg’s generalized phrase that “every family will receive an average award of 1.6 million dollars” (Torres, 2008, p. 135), this public(ized) compensation narrative failed to emphasize that the amount did not “include any setoffs (life insurance, social security, workers compensation, retirement funds, pensions, etc.)” (p. 135). American Widow critiques the public denunciation of “terror” widows as generated partly by misinformation about the allocation of the funds102 but also by the general public’s inability to comprehend the extent of the traumatic impact of others’ pain. The public’s vilification of 9/11 widows figures prominently in the second half of Torres’s graphic novel. Torres documents the misrepresentation of the widows as “arrogant, selfish, lazy, [and] wealthy” (Torres, 2008, p. 127). Accordingly, the 2004 RAND report by Dixon and Kaganoff Stern (2004) indicts the inequities generated by government programs like FEMA for their “inflexibility in adapting programs to the particular circumstances of the attack on the World Trade Center, and its poor coordination of charities” (p. xxi). The report also mentions the

194

Chapter Seven

Victim Compensation Fund’s (VCF) mishandling of the estimated earnings and privileging of high earners (p. xxiii). The distribution of funds thus reestablished class differences and inequities that marginalized the lives of those considered low earners. In 2006, Zoe Brennan published an article on MailOnline noting the discrepancies in the allocation of funds as well as the increasing castigation and marginalization of the “9/11 widows” by the public. In American Widow, Torres rebukes the cartoonist Ted Rall for his distasteful and dehumanizing cartoon, “Terror Widows,” which was published on the New York Times website on March 6th, 2002. On March 15th, Torres wrote a letter to Rall, questioning his decency.103 Her public rebuke incriminates the brutality of misperception and unfounded assumptions. In aligning the government and charities’ compensation funds with economic, class, race, and ethnic tokenization, Torres’s American Widow speaks to the larger scope of inequities that pervade America. By pointing out the redaction of information and the reduction of victims and their widows to tokens of “terror” and cartoon comics, Torres scorns not just the collective mourning of 9/11, but rather the historical amnesia and dismembering of history that followed in its aftermath. This dismembering, affirmed by the economic devaluation of the lives lost, generated a particular mourning protocol and performance while simultaneously imposing what Judith Butler (2004) calls “the prohibition on certain forms of public grieving” (p. 37).104 Butler (2004) challenges the nationalist impulse behind such prohibitions, but also exposes its “logic of exclusion, … effacement and denominalization” (p. 38). These prohibitions contribute to, rather than undermine, the spectacle of collective mourning, whereby the individual histories and traumatic experiences of 9/11 victims and their families have been homogenized and thus, figuratively, dismembered. The government’s participation in this form of dismembering as a mass spectacle celebrated the glory of the United States, a spectacle that had very little to do with the victims’ deaths and their families’ ongoing grieving process. For example, on October 11th, 2001, NASA initiated the “Flags for Heroes and Families” campaign, sending 6,000 American flags to space via the Space Shuttle Endeavor. The mission involved flying the flags aboard the Endeavour to the International Space Station and returning them back to the survivors and their families during a special ceremony on National Flag Day, June 14th, 2002. The ceremony took place at the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City.105 The government and NASA described the campaign as a “way for us to honor and show our support for the

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

195

thousands of brave men and women who have selflessly contributed to the relief and recovery efforts” and as a “patriotic symbol of our strength and solidarity, and our Nation’s resolve to prevail” (NASA, 2001, para. 1). Torres has spoken in interviews to the absurdity of the space mission as a form of minimizing rather than magnifying the traumatic experiences of the victims’ families.106 American Widow is thus more than a graphic autobiography; it is also a political statement that refutes the transformation of the 9/11 tragic events into a narrative of collective survival and national prowess. Consequently, American Widow further rejects the ecstatic consumption of the tragic by refusing to participate in the anniversary of 9/11 spectacle. The novel ends with Torres taking her son to Hawaii on the first-year anniversary of the attacks. By refusing to participate in the national and international reconstruction of the events, Torres subverts the imperative to celebrate America’s prowess through an imposed ritual comprising public displays of collective mourning; instead, she reclaims her own sense of agency as a grieving spouse and mother, but also as an author whose narrative serves not only as a private, but also public, testimony to the circus that 9/11 has become. American Widow is thus also a graphic biography of America and what Badiou (2006) refers to as its “spectacular staging of power” (p. 29). This staging speaks to the Debordian (1983) notion of the spectacle as an “ideology par excellence” and as “the highest stage of expansion that has turned need against life” (p. 215). More importantly, the novel testifies to the lacunae of history that, in its repetitive commemoration, is bound to be dis(re)membered. Torres’s graphic novel thus encapsulates the irony of the images as an alienating warfare on human consciousness while simultaneously allowing the privacy of her own grief to remain entombed rather than exposed within the semantic and visual gaps of her narrative medium. While much has been said about Torres’s choice of the graphic novel genre as a means to “illustrate the experience of trauma and the symptoms of post-traumatic stress” (Pines, 2013, p. 191), American Widow complicates the assumption that a graphic novel, or any literary genre, can make a “particularly apt form for the representation of trauma” or any life experience (Pines, 2013, p. 191). Torres reveals instead that fictionalizing and storytelling contribute to the shaping and construction of history. But she also testifies to the ways in which storytelling has become complicit in the economics of pain and suffering, feeding the public anxiety about the imminence of terror and fostering a politics of global fear that is “a fruit of a terror-ridden panic of populations faced with the outrageousness of the broadcasting of real or simulated threats” (Virilio, 2007, p. 59). American

196

Chapter Seven

Widow spares no punches when it comes to battling the red tape of government bureaucracy or challenging the increasingly global appetite for the tragic. In this respect, American Widow is not just a personal monument–it is much more than that. It is also an ambitious attempt to bear witness to the ways in which ecstatic consumption promises utopia, where brutality and a lack of ethics degenerate into a melancholy dystopia. The post-9/11 spectacle has taken on a dystopian quality, in which “pseudo-histories” take the place of history in a desperate chase to sustain the image of America’s hegemony. As Badiou (2006) suggests, the spectacle is criminal; it is “the obverse of imperial brutality” (p. 31). Torres’s novel echoes his words: “Savour the irony” (Badiou, 2006, p. 32). This irony is immortalized in the post-9/11 visual and narrative war to “preserve the threatened equilibrium” of what Debord (1983) refers to as “frozen time” (p. 200). The frozen time is endemic of not only the culture of spectacle but also of the ecstatic consumption that drives it. Any attempt at emancipation or subversion becomes subject to a reversible hypertely where time is frozen into a close-up that is also simultaneously an extended shot. As reality disappears into an image-verse and the ecstatic gaze singes everything in its path, all that remains is the narrative debris of historic events that continues to speak in its unspoken silences, in the lacunae of meaning and interpretation, in the blindspots of human ignorance and indignity. These lacunae speak to the impossibility of closure, but they also reveal the immorality of the spectacle as a form of mass reality that subsumes the private into the public, subjecting the private subject to the emotional (ecstatic and, often, bathetic) appetite of the public. To put it in Debord’s (1983) terms, “The critical concept of spectacle can undoubtedly also be vulgarized into a commonplace hollow formula of socio-political rhetoric to explain and abstractly denounce everything, and thus serve as a defense of the spectacular system” (p. 203). American Widow (2008) challenges this formula by questioning what Jonathan Beller (2006) refers to as the “cinematic mode of production” informing global politics (p. 1), but also by exposing the normative economies of public emotion that shape and define the limits of personal grief in order to serve the nation. Mapping the ways in which the private body is subsumed by the body politic, Torres uncovers the post-9/11 media, government, and public spectacle as a terror against the living. Torres’s graphic novel thus brings to the forefront the main issues discussed in this book—the increasing globalization of ecstatic gaze and its cinematic effect that “weaken[s]…the reality principle” (Hartman, 2002, p. 22); the futuristic impulse and its

9/11 and the Economics of Suffering in Torres’s American Widow

197

dystopian tenor; the hyperbole of political correctness that frequently results in the radical marginalization of disadvantaged groups; and, last but not least, the global appetite for the tragic that secures a constant and instaneous turnaround of historical crises and emotional trauma through the media. In her critique of life as a movie principle, Torres evokes Hartman’s (2002) skepticism of “traumatic realism” (p. 22). According to Hartman, “traumatic realism often produces an unreality effect; and although this reaction is clearly a psychological defense, it may induce a weakening of the reality principle and lead to the delusion that all the world’s a movie” (p. 22). While DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) brings the dangers of traumatic realism to the forefront by exploring the limits of art in addressing global events, Torres’s graphic novel provides a personal reflection on the affective topographies of trauma, but it also illuminates the dangers of the flattening of reality by means of the 24/7 media coverage. In its rebuttal of the ecstatic, American Widow provides an interesting closure to the very argument of this book. The spectacle of global dystopia depends on the ecstatic form of consumption to churn utopia under the guise of a better, happier future or, in other words, of survival and virility, eros and aggression—the legitimate discourses of imperial and consumer brutality. Like the narratives by DeLillo, Piercy, Smiley, Lee, Abu-Jaber, and Auslander, Torres’s work engages with the brutal fatality and fatal brutalities the ecstatic form represents while refusing to succumb to the deadly equilibrium that it promises. In offering a back story, Torres troubles the limits of memory and thus exposes the tragic consequences of historical amnesia without attempting to fill the gaps of (mis)perception that cannot be filled, that remain entombed in the in-between spaces of the frames and their own precarious and perforated memory.

CONCLUSION “THE ZERO POINT; OR, A NEW BEGINNING”

The aim here is to go beyond Literature by entrusting one’s fate to a sort of basic speech, equally far from living languages and from literary language proper. —Roland Barthes (1953), Writing Degree Zero, p. 77 Although all is truly becoming one, this new connectedness is far from unitary. Rather, it is fractal, multiplying in layers within layers of burgeoning complexity. We live in an age of radical differentiations, cascades and crashes, decentralized affiliations and baroque complexifications, all of which shatter as they recompose and destroy as they create. It is as if we woke up one day, and suddenly all the points in the world had burst into webs, all the straight lines into nets of wires, and all the planes and volumes revealed textured layerings of branchings within branchings. Nothing is what it seemed it would be. —Christopher Vitale (2014), Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age—A Manifesto, p. 2

When in the 1950s, Roland Barthes invoked the importance of “writing degree zero,” he was calling for a writing that would happen in the absence of ecstatic emotion, a writing that would be neutral, singular, and infinite at the same time (1953, p. 77). This neutrality would circumvent “those ejaculations and judgments” associated with literary, political, and theoretical writing, “without becoming involved in any of them” (p. 77). By contrast, it would “consis[t] precisely in their absence” (p. 77). A few decades later, Andrei Tarkovsky (1986) similarly contemplated the artist’s responsibility in “bring[ing] spiritual vision to bear on reality” rather than “shout[ing] his emotion” (pp. 96, 78). According to Tarkovsky (1986), “Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form” (p. 78). Both Barthes and Tarkovsky speak to the ways in which art can transcend the ecstasy of emotion—be it in the name of love or war, pleasure or pain, peace or violence. The texts discussed in this book—Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega, Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills, Marge Piercy’s He,

200

Conclusion

She and It, Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, and Alissa Torres’s American Widow—in many ways strive to balance Barthes’s and Tarkovsky’s utopian dream of a neutral language (or artistic medium) that takes place in the absences and silences but that also engages with the paradigm shifts brought about by globalization, new media technologies, social media, and the 21st century zeitgeist. Pointing to the paradigm shifts of new media technologies and their impact on both the body politic and individuals, the narratives discussed in Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature ponder how the spectacle and the ecstasy of consumption not only shape global politics and economy but also drive global ethics. They comment on what Christopher Vitale (2014) calls the “virtual kaleidoscopy” of the contemporary age (p. 4). Echoing Haraway’s (1991) and Braidotti’s (2013) arguments about posthuman futurities, Vitale (2014) argues that “[w]e are increasingly composed of so many quasi-living distributed intelligences, meshes of data, images, and commodities, all of which seem to increasingly manipulate us according to their own sub- and supra-human desires, fears, hopes, and dreams” (p. 5). Similarly, the literary texts by DeLillo, Smiley, Piercy, Abu-Jaber, Lee, Auslander, and Torres ponder the increasing enmeshment of everyday events and their various representations in the image-verse of the spectaclist culture and its insatiable appetite for more drama, more trauma, and more pain. As discussed in the previous chapters, the culture of spectacle has been radically redefined by digital culture and mass media, which blur the line between authenticity and simulation, reality and virtuality. But it has also infiltrated state politics and their affective topographies and networks. Don DeLillo laments this notion in his most recent novel, Zero K (2016), a novel which was published as Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature was going into production. In Zero K, DeLillo envisions a world where nanotechnology has taken over humanity’s ontological struggle with the life-death cycle by cryonizing humans before their time, or as DeLillo (2016) says, “prematurely” (p. 239). This new generation of “heralds” who choose to submit to a “biomedical redaction” and a “brain-edit” is “postmarked Zero K” (p. 238). In this novel, DeLillo considers the reality of the omega point, evoking Teilhard de Chardin’s (1955/64) theories of the noosphere and “supreme synthesis” or singularity, whereby an “inward movement” of the “planetization of mankind,” or what he defines as an “inversion” will be accomplished (de Chardin, 1955/64, pp. 123, 263). In Zero K, DeLillo envisions a special “portal” where such “convergence,” as

“The Zero Point; or, a New Beginning”

201

he calls it, happens. However, skeptical of de Chardin’s optimism, DeLillo (2016) challenges the utopia of collective inwardness as he foresees the convergence to be controlled by corporate tycoons like the novel’s main protagonist, Ross Lockhard, a billionaire who wishes to preserve his wife Artis for eternity. In Zero K, DeLillo (2016) uncovers the dystopian realm of infinity by noting the nanotechnology’s dematerialization of the body, its stripping of the surface, its “grotesque kind of nostalgia” for immortality (p. 241). His dystopian vision echoes the texts discussed in this book. Echoing the dystopian concerns of the novels—The Body Artist and Point Omega but also Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It—examined in Part I, DeLillo’s latest novel provides a compelling closure to this book, a kind of zero point that is also a new beginning. How the nostalgia for immortality feeds the ecstasy of consumption is also an important concern of the novels in Part II and Part III. While Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent and Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker examine the ethical implications of the kind of nostalgia for a multicultural collective that aligns itself with the body politic, Shalom Auslander’s Hope and Alissa Torres’s American Widow reflect on the impact of digital technology and media on the spectaclist gaze and its violent ramifications. Pondering the ways in which new media and networks of being have redefined the very politics of what it means to be human, these works thus also address the challenges of the ever-expanding and growing networks of data, images, spaces, and temporalities that blur the line between the public and private, reality and simulation.107 As ecstatic consumption continues to blur the line between agency and lack thereof, empowerment and disempowerment, embodiment and disembodiment, contemporary society is propelled towards new “ecosoph[ies]” that combine “singularity and finity” (Guattari, 2000/2008, p. 44) and which ponder the relationship between the end and the beginning from a hyperreal, multidimensional perspective. The ecstasy of consumption, as Baudrillard (2008) defines it, and as the texts in this book complicate and redefine it, is not so much about the illusion of separation or unification, as argued by Debord (1983), but rather, the ecstasy of consumption is about the “indefinite proliferation” of the “pataphysical perspective [inspired by Alfred Jarry]” (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 13). This pataphysical perspective speaks to what Baudrillard (2008) calls “the ecstatic form of unconditional metamorphosis” (p. 26). Metamorphosis is the lay of the land, the metaphor of the postdramatic everyday that leads to a proliferation of endings and beginnings, as well as to their interconnections and intertwining. As Christopher Vitale (2014) emphasizes,

202

Conclusion

we live in the era of “networkologies”—networks of relations, narratives, discourses, and ideas that construct their own ideologies that are no longer linear but instead multidimensional and rhizomic. They defy the binary logic of good and evil, good and bad, and pleasure and pain. As Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature shows, contemporary American literature examines the challenges of global networks and their interconnected subjectivities, their complex and ever-shifting topographies of emotion. The works of DeLillo, Smiley, Piercy, Abu-Jaber, Lee, Auslander, and Torres discussed in this book provide important and challenging commentaries on the ecstatic gaze of global dystopia, particularly its lust for alterity and the tragic, which are often disguised as interchangeable metaphors of Otherness, fear, anxiety, terror, pain, and pleasure, titillation, exoticism, and ecstasy. Consequently, the goal of this book has been to shed light on the ways in which the culture of spectacle is ever-evolving, but also manipulating and thus affecting the global dependence on the ecstasy of consumption and its many different forms.

NOTES

1

See, for example, James Annesley’s (2006, 2013) Fictions of Globalization and Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel; Peter Boxall’s (2013) Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction; Gerhard Hoffmann’s (2005) From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction; Stephen N. DoCarmo’s (2009) History and Refusal: Consumer Culture and Postmodern Theory in the Contemporary American Novel; and Marianne Hirsch’s (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and the Visual Culture after the Holocaust. 2 See also Cătălin Avranescu and Alistair Ian Blyth (2011), An Intellectual History of Cannibalism and Paul Lerner (2015), The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution. 3 See D. Pettman’s translation of Jean Baudrillard’s (2008) Fatal Strategies. 4 See, for example, George Perkins’s and Barbara Perkins’s (1987) Contemporary American literature; Richard Ruland’s and Malcolm Bradbury’s (1991) From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature; James Annesley’s (2006) Fictions of Globalization; and Gerhard Hoffmann’s (2005) From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. 5 See also Pansy Duncan (2015), The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s Other in which she describes Baudrillard’s work on ecstasy as “elevat[ing] emotion to a metaphysical principle” that relies on reversibility (p. 38). 6 See Andrew Hugill’s (2015) Pataphysics: A Useless Guide. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s “Elements of Pataphysics” (1894), Hugill emphasizes the protean and meta-ironic nature of pataphysics—its privileging of the imaginary over the real, the particular over the general (p. 4). For Jarry, pataphysics was “the science of imaginary solutions” and, as such, it was a universe unto itself, “the end of ends” (Jarry as qtd. in Hugill, 2015, p. 4). 7 See also Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, in which she emphasizes that “the line between compliance and subversion is always a fine one,” since “all of us, men as much as women, are caught up in modes of self-production and self-observation” (p. 144). Nonetheless, contemporary studies continue to associate literature with a redemptive and emancipatory potential. See, for example, studies by Duvall (2008), DoCarmo (2009), and Boxall (2013). 8 See also Paul Virilio (1989), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. 9 For example, see Longmuir (2007) and Cowart (2008).

204

Notes

10 See also Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) Volatile Bodies. Grosz emphasizes that “the line between compliance and subversion is always a fine one” since “all of us, men as much as women, are caught up in modes of self-production and selfobservation” (p. 144). 11 Cf. Lady Gaga’s songs, “Paparazzi” (2008), “Judas” (2011), and “Born This Way” (2011). 12 This is a reference to the famous speech on divine madness that Socrates delivers in Plato’s The Phaedrus. See Plato (360 BCE/1993), The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, translated by William Cobb. 13 The etymology of the word “ecstasy” is particularly relevant not only to Baudrillard’s (2008) notion of the ecstatic as an “immoral form” (p. 26) but also to this chapter’s emphasis on the “self-Other” dynamic underpinning the emancipated gaze that permeates both Gaga’s and DeLillo’s representations of performance art. The origin of the word is the Greek term ekstasis meaning “standing outside oneself” (“Ecstasy,” n.d.). 14 For example, see critical studies by Peter Knight (2008), Stacey Olster (2008), or John Duvall (2008). Although much has been said about DeLillo as a radical critic of contemporary culture, this chapter, albeit expanding on the current scholarship, shifts the focus to the ways in which DeLillo’s aesthetics both reinscribe and problematize subversive strategies as duped by the illusion of, rather than the acute fostering of, radical politics—be it in the name of art as philosophy and politics or art as commodity. 15 For more details, see Schuster, 2008, Olster, 2008, and Nel, 2002. 16 See also David Cowart’s (2008) article, “DeLillo and the Power of Language,” in which he emphasizes DeLillo’s interest in the “redemptive vitality” (p. 154) of language. 17 In his study, “DeLillo and Media Culture,” Peter Boxall (2008) links DeLillo’s writing with such subversive potential by aligning his earlier novel Americana with a “new, as yet undiscovered country, a new America free of paternal prohibition, free of the disfiguring marks of cultural difference” (p. 50). For Boxall, writing itself represents what he calls a “moral form” (p. 45). However, this chapter argues that DeLillo’s The Body Artist questions such ideals, exposing the dystopian nature of contemporary culture and the impossibility of escaping commodity culture through art. As DeLillo reveals, postmodern counterculture forms of the ‘60s and ‘70s have co-opted the spectaclist drive through the very emphasis on the subversive gaze and the embodiment they court and advocate. 18 Drawing on Foucault’s emphasis on the body as a “product of power” (p. 537), Anne Longmuir (2007) suggests that The Body Artist foregrounds what she calls a “political aesthetic” of resistance to capitalist culture, whereby “bodily experience restores a sense of self” (pp. 537, 532). As this chapter reveals, however, DeLillo’s novel problematizes the very notion of the politics of resistance. 19 For a detailed discussion of Hartke’s grieving process through the lens of trauma theory, see Laura DiPrete’s (2005) article, “DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body, Narrating Trauma.” DiPrete interprets Hartke’s performance as a positive process of working through her grief.

Ecstatic Consumption

20

205

This hyperbolic presentation is what Baudrillard (1993) associates with the “proliferative tendency” of postmodern transaesthetics, whereby the “surplus-value of the commodity [is transposed] into the aesthetic surplus-value of the sign” (p. 17). In other words, the staging of Lauren’s grief exemplifies the ecstatic form in that it presents suffering as a spectacle of loss that is offered up for public consumption, which mirrors Gaga’s “bad romance” with the paparazzi. 21 Cf. Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) notion that “the line between compliance and subversion is always a fine one” (p. 144). See also endnote one of this chapter. 22 For further discussion of these works, see Freeman (2007). 23 For an incisive commentary on Buñuel’s and Dali’s (1928/1929) Un Chien Andalou, see Freeman (2007). 24 As Sigmund Freud (1933) emphasizes in Civilization and its Discontents, our unconscious is “the same as that of primeval man” (p. 85). It does not comprehend death as such. In his terms, “it behaves as if it were immortal” (p. 85). For more, see Sigmund Freud (1933/1991), Civilization, society and religion: Group psychology, Civilization and discontents, and other works, edited by J. Strachey. 25 Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) was a Soviet filmmaker of the 1960s who challenged the Soviet government with his experimental films like Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1974), and Stalker (1979). He left the Soviet Union in 1984 for Western Europe. For more see, Robert Bird (2008), Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema. Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) was a 1920s Russian filmmaker and documentarist, well-known for his experimental approach to cinema. Inspired by futurism and constructivism, but also influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman and the work of Albert Einstein, Vertov strove to visualize poetry while simultaneously attempting to disentangle film from literature and narrative in general. His search for a method is perhaps best encapsulated by his 1920s manifesto Kino-Eye. For more see, D. Vertov (1924/1984), Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. See also Yuri Tsivian (2004), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Both Vertov and Tarkovsky experimented with the cinematic form, drawing on their love of poetry and defining cinema as “high art not entertainment” (Bird, 2008, p. 10). 26 As Helmut Gernsheim (1986) in A Concise History of Photography explains, camera obscura was a “dark room, wih a small hole in the wall or window-shutter through which an inverted image of the view outside is projected on to the opposite wall or a white screen” (p. 3). Similarly, Elster’s and Finley’s conversations can be described as inversions of truth; both emphasize the importance (and relativity) of perception. 27 Here, Freud reminds Einstein of the Eros-Thanatos principle, detailing the difference between the two. While the aggressive drive aspires towards death, the erotic drive seeks to “preserve and unite” (Gay, 1989, p. 356). 28 Whitman anticipated the modernists, particularly the futurists and their embrace of war as a cure for commodification and commercialization. 29 In his interview with Thomas DiPietro (2005), DeLillo argues that “fiction rescues history from its confusions” (p. 64). He adds: “I can do this in the

206

Notes

somewhat superficial way of filling in blank spaces” (p. 64). He concludes that what literature can do is serve as a balancing act, a counterpoint of sorts, offering a different perspective, insight into a blind spot. 30 See also David Cowart’s (2012) incisive essay, “The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega.” Cowart points to Elster’s Freudianism, highlighting his preoccupation with the inanimate state of being, a notion that Freud defined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. While Cowart is correct in linking Elster’s preoccupation with extinction to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud continued developing his theory of the “death drive” (Thanatos) throughout his life. He presented a more developed version of his musings on humanity’s primeval drive in Civilization and Its Discontents, written in 1929, as well as in his essay-response to Albert Einstein titled, “Why War?” (1933[1932]). It is in Freud’s response to Einstein’s inquiry about mankind’s lust for violence that Freud emphasizes the impossibility of circumventing the drive completely. All we can hope for, he suggests, is finding an “indirect” method, a “cultural attitude” that transforms the combative energy into something life-preserving (p. 362). For more details, see Gay (1989). 31 See Philip J. Skerry (2013), Dark Energy: Hitchcock’s Absolute Camera and the Physics of Cinematic Spacetime (p. 85). Here, Skerry refers to Gordon’s extension of the film from one hour and 49 minutes to 24 hours, whereby the original shower scene takes 53 minutes (p. 85). 32 See also David Cowart (2012) and Graley Herren (2015). For an interesting Žižek-Lacanian reading of DeLillo’s Point Omega, see G. M. G. Barker (2013), “Mining the Lack; Desire, Delusion and the Necessary Possibility of Connection.” Retrieved July 10, 2016 from http://www.gmgbarker.com/mining-the-lack-desiredelusion-and-the-necessary-impossibility-of-connection/. 33 See also Roger Stahl’s (2009), Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture in which he discusses how “technofetishism” underpins the “war as a spectacular event” or what he calls the “spectacular war” (p. 35). But while Stahl suggests that contemporary society has moved beyond the “spectacular” to an “interactive” kind of war (p. 35), both this book and, specifically, this chapter examine the ways in which the spectacle continues to play an important, if not ecstatic role in managing, controlling, and policing contemporary culture. 34 See, for example, Catherine MacKinnon’s (1996) Only Words and Andrea Dworkin’s (1997), Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War on Women, both of which comment on the patriarchal oppression of and violence against women—be it physical or symbolic. 35 Cf. Chapter One, endnote 24. Freud develops his theory of the death drive/Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1991), and he continued to expand on this theory throughout his life. He presented a more developed version of his musings on humanity’s primeval drive in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929; 1933). For more details, see also Gay (1989). 36 For an interesting discussion on “the language of love,” see Carter Lindberg’s (2008) Love: A Brief History through Western Christianity.

Ecstatic Consumption

37

207

As Roger Stahl (2009) argues, “technofetishism” is an important aspect of the “spectacular war” whereby weapons become elevated to an aesthetic trope. In his words, “the techno-spectacle sometimes works by eroticizing weapons, imbuing them with overt sexual symbolism” (p. 28). See also endnote 33 of this chapter. For more details see, Roger Stahl’s (2009) Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. 38 For more details, see Robert Emmet Meagher and Stanley Hauerwas (2014), Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War. See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, ed. (1991), Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays. 39 For more details, see Magali Sarfatti Larson (1993), Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America. See also Tomas Kulka (2010), Kitsch and Art. 40 As Baudrillard (1995) emphasizes, the collapse of the political into the hyperreal precipitates societies into an obsessive pursuit of power and/or its signs (p. 23). 41 See, for example, Elissa Gurman (2011), “The Holy and the Powerful Light that Shines through History”; Neil Badmington (2000), “Posthumanist (Com)Promises: Diffracting Donna Haraway’s Cyborg through Marge Piercy’s He, She and It” in Posthumanism, pp. 85–97; Stephen Schryer, (2012), “Experts without Institutions: New Left Professionalism in Marge Piercy and Ursula LeGuin” in Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism, pp. 141–166; and Heather Hicks (2002), “Striking Cyborgs: Reworking the ‘Human’ in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It” in Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, pp. 85–106. 42 The section draws here on Maurice Blanchot’s definition of prophetic speech as caught in its own ecstatic dilemma: to “lay things bare” and to aspire to “living mimicry” (1959/2003, p. 84). Blanchot suggests that prophetic speech is a “wandering speech that returns to the original demand of movement by opposing all stillness, all settling, any taking root that would be to rest” (p. 79). In other words, as this chapter suggests, prophecy is an errant but also erring (and erroneous) speech type. 43 See Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds., (1995) Cyberspace/ Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment for a detailed history of cyberpunk literature. 44 See Neil Badmington (2000); Heather Hicks (2002); Elissa Gurman (2011); Stephen Schryer, (2012). For more details, see also ft. 39. 45 The etymology of “information” is particularly useful in this context. According to the Online Dictionary of Etymology, between the years 1330 and 1400, the word “information” in Middle English meant an “instruction, a forming of the mind,” while in Medieval Latin, the term was used to denote “conception.” 46 See Teilhard de Chardin’s (1955/1964) The Future of Man, in which de Chardin puts forward his theory of mankind’s movement towards a noogenesis, whereby personalization and transcendence will become one. As Charles Gere (2012) notes in Digital Culture, among other theories, cybernetics draws on Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere”: “the Internet encompassed the theories of … Teilhard de Chardin about the ‘noosphere,’ a communicative equivalent to the atmosphere, the increasing complexity of which would lead to a kind of global consciousness” (p.

208

Notes

151). DeLillo’s Point Omega incorporates such ideas in his contemplation of the future of mankind. For more, see Chapter One of this book. 47 As Gary Allan Scott and William Welton (2008) emphasize, Eros occupies an in-between position. Its power is the ability to “navigate between two realms: the divine (associated with higher desire and wisdom) and the mortal realm (lower/base desires like aggression and war)” (p. 95). 48 In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway (1991), similarly to Piercy, argues that cyborg politics is about “the struggle for language” and the power of “retelling the origin stories” by subverting “the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness of language before writing, before Man” (p. 22). But like Braidotti (2006), Haraway also argues for an embodied politics. In Braidotti’s view, such politics must challenge the sentimentality of the holistic, eco-feminist emphasis on a postindividualistic, collective subjective and “bracke[t] off … the spiritual dimension” (2006, p. 118). 49 See, for example, Elissa Gurman’s (2011) essay, “‘The Holy and the Powerful Light that Shines through History’: Tradition and Technology in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It.” Gurman argues that Piercy’s novel reinforces traditional discourses of romance. Similarly, Heather Hicks (2002) acknowledges Yod’s relationship to Shira as adhering to, rather than subverting, the formula of a heterosexual romance; she also emphasizes that Yod is a victim of power asymmetries established by his creators and co-creators, Avram, Malkah, and Shira (p. 92). See also Badmington (2000) and Schryer (2012). 50 See Rosi Braidotti’s (2006) work on the impact of globalization, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, in which she points to the “non-linearity as a major principle” of global exploitation that simultaneously masquerades as a form of emancipation and work production (p. 275). 51 For an interesting reading of the increasing globalization of the golem figure and Jewish culture in literature and film, including Piercy’s representation of the golem in He, She and It, see Cathy S. Gelbin (2011), “Towards the Global Shtetl: Golem Texts in the New Millennium.” While Gelbin’s analysis focuses on the ways in which Jewish culture has been globalized, this chapter examines Piercy’s critique of the dream of Singularity as a globalizing principle. 52 Here, the chapter draws on J. Sage Elwell’s expression, “the logic of prosthesis,” which he associates with the increasing digitalization of the self. See Elwell’s (2010), Crisis of Transcendence: A Theology of Digital Art and Culture. 53 For more on these artists’ works, see Elwell (2010). 54 The chapter here draws on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) notion of the cultural politics of emotion, which highlights “affective economies” as a system of social and cultural practices that shape emotions, and vice versa (p. 8). 55 See Carol Fadda-Conrey (2006), “Arab American Literature in the Ethnic Borderland: Cultural Intersections in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent”; Lorraine Mercer and Linda Strom (2007), “Counter-Narratives: Cooking Up Stories of Love and Loss in Naomi Shihab Nye’s Poetry and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent”; or Brinda J. Mehta (2012), “The Semiosis of Food in Diana Abu-Jaber” in Layla

Ecstatic Consumption

209

Maleh (2012) (ed.), Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature (pp. 203–236). 56 See Brinda J. Mehta’s (2012) chapter, “The Semiosis of Food in Diana AbuJaber” in Layla Maleh (2012) (ed.), Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature (pp. 203–236). Mehta defines AbuJaber’s culinary practice as “an enduring signifier of cultural retention and identity” (p. 205). 57 For a detailed study of American orientalism, see Douglas Little (2009), American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. See also Steven Salaita’s (2006) Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes From and What It Means for Politics Today. 58 As Steven Salaita (2006) notes in the 2000 U.S. Census, 1.2 million Arab Americans classified as “white” (p. 17). 59 For example, Edward Said (1979), Orientalism; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media; Sara Ahmed (2000), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality; Douglas Little (2009), American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945; and David Arnold (2011), Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science 1800-1845. 60 The Motion Picture Production Code was adopted in 1930 and took effect until 1966, when it was replaced with the so-called ratings system (Black, 1994, p. 1). The code censored excessive sexual and violent scenes, but it also “forestalled the possibility of a denunciatory counter-narrative from the people of color” (Shohat and Stam, 1994, p. 160). For more, see Gregory D. Black (1994), Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies. See also Shohat & Stam (1994). 61 See Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which American travellers to Spain align the Spanish population with animalism and bullfights. 62 Although two American policemen, “one white and one black come to the café every day, order fava bean dip and lentils fried with rice and onions,” they are marginal to the novel’s plot (Abu-Jaber, 2003, p. 23). Again, while this relegation to a minor role can be viewed as Abu-Jaber’s attempt at transforming and turning the lens on America’s majoritarian position, such an approach is not without its own racialized, political biases, as it ignores the politics of American slavery and the oppressive legacy of African-Americans living in the United States. 63 This notion draws on Gerald Vizenor’s (1998) Fugitive Poses, in which he discusses American colonialism and the conquest of the native presence as an invention of an “indian as an imprinted picture” (p. 145). As Vizenor emphasizes, this “simulation of the other” erases the native or, in his terms, results in “the absence of the native” (p. 145). 64 For more, see Shohat and Stam (1994), “Postmodern War,” pp. 125–136, in Unthinking Eurocentrism; see also Paul Virilio’s (1989) War and Cinema and Susan Sontag’s (1977) On Photography. 65 Here, Shohat and Stam (1994, p. 48) warn against the kind of homogenizing multicultural ethic that relies on proximity to others as a means of diluting rather

210

Notes

than empowering diasporic subjects. See also Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work on the cultural politics of emotion and its (multi)cultural uses and abuses. 66 Steven Salaita (2006) emphasizes that “the early settler ethos, in which the settlers had a divine mission conferred upon them, continues to influence American discourse,” particularly in the ways in which racial communities are represented and subjected to the so-called “imperative patriotism” that views any form of dissent as threatening (p. 82). 67 See, for example, Eudardo Bonilla-Silva (2014), Racism without Racists, in which he speaks of “new racism” as a subtle and “apparently non-racial” version that “otherizes softly” through exclusive sorting (p. 2). Cf. Saskia Sassen (2014), Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, in which she aligns multicultural discourses with “new logistics of expulsion” and “savage sorting” (p. 1). 68 As Steven Salaita (2006) notes, “the covenant Messianism with which early American settlers invested their identity invents and reinvents itself based on deeply encoded notions of racial superiority” that continue to ride under the more recent banner of colour-blindness (p. 86). 69 Many critics have focused on analyzing the relationship between the public and the private as imperative to understanding Lee’s exploration of immigrant identity. See, for example, Jodi Kim (2009), “From Mee-Gook to Gook: The Cold War and Racialized Undocumented Capital in Lee’s Native Speaker”; Betsy Huang (2006), “Citizen Kwang: Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Consent”; and Rachel C. Lee (2014), “Reading Contests and Contesting Reading: Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Ethnic New York.” See also Juliana Chang (2012), Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature. While the encroachment of the private on the public and vice versa is essential to Native Speaker, the novel undermines such a binary approach by pointing to the ways in which globalization and transnationalism have surpassed binary and dialectic thinking. Instead, as this chapter proposes, the novel triangulates these traditionally contrasting and separate worlds, subjecting them to what Baudrillard (2008) calls an “unconditional metamorphosis” (p. 24). 70 Pocahontas’s marriage to John Rolfe was the ultimate highlight of multicultural Messianism, whereby Pocahontas disappeared (or was integrated and thus assimilated) into the New World’s messianic future. For more on this topic, see Greg Carter (2013), The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing, and Minelle Mahtani (2014), Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality. 71 See Greg Carter’s (2013) The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing, in which he historicizes the dehumanizing and conflicting “efforts to stabilize racial identity” in America (p. 3). As Carter emphasizes, “even though laws against interracial intimacy are a memory, acceptance has surpassed past levels and mixed figures are more visible than ever, the tensions between stabilization of racial identity and defense of racial mixing have remained relevant” (p. 193).

Ecstatic Consumption

211

72 See Rebekah Metzler (2012), “Racism Shows Its Face in Presidential Campaign,” U.S. News. Retrieved October 3, 2014 from http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/08/17/racism-shows-its-face-inpresidential-campaign. 73 See also Chapter One. 74 As Andrew Hugill (2015) emphasizes in Pataphysics: A Useless Guide, Jarry defines pataphysics as “the science of the particular,” where the imaginary trumps the real; more specifically, he describes it as a “science of exception[s]” (p. 3). For more, see endnote four of the Introduction. 75 See, for example, Elizabeth Gallway’s (2008) From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood: Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity, in which Gallway analyzes the history of Canadian identity in terms of nursery rhymes as ideological doctrines of the British empire and its “imperial dreams” (p. 14). For the significance of nursery rhymes in socialization, see Linda Alchin (2004), The Secret History of Nursery Rhymes, and Albert Jack (2008), Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes. 76 See David Naimon’s (2014) article, “A Conversation with Chang-Rae Lee.” 77 See Chris Perez (2014, July 21), “Smiling Auschwitz Selfie Sparks Twitter Outrage,” New York Post. Retrieved December 15, 2015 from http://nypost.com/2014/07/21/smiling-auschwitz-selfie-sparks-twitter-outrage/. 78 For an incisive analysis of war as “militainment,” see Roger Stahl’s (2009) Militainment Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture in which he argues that “militainment” turns wars into “interactive wars” (p. 6). 79 See Emily Payne (2015, April 23), “So Popular, They Are Turning People Away: Auschwitz Becomes the World’s Most Unlikely Tourist Hot Spot Thanks to a 40% Surge in Visitor Numbers,” MailOnline. Retrieved December 23, 2015 from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3052542/So-popularturning-people-away-Auschwitz-world-s-unlikely-tourist-hot-spot-40-increasevisitors.html. 80 Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider (2006) refer to this phenomenon as the “Americanization of the Holocaust.” See The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, p. 132. The next section of this chapter further elaborates on this notion. 81 As Jean-Pierre Vernant (1999) emphasizes, what drives Pandora is her appetite. Upon entering Epimetheus’s household, where many jars tempt her appetite, Zeus coaxes her to open them. When she lifts the lid of the hidden jar that “is never to be touched,” she releases “all the bad things … throughout the universe” (p. 63). All that remains is elpis (hope), an “expectancy for what is to come—which hadn’t had time to escape” (p. 63). For more, see Jean-Pierre Vernant (1999), The Universe, the Gods, and Men, translated by Linda Asher. 82 See Aaron Kerner’s (2011) Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films, p. 2. Kerner acknowledges the Greek origin of the term “holocaust” as meaning “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; a whole burnt offering” (p. 2). He also points out Bruno Bettelheim’s rejection of the term as a “sacrilege” or, as Bettelheim puts it, “a distortion invented for our comfort” (Kerner, 2011, p. 2). Auslander’s novel exposes the challenges that

212

Notes

language and any form of visual, verbal, or digital representation pose when it comes to bearing witness without having experienced the traumatic event in the first place. 83 See Killian Fox’s (2012, February 19) interview with Shalom Auslander, “Shalom Auslander: Part of the Job Is Frightening Yourself” in The Guardian. Retrieved October 15, 2013 from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/19/shalom-auslander-interview-hopetragedy. 84 In Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture, Roger Stahl (2009) expands on Sontag’s (1977; 2003) arguments about contemporary visual culture’s problematic representations of war, suggesting that “a shrinking world continues to erase the lines between the home front and battlefield” (p. 6). As this chapter argues, however, the lines between the actual physical experience of war and its representation are not only blurred as Stahl (2009) emphasizes, but they are also peculiarly re-established through the distance and abstract separation, as well as the non-stop hypertely that the spectacle generates. As Debord (1989) emphasizes, “the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate” (p. 30). 85 For more, see “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Collecting,” pp. 59–68 in Walter Benjamin’s (1968) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn. 86 For more see, Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt’s (1994), “Reclaiming Auschwitz,” pp. 232–251 in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, edited by Geoffrey Hartman. 87 Roberta Rosenberg’s (2015) essay titled “Jewish ‘Diasporic Humor’ and Contemporary Jewish American Identity” is particularly informative here. Rosenberg describes Anne Frank as “the objective correlative of the mother’s fear and anxiety, the personification and justification of her paranoia” (p. 128). But Anne Frank seems to be more than the embodiment of Mother’s guilt. In his grotesque deployment of Anne Frank, Auslander critiques the American appropriation of her text/body/memory, and, through his satirical re-vision of Anne Frank as an elderly survivor striving to outdo but also amend her celebrity reputation, he ponders the complexity of representing her past and afterlife. 88 See Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian novel, Jane Eyre (1847/2013), and Jean Rhys’s post-colonial novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which Rhys reimagines Brontë’s Bertha as Antoinette. See also Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), for their succinct analysis of the trope’s subversive role in women’s literature. 89 For more details about Anne Frank and her diary’s interesting “journey,” see Francine Prose’s (2009) Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, and the Afterlife. 90 For more details, see Francine Prose’s (2009) Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, and the Afterlife. 91 Hope: A Tragedy indicts the persistent attempts at reducing the Holocaust to a consumer experience. From the Broadway staging of The Diary of Anne Frank, the 2003 hip hop version called Anne B. Real, and the musical The Diary of Anne

Ecstatic Consumption

213

Frank: A Song to Life to the many film adaptations of the story, including the recent 2009 Jon Jones miniseries, The Diary of Anne Frank, the novel questions such unsavory resuscitations of memory. For more details and examples, see also Prose (2009). 92 For more details, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 93 For more details on the Nazi’s public burning of the books, see Jonathan Rose, ed., (2008), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation. 94 See Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s (1994) Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, specifically her chapter titled “Viennese Figures of Otherness: Femininity and Jewishness” (pp. 115-123). 95 See Walter Benjamin’s (1996) Selected Writings: 1927–1934, p. 798. Benjamin refers to the conversation between Franz Kafka and Max Brod. Kafka tells Brod, “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts, that come into God’s head, …. Our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his” (p. 798). Kafka then adds that there is “plenty of hope, …but not for us” (p. 798). 96 As Guy Debord (1983) emphasizes, the spectacle is an “instrument of unification” that inverts reality into a fetish (p. 3). See also Roger Stahl’s (2009) Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture and his analysis of technofetishism (p. 28). 97 See “9/11 footage” keyword search on Google. Retrieved January 28, 2016. 98 See Torres’s articles on Salon.com, “9/11 Widow: Do I Really Want the Truth?” (2009), “9/11 Widow: The Media Duped Us” (2010), “9/11 Widow: What I’ve Learned” (2011), and “Widow’s Advice to the Most Recent Victims of Terrorism and Violence” (2015). Retrieved December 8, 2015. 99 In her discussion of Alissa Torres’s and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels about 9/11, Davida Pines (2013) raises Caruth’s point about the trauma victim’s inability to “entirely possess” the traumatic moment (p. 191). For more, see “History, Memory, and Trauma: Confronting Dominant Interpretations of 9/11 in Alissa Torres’s American Widow and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers,” pp. 185–206 in Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, edited by Jane Tolmie (2013). Expanding on Pines (2013), this section focuses on the ethics of telling as it pertains to public memorials and their narrativization of historical events. 100 See Jean Baudrillard’s (2008) Fatal Strategies, in which he speaks of the “ecstasy of communication” as a contemporary imperative where the excess of information represents a “screen without depth, a tape perforated with messages and signals to which corresponds a receiver’s own perforated reading” (p. 90). Not only is such communication without depth, it is also “obscene” (p. 90). 101 Jacques Rancière (2009) defines the emancipated spectator as an active participant in the construction of meaning or performance (p. 6). However, Torres’s novel suggests that the 9/11 and post-9/11 voyeurism participated in the process of de- and re-construction of meaning, but it nonetheless failed to acknowledge the complex politics of grief and emotion.

214

102

Notes

See Alissa Torres’s (2002, March 15) “Wrath of a Terror Widow,” on Salon.com. Retrieved October 25, 2015 from http://www.salon.com/2002/03/15/widow_wrath/. See also the article by Asa Pittman and Emma Ruby-Sachs (2002, July 15), “Cartooning Terror,” on The Nation website. Retrieved October 25, 2015 from http://www.thenation.com/article/cartooning-terror/. 103 See Torres (2002), “Wrath of a Terror Widow.” See also Pittman and RubySachs (2002), “Cartooning Terror.” 104 See Davida Pines (2013) chapter, “History, Memory, and Trauma: Confronting Dominant Interpretations of 9/11 in Alissa Torres’s American Widow and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers,” pp. 185–206 in Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, edited by Jane Tolmie. In her chapter, Pines (2013) mentions the “dominant interpretations that arose quickly in the aftermath of the attack” and points to the “gap between public and private interpretations of the attack” (p. 186). 105 See NASA Press Release 01-195 (2001), “Flags for Heroes and Families” at http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2001/01-195.txt. Retrieved October 15, 2013. See also collectSPACE (2001), “Profile: Flags for Heroes and Families” at http://collectspace.com/news/news-091102a.html. Retrieved October 15, 2013. 106 See Michael C. Lorah’s interview with Alissa Torres (2008, September 11), “9/11 Legacy—Alissa Torres, American Widow,” on Newsrama.com. Retrieved October 15, 2013 from http://www.newsrama.com/994-9-11-legacy-alissa-torresamerican-widow.html. 107 For more details on networks and their ideologies, see Christopher Vitale (2014), Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age—A Manifesto.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“9/11 footage”. Google Images keyword search. Retrieved January 28, 2016 from https://images.google.ca/. 9/11 Memorial. National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Retrieved January 25, 2016 from http://www.911memorial.org. Abraham, N., & Torok, M. (1994). The shell and the kernel: Renewals of psychoanalysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Abu-Jaber, D. (1993). Arabian jazz. New York, NY: Harcourt. —. (2003). Crescent. New York, NY: Norton. Adorno, T. W. (1974). Minima moralia: Reflections from a damaged life (E. F. N. Jephcott, Trans.). London, UK: Verso. (Original work published 1951) —. (1991). The culture industry reconsidered. In Adorno, T. W., The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture (pp. 98-106). London, UK: Routledge. Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1997). The Culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In T. W. Adorno & M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of enlightenment (pp. 120–167). London, UK: Verso. (Original work published 1944) Aeschylus. (1998). Aeschylus, 2: The Persians, Seven against Thebes, The Suppliants, Prometheus bound. D. R. Slavitt & P. Bovie (Eds.). (D. R. Slavitt, S. Sandy, G. Holst-Warhaft, & W. Matthews, Trans.). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Original works published in 472, 467, 470, & 430 BCE) Agamben, G. (2002). Remnants of Auschwitz (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in postcoloniality. London, UK: Routledge. —. (2004). The cultural politics of emotions. New York, NY: Routledge. Alchin, L. (2004). The secret history of nursery rhymes. New York, NY: Folklore. Annesley, J. (2006). Fictions of globalization. London, New York, NY: Continuum. —. (2013). Blank fictions: Consumerism, culture, and the contemporary American novel. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

216

Bibliography

Aristotle. (1979). Metaphysics (J. Sachs, Trans.). New York, NY: Peripatetic. (Original work published 350 BCE) Armstrong, N. (1987). Desire and domestic fiction: A political history of the novel. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Arnold, D. (2011). Tropics and the traveling gaze: India, landscape, and science 1800–1845. Washington, DC: Washington University Press. Asimov, I. (1976/2002). The bicentennial man and other stories. New York, NY: Gollancz. Atkins, E. (2008). Ten days in the hills (Review). The Hopkins Review, 1(2), 355–359. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/thr.2008.0029 Auslander, S. (2005). Beware of god: Stories. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. —. (2007). Foreskin’s lament. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. —. (2012). Hope: A tragedy. New York, NY: Picador. Avranescu, C., & Blyth, A. I. (2011). An intellectual history of cannibalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Badiou, A. (2005). Being and event (O. Feltham, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. (Original work published 2001) —. (2006). Polemics (S. Corcoran, Trans.). New York, NY: Verso. Badmington, N. (2000). Posthumanism. London, UK: Palgrave. Barber, B. R. (2007). Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole. New York, NY: Norton. Barish, K. (Producer), & Pakula, A. J. (Director). (1982). Sophie’s Choice [DVD]. USA: IFC Entertainment. Barker, G. M. G. (2013). Mining the Lack; Desire, Delusion and the Necessary Possibility of Connection. Retrieved July 10, 2016 from http://www.gmgbarker.com/mining-the-lack-desire-delusion-and-thenecessary-impossibility-of-connection/ Barkin, S. (2013). Hope: A tragedy (review). Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal 32(1), 130-132. Barlow, J. P. (1996). Declaration of the independence of cyberspace. Retrieved December 12, 2013 from https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html Barthes, R. (1953). Writing degree zero (A. Lavers & C. Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, J. (1988). America (C. Turner, Trans.). New York: Verso. —. (1993). The transparency of evil (J. Benedict, Trans.). New York, NY: Verso. —. (1995). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Ecstatic Consumption

217

—. (1998). The Ecstasy of communication. In Hal Foster (Ed.), The antiaesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture (pp. 145–154). New York, NY: The New Press. —. (2008). Fatal strategies (D. Pettman, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: Semioxt(e). Beller, J. (2006). The cinematic mode of reproduction: Attention economy and the society of the spectacle. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations: Essays and reflections (H. Zohn, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House. —. (1996). Selected writings: 1927–1934. New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press. Benmussa, R. (Producer), & Polanski, R. (Director). (2002). The Pianist [DVD]. USA: R.P. Productions. Berlant, L. (1997). The queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bethke, B. (1983). Cyberpunk. Retrieved September 17, 2013, from http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/cpunk.htm Biesenbach, K. (2006). Douglas Gordon: Timeline. New York, NY: MoMA Publications. Bird, R. (2008). Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of cinema. London, UK: Reaktion Books. Black, G. D. (1994). Hollywood censored: Morality codes, Catholics, and the movies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Blancato, K. (Producer), & Percival, B. (Director). (2013). The book thief [DVD]. USA: Fox Pictures. Blanchot, M. (1999). Friendship (E. Rottenberg, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1971) —. (2003). The book to come (C. Mandell, Trans.). Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1959) Boccaccio, G. (2014). Decameron (W. E. Rebhorn, Trans.). New York, NY: Norton. (Original work published 1351) Bonilla-Silva, E. (2014). Racism without racists. New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield. —. (2015). Getting over the Obama hangover: The new racism in “postracial” America. In K. Murji, & Solomos, J. (Eds.), Theories of race and ethnicity (pp. 57–70). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Borovan, P., Trojan, O. (Producers), & HĜebejk, J. (Director). (2000). Divided We Fall. [Motion picture]. Czech Republic: Sony Pictures.

218

Bibliography

Boxall, P. (2008). DeLillo and media culture. In J. N. Duvall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo (pp. 43–52). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —. (2012). Late: Fictional time in the twenty-first century. Contemporary Literature 53(4), 681–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cli.2012.0038 —. (2013). Twenty-first century fiction: A critical introduction. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Bozak, N. (2011). The cinematic footprint: Lights, camera, natural resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bradbury, L. (2004, June 20). Interview with Chang-Rae Lee. The Telegraph. Retrieved September 14, 2013 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3619233/Chang-rae-Lee.html Bradbury, R. (1967). Fahrenheit 451. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. (Original work published 1953) Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. New York, NY: Polity. —. (2013). The posthuman. New York, NY: Wiley. Brennan, Z. (2006, September 6). The curse of the 9/11 widows. MailOnline. Retrieved June 15, 2014 from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-403840/The-curse-9-11widows.html Breton, A. (1929). Second manifesto of surrealism. In A. Breton, André Breton: Selections (pp. 152–157). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. (2003). André Breton: Selections (M. Polizzotti, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bronfen, E. (2012). Specters of war: Hollywood’s engagement with military conflict. New York, NY: Rutgers. Brontë, C. (2013). Jane Eyre. London, UK: Penguin. (Original work published 1847) Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1994). Baroque reason: The aesthetics of modernity (P. Camiller, Trans.). New York, NY: Sage. Buñuel, L. (Director), & Dali, S. (Writer). (1928/1929). Un chien andalou [DVD]. France: Distribution Select. Bush, G. W. (2002, October 7). Transcript: George Bush’s war ultimatum speech on Iraq (Cincinnati). The Guardian. Retrieved October 10, 2013 from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/07/usa.iraq —. (2003, March 18). A transcript of George Bush’s war ultimatum speech from the Cross Hall in the White House. The Guardian. Retrieved October 10, 2013 from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/18/usa.iraq

Ecstatic Consumption

219

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London, UK and New York, NY: Verso. Carter, G. (2013). The United States of the united races: A utopian history of racial mixing. New York, NY: New York University Press. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cassier, E. (1953). Substance and function and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Chicago, IL: Dover. Cavedon, C. (2015). Cultural melancholia: US trauma and discourse before and after 9/11. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Brill|Rodopi. Chandler, M. R. (1991). Dwelling in the text: Houses in American fiction. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Chaney, M. A. (Ed.). (2011). Graphic subjects: Essays on autobiography and graphic novels. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Chang, J. (2012). Inhuman citizenship: Traumatic enjoyment and Asian American literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chow, R. (1993). Writing diaspora: Tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cohn, C. (1987). Sex and death in the rational language of defence intellectuals. Signs, 12(4), 687–718. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174209 collectSPACE. (2001). Profile: Flags for heroes and families. Retrieved October 15, 2013 from http://collectspace.com/news/news-091102a.html Cowart, D. (2008). DeLillo and the power of language. In J. N. Duvall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo (pp. 151–165). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —. (2012). The lady vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point omega. Contemporary Literature, 53(1), 31–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cli.2012.0009 Dadge, D. (2006). The war in Iraq and why the media failed us. New York, NY: Praeger. Debord, G. (1983). Society of the spectacle. Oakland, CA: AK Press. de Chardin, T. (1964). The future of man. London: Collins. (Original work published 1955) DeGroot, J. (2008). Consuming history: Historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Deitch, J. (1992). Post human. Retrieved Oct. 15, 2014 from http://www.deitch.com/curatorial/post-human

220

Bibliography

Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and philosophy (H. Tomlinson, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1962) —. (1993). The baroque fold (T. Conley, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. DeLillo, D. (1985). White noise. New York, NY: Scribner. —. (1988). Libra. New York, NY: Scribner. —. (1991). Mao II. New York, NY: Viking. —. (1997). Underworld. New York, NY: Scribner. —. (2001). The body artist. New York, NY: Scribner. —. (2010). Point omega. New York, NY: Scribner. —. (2016). Zero K. New York: Scribner. Digby, T. (2014). Love and war: How militarism shapes sexuality and romance. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. DiPietro, T. (2005). Conversations with Don DeLillo. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. DiPrete, L. (2005). DeLillo’s The body artist: Performing the body, narrating trauma. Contemporary Literature, 46(3), 484–510. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cli.2005.0033 Dixon, L., & Kaganoff Stern, R. (2004). Compensation for losses from the 9/11 attacks. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Retrieved October 27, 2013 from http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND _MG264.pdf Doane, M. A. (2013). Femmes fatales. New York, NY: Routledge. DoCarmo, S. N. (2009). History and refusal: Consumer culture and postmodern theory in the contemporary American novel. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Doss, E. (2012). Memorial mania: Public feeling in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Drob, S. L. (2000). The doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum in Jewish mysticism. Retrieved October 3, 2013 from http://www.newkabbalah.com/CoincJewMyst.htm. Duncan, P. (2015). The emotional life of postmodern film: Affect theory’s other. New York, NY: Routledge. Duvall, J. (Ed.). (2008). The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dwork, D., & van Pelt, R. J. (1994). Reclaiming Auschwitz. In G. Hartman (Ed.), Holocaust remembrance: The shapes of memory (pp. 232–251). New York, NY: Blackwell.

Ecstatic Consumption

221

Dworkin, A. (1997). Life and death: Unapologetic writings on the continuing war on women. New York, NY: Free Press. Ecstasy. (n.d). In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved September 15, 2013 from http://www.oed.com Einstein, A. (1961). Relativity, the special and general theory. New York, NY: Three Rivers. (Original work published 1916) Eliot, T. S. (1953). Selected prose. John Hayward (Ed.). London, UK: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1919) Elwell, J. S. (2010). Crisis of transcendence: A theology of digital art and culture. New York, NY: Lexington Books. Fadda-Conrey, C. (2006). Arab American literature in the ethnic borderland: Cultural intersections in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent. MELUS 31(4), 187–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/31.4.187 Faulkner, W. (1936). Absalom, Absalom! New York, NY: Random House. Featherstone, M., & Burrows, R. (Eds.). (1995). Cyberspace/cyberbodies /cyberpunk: Cultures of technological embodiment. London, UK: Sage. Feinberg, K. R. (2008, April 1). Testimony of Kenneth R. Feinberg: Former special master of the federal September 11 victim compensation fund of 2001. Retrieved April 3, 2013 from http://www.911healthwatch.org/pdf/Feinberg080401.pdf Fischer-Lichte, E. (2005). Theatre, sacrifice, ritual: Exploring forms of political theatre. London, UK: Routledge. Fish, S. (1997). Boutique multiculturalism, or why Liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech. Critical Inquiry 23(2), 378–395. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343988 Fitzgerald, F. S. (2013). The great Gatsby. New York, NY: Wildside. (Original work published 1925) Foster, B. R., & Pollinger-Foster, K. (2009). Civilizations of ancient Iraq. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fox, K. (2012, February 19). Shalom Auslander: Part of the job is frightening yourself. The Guardian. Retrieved October 15, 2013 from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/19/shalom-auslanderinterview-hope-tragedy Freeman, J. (2007). New performance/new writing. New York, NY: Macmillan. Freud, S. (1991). Civilization, society and religion: Group psychology, civilization and discontents, and other works (Vol. 12). J. Strachey (Ed.). London, UK: Penguin. (Original work published 1933) —. (1991). On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis; Beyond the pleasure principle; The ego and the id and other works (Vol. 11). J. Strachey (Ed.). London, UK: Penguin. (Original work published 1920)

222

Bibliography

—. (1991). The future of an illusion. (G. C. Richter, Trans.). New York, NY: Martino Fine Books. (Original work published 1928) —. (1991). Why war. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Civilization, society and religion: Group psychology, civilization and discontents, and other works (Vol. 12) (pp. 341–362). London, UK: Penguin. (Original work published 1933) Fudge, R. (2006). Bias cut: Old racism as new fashion. In L. Jervis & A. Zeisler (Eds.), BITCHfest: Ten years of cultural criticism from the pages of Bitch Magazine (pp. 322–327). New York, NY: Macmillan. Gallagher, C. A. (2014). Color-blind egalitarianism as the new racial form. In K. Murji & J. Solomos (Eds.), Theories of race and ethnicity (pp. 40–56). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gallway, E. (2008). From nursery rhymes to nationhood: Children’s literature and the construction of Canadian identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Gana, N. (2008). In search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent. Comparative Literature Studies 45(2), 228–246. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cls.0.0018 Gauthier, T. (2010). 9/11, image control, and the graphic narrative: Spiegelman, Rehr, Torres. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46(3–4), 369–380. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2010.482420 Gay, P. (Ed.). (1989). The Freud reader. New York, NY: Norton. Gelbin, C. S. (2011). Towards the global shtetl: golem texts in the new millennium. European Review of History 18(1), 9-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.543588 Gere, C. (2012). Digital culture. London, UK: Reaktion Books. Gernsheim, H. (1986). A concise history of photography. North Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York, NY: Ace. Gilbert, S., & Gubar, S. (1979). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gimbel, S. (2012). Einstein’s Jewish science: Physics at the intersection of politics and religion. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Glenn, J., & Kingwell, M. (2008). The idler’s glossary. Windsor, ON: Biblioasis. Gogol, N. (2003). Taras Bulba (P. Constantine, Trans.). New York, NY: Modern Library. (Original work published 1835) Goldberg, R. (2011). Performance art: From futurism to the present. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson.

Ecstatic Consumption

223

Gordon, D. (Producer & Director). (1993). 24 hour psycho [Art installation]. United Kingdom. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Guattari, F. (2008). Guattari: The three ecologies. (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). London, UK: Continuum Impacts. (Original work published 2000) Gurman, E. (2011). “The holy and the powerful light that shines through history”: Tradition and technology in Marge Piercy’s He, she and it. Science Fiction Studies, 38(3), 460–477. http://dx.doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.38.3.0460 Haraway, D. (1991). Cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New York, NY: Routledge. Hartman, G. (1992). The book of destruction. In S. Friedländer (Ed.), Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the “final solution” (pp. 318–336). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. (Ed.). (1994). Holocaust remembrance: The shapes of memory. New York, NY: Blackwell. —. (2002). Scars of the spirit: The struggle against inauthenticity. New York, NY: Palgrave. Hatab, L. J. (2005). Nietzsche’s life sentence: Coming to terms with eternal recurrence. New York, NY: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1954) Hemingway, E. (2006). The sun also rises. New York, NY: Scribner. (Original work published 1926) Herren, G. (2015). Don DeLillo’s art stalkers. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 61(1), 138–167. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2015.0007 Hicks, H. (2002). Striking cyborgs: Reworking the “human” in Marge Piercy’s He, she and it. In M. Flanagan & A. Booth (Eds.), Reload: Rethinking women and cyberculture (pp. 85–106). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hirsch, M. (2012). The generation of postmemory: Writing and the visual culture after the Holocaust. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hitchcock, A. (Producer & Director). (1960). Psycho [DVD]. USA: Paramount Pictures.

224

Bibliography

Hitchcock, P. (2003). Imaginary states: Studies in cultural transnationalism. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hoesterey, I. (2001). Pastiche: Cultural memory in art, film, literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hoffmann, G. (2005). From modernism to postmodernism: Concepts and strategies of postmodern American fiction. New York, NY: Rodopi. Huang, B. (2006). Citizen Kwang: Chang-Rae Lee’s Native speaker and the politics of consent. Journal of Asian American Studies, 9(3), 243– 269. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2006.0026 Hugill, A. (2015). Pataphysics: A useless guide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A poetics of postmodernism: History, theory, fiction. New York, NY: Routledge. —. (1992). The power of postmodern irony. In B. Rutland (Ed.), Genre, trope, gender: Essays by Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, and Shirley Neuman (pp. 35–49). Ottawa, ON: Carleton University Press. Idel, M. (2002). Abraham Abulafia and ecstatic Kabbalah. Lancaster, UK: Labyrinthos. —. (2002–2003). Metamorphoses of a Platonic theme in Jewish mysticism. Jewish Studies at the Central European University, 3, 67– 86. Retrieved Oct. 15, 2014 from http://web.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/yb03/08idel.pdf Information. (n.d.). In Online dictionary of etymology. Retrieved September 13, 2014 from http://www.oed.com Jack, A. (2008). Pop goes the weasel: The secret meanings of nursery rhymes. London, UK: Penguin. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. (1998). Postmodernism and consumer society. In H. Foster (Ed.), The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture (pp. 111–125). New York, NY: The New Press. —. (2009). Utopia as replication. In F. Jameson, Valences of the dialectic (pp. 410-434). New York, NY: Verso. Jarry, A. (2001). Elements of pataphysics. In P. Edwards & A. Melville (Trans.), Adventures in ‘pataphysics.’ London, UK: Atlas. (Originally published in 1894). —. (1996). Exploits and opinions of Doctor Faustroll, pataphysician: A neo-scientific novel (S. W. Taylor, Trans.). Boston, MA: Exact Change. (Original work published 1911)

Ecstatic Consumption

225

Johnson, K. (2006, June 9). At MoMA: Douglas Gordon: The hourglass contortionist. The New York Times. Retrieved April 3, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/arts/design/09gord.html?_r=0 Joseph, M., & Fink, J. (1999). Performing hybridity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kac, E. (2000). GFP Bunny. Retrieved October 15, 2015 from http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html Kafka, F. (1998). The trial (M. Harman, Trans.). New York, NY: Schocken. (Original work published 1925) Kear, A., & Steinberg, D. L. (2002). Mourning Diana: Nation, culture, and the performance of grief. London, UK: Routledge. Kerner, A. (2011). Film and the Holocaust: New perspectives on dramas, documentaries, and experimental films. New York, NY: Continuum. Kim, J. (2009). From mee-gook to gook: The cold war and racialized undocumented capital in Lee’s Native speaker. MELUS, 34(1), 117– 137. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mel.0.0009 King-O’Riain, R. C., Small. S., Mahtani, M., Song, M., & Spickard, P. (2014). Mixed race amnesia: Resisting the romanticization of multiraciality. New York, NY: New York University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., & Shandler, J. (2012). Anne Frank unbound: Media, imagination, memory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Knight, P. (2008). DeLillo, postmodernism, postmodernity. In J. N. Duvall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo (pp. 27–40). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kulka, Tomas. (2010). Kitsch and art. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Lacan, J. (1981). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1978.) LaCapra, D. (1994). Representing the Holocaust: History, theory, context. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lady Gaga. (2009). Bad romance [Music video]. Retrieved September 20, 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I —. (2011). Born this way [Music video]. Retrieved October 20, 2013 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1FrqwZyKw —. (2011). Judas [Music video]. Retrieved October 20, 2013 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagn8Wrmzuc Lancaster, B. L. (2008). The golem as a transpersonal image: 2. Psychological features in the medieval golem ritual. Transpersonal Psychology Review, 1(4), 23–30. Retrieved October 20, 2013 from

226

Bibliography

http://www.academia.edu/20769482/The_Golem_as_a_Transpersonal_ Image_2._Psychological_Aspects_in_the_Mediaeval_Golem_Ritual Larson, M. S. (1993). Behind the postmodern façade: Architectural change in late-twentieth century America. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Lee, C. R. (1995). Native speaker. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. —. (1999). Gesture life. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. —. (2004). Aloft. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. —. (2010). The surrendered. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. —. (2014). On such a full sea. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. Lee, E. (2015). The making of Asian America: A history. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Lee, R. (2004). Theorizing diasporas: Three types of consciousness. In R. B. H. Goh & S. Wong (Eds.), Asian diasporas: Cultures, identity, and representation (pp. 55–76). Hong Kong, China: Hong Kong University Press. Lee, R. C. (2014). Reading contests and contesting reading: Chang-Rae Lee’s Native speaker and ethnic New York. MELUS, 29(3–4), 341– 352. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4141859 Lerner, P. (2015). The consuming temple: Jews, department stores, and the consumer revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levy, D., & Sznaider, N. (2006). The Holocaust and memory in the global age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lindberg, C. (2008). Love: A brief history through western Christianity. New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell. Little, D. (2009). American orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Longmuir, A. (2007). Performing the body in Don DeLillo’s The Body artist. Modern Fiction Studies, 53(3), 528–543. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2007.0071 Lorah, M. C. (2008, September 11). 9/11 legacy—Alissa Torres, American widow. Newsrama.com. Retrieved October 15, 2013 from http://www.newsrama.com/994-9-11-legacy-alissa-torres-americanwidow.html Ludwig, P. W. (2002). Eros and polis: Desire and community in Greek political theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lustig, B. (Producer), & Spielberg, S. (Director). (1993). Schindler’s list [DVD]. USA: Universal Pictures. Lyotard, J. F. (2005). Answering the question: What is postmodernism? In H. Adams & L. Searle (Eds.), Critical theory since Plato (pp. 1418– 1423). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Ecstatic Consumption

227

MacKinnon, C. (1996). Only words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mahtani, M. (2014). Mixed race amnesia: Resisting the romanticization of multiraciality. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Marshall, D. (1997). Celebrity and power: Fame in contemporary culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Martin, E. (2011). Graphic novels or novel graphics?: The evolution of an iconoclastic genre. The Comparatist, 35, 170–181. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/com.2011.0015 —. (2012). “I” for iconoclasm: Graphic novels and the (re)presentation of terrorism. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5(3), 469–481. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2012.723521 McLuhan, M. (1987). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Toronto, ON: ARK. Meagher, R. E., & Hauerwas, S. (2014). Killing from the inside out: Moral injury and just war. New York, NY: Wipf and Stock. Mehta, B. J. (2012). The semiosis of food in Diana Abu-Jaber. In L. Maleh (Ed.), Arab voices in diaspora: Critical perspectives on anglophone Arab literature (pp. 203–236). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi. Melville, Herman. (2001). Moby Dick. New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1851). Mercer, L., & Strom, L. (2007). Counter narratives: Cooking up stories of love and loss in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent. MELUS, 32(4), 33–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/32.4.33 Metzler, R. (2012, August 17). Racism shows its face in presidential campaign. U.S. News. Retrieved October 3, 2014 from http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/08/17/racism-shows-itsface-in-presidential-campaign. Miller, V. (2011). Understanding digital culture. London, UK: SAGE. Moghadam, V. M. (2005). Globalizing women: Transnational feminist networks. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murji, K., & Solomos, J. (Eds.). (2015). Theories of race and ethnicity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nadakate, N. (1999). Understanding Jane Smiley. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Naimon, D. (2014). A conversation with Chang-Rae Lee. The Missouri Review, 37(1), 120–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mis.2014.0010 NASA. (2001). Press Release 01-195. NASA administrator launches “Flags for heroes and families” campaign. Retrieved October 15, 2013 from http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2001/01-195.txt

228

Bibliography

Nealon, J. T. (1998). Alterity politics: Ethics and performative subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nel, P. (2002). Don DeLillo’s return to form: The modernist poetics of The Body Artist. Contemporary Literature, 33(4), 737–759. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1209040 —. (2008). Don DeLillo and modernism. In J. N. Duvall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo (pp. 13–26). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1909). Thus spoke Zarathustra: A book for all and none (T. Common, Trans.). Edinburgh, UK: Foulis. Nussbaum, M. (1986). The fragility of goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. —. (2013). Political emotions: Why love matters for justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Obama, B. (2008). Audacity of hope: Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream. New York. NY: Vintage. Olster, S. (2008). White noise. In J. N. Duvall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo (pp. 79–93). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Osteen, M. (2008). DeLillo’s Dedalian artists. In J. N. Duvall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo (pp. 137–150). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ovid. (2010). The art of love (S. Applebaum, Trans.). New York, NY: Dover. (Original work published 2 AD) Payne, E. (2015, April 23). So popular, they’re turning people away: Auschwitz becomes the world’s most unlikely tourist hot spot thanks to a 40% surge in visitor numbers. MailOnline. Retrieved December 23, 2015 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-30525 42/So-popular-turning-people-away-Auschwitz-world-s-unlikelytourist-hot-spot-40-increase-visitors.html Perez, C. (2014, July 21). Smiling Auschwitz selfie sparks Twitter outrage. New York Post. Retrieved December 15, 2015 from http://nypost.com/2014/07/21/smiling-auschwitz-selfie-sparks-twitteroutrage/ Perkins, G. & Perkins, B. (1987). Contemporary American literature. New York, NY: McGraw Hill Humanities. Piercy, M. (1991). He, she and it. New York, NY: Random House. Pines, D. (2013). History, memory, and trauma: Confronting dominant interpretations of 9/11 in Alissa Torres’s American widow and Art Spiegelman’s In the shadow of no towers. In J. Tolmie (Ed.), Drawing

Ecstatic Consumption

229

from life: Memory and subjectivity in comic art (pp. 185–206). Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Pittman, A., & Ruby-Sachs, E. (2002, July 15). Cartooning terror. The Nation. Retrieved October 25, 2015 from http://www.thenation.com/article/cartooning-terror/. Plato. (1993). The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato’s erotic dialogues (W. Cobb, Trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York. (Original work published 260 BCE) Poe, E. A. (1945). The fall of the house of Usher. In J.G. Kennedy (Ed.), The portable Edgar Allan Poe (pp. 244-267). New York, NY: Viking Penguin. (Original work published in 1839) —. (1945). The portable Edgar Allan Poe. (J. G. Kennedy, Ed.). New York, NY: Viking Penguin. Prose, F. (2009). Anne Frank: The book, the life, and the afterlife. New York, NY: Harper. Radway, J. (2006). Reading the romance. In J. Storey (Ed.), Cultural theory and popular culture: A reader (pp. 215-231). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Rancière, J. (2009). The emancipated spectator (S. Corcoran, Trans.). New York, NY: Polity. Rhys, J. (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea. New York, NY: Norton. Rilke, R. M. (1961). Duino elegies (C. F. MacIntyre, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: The University of California Press. Rose, J. (2008), (Ed.). The Holocaust and the book: Destruction and preservation. Boston, MA: The University of Massachussetts Press. Rosenberg, R. (2015). Jewish “diasporic humor” and contemporary Jewish American identity. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 33(3), 110–138. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sho.2015.0027 Ruland, R., & Bradbury, M. (1991). From puritanism to postmodernism: A history of American literature. New York, NY: Penguin. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin. —. (1981). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. New York, NY: Vintage. Salaita, S. (2006). Anti-Arab racism in the USA: Where it comes from and what it means for politics today. New York, NY: Pluto Press. —. (2011). Modern Arab American fiction: A reader’s guide. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Sassen, S. (2004). Global cities and survival circuits. In B. Ehrenreich & A. R. Hochschild (Eds.), Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy (pp. 254–274). New York, NY: MacMillan.

230

Bibliography

—. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schryer, S. (2012). Experts without institutions: New left professionalism in Marge Piercy and Ursula LeGuin. In S. Schryer (Ed.), Fantasies of the new class: Ideologies of professionalism (pp. 141–166). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Schuster, M. (2008). Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the consumer conundrum. New York, NY: Cambria Press. Scott, G. A., & Welton, W. (2008). Erotic wisdom: Philosophy and intermediacy in Plato’s Symposium. New York, NY: SUNY. Shalal-Esa, A. (2003). Interview with Diana Abu-Jaber. In D. Abu-Jaber, Crescent (pp. 407–413). New York: Norton. Shelley, M. (1994). Frankenstein. New York: Dover. (Original work published 1818) Shira. (n.d.). In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved September 12, 2013 from http://www.oed.com Shklovsky, V. (1917/1998). Art as technique. In Kolocotroni, V., Goldman, J., & Taxidou, O. (Eds.), Modernism: An anthology of sources and documents (pp. 217–221). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Shohat, E. (2006). Taboo memories, diasporic voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shohat, E., & Stam, R. (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media. New York, NY: Routledge. Sjoberg, L. (2013). Gendering global conflict: Toward a feminist theory of war. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Skerry, P. J. (2013). Dark energy: Hitchcock’s absolute camera and the physics of cinematic spacetime. London: Bloomsbury. Slusser, G. E., & Shippey, T. A. (Eds.). (1992). Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the future of narrative. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Smiley, J. (1984). Duplicate keys. New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday. —. (1987). The age of grief. New York, NY: Anchor. —. (1988). The greenlanders. New York, NY: A. Knopf. —. (1989). Ordinary love and good will. New York, NY: Anchor. —. (1991). A thousand acres. New York, NY: A. Knopf. —. (1995). Moo. New York, NY: Anchor. —. (1998). The all-true travels and adventures of Lidie Newton. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. —. (2007). Ten days in the hills. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Smith, S. (2011). Human rights and comics: Autobiographical avatars, crisis witnessing, and transnational rescue networks. In M. A. Chaney

Ecstatic Consumption

231

(Ed.), Graphic subjects: Critical essays on autobiography and graphic novels (pp. 61–72). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. New York, NY: Picador. —. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. New York, NY: Picador. Spectacle. (n.d.) In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved Dec. 13, 2012, from http://www.oed.com Stahl, R. (2009). Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Stam, R. (1999). Palimpsestic aesthetics: A meditation on hybridity and garbage. In M. Joseph & J. Fink (Eds.), Performing hybridity (pp. 59– 78). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stelarc (1996). The ping body. Retrieved November 20, 2014, http://www.artelectronicmedia.com/document/stelarc-ping-body Sternheimer, K. (2014). Celebrity culture and the American dream: Stardom and social mobility. New York, NY: Routledge. Strachey, J. (1991). Preface to “Why war?”. In S. Freud, Civilization, society and religion: Group psychology, Civilization and discontents, and other works (Vol. 12) (pp. 343–344). London, UK: Penguin. Sweeney-Turner, S. (2001). The political parlour: Identity and ideology in Scottish national song. In H. White & M. Murphy (Eds.), Musical constructions of nationalism: Essays on the history and ideology of European musical culture, 1800–1945 (pp. 212–238). Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press. Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. New York, NY: Penguin. Tarkovsky, A. (1986). Sculpting in time: Reflections on cinema (K. Hunter-Blair, Trans.). London, UK: Faber & Faber. Taylor, C. (2008, September 7). Review of Alissa Torres’s American Widow. New York Times. Retrieved November 30, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/books/review/Taylor-t.html?_r=0 Tolmie, J. (2013). Drawing from life: Memory and subjectivity in comic art. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Torres, A. (2002, March 15). Wrath of a terror widow. Salon.com. Retrieved October 25, 2015 from http://www.salon.com/2002/03/15/widow_wrath/ —. (2008). American widow. New York, NY: Villard. —. (2009). 9/11 widow: Do I really want the truth? Salon.com. Retrieved December 8, 2015 from http://www.salon.com/2009/09/11/911_widow/ —. (2010). 9/11 widow: The media duped us. Salon.com. Retrieved December 8, 2015 from

232

Bibliography

http://www.salon.com/2010/09/08/we_are_not_experts_on_park/ —. (2011). 9/11 widow: What I’ve learned. Salon.com. Retrieved December 8, 2015 from http://www.salon.com/2011/09/09/911_widow_what_ive_learned/ —. (2015). Widow’s advice to the most recent victims of terrorism and violence. Salon.com. Retrieved December 8, 2015 from http://www.salon.com/2015/12/07/a_911_widows_advice_to_the_most _recent_victims_of_terrorism_and_violence/ Tsivian, Y. (2004). Lines of resistance: Dziga Vertov and the twenties. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Van Ausdale, D., & Feagin, J. R. (2001). The first r: How children learn race and racism. New York, NY: Rowman. Veblen, T. (2011). Theory of the leisure class. New York, NY: BoD. (Original work published 1899) Vernant, J. P. (Ed.). (1991). Mortals and immortals: Collected essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vernant, J. P. (1999). The universe, the gods, and men (L. Asher, Trans.). London, UK: Harper Perennial. Vertov, D. (1984). Kino-eye: The writings of Dziga Vertov. Los Angeles: The University of California Press. (Original work published 1924) Virilio, P. (1989). War and cinema: The logistics of perception (P. Camiller, Trans.). London: Verso. —. (2007). The Original accident (J. Rose, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity. (Original work published 2005) Vitale, C. (2014). Networkologies: A philosophy of networks for a hyperconnected age—a manifesto. Alresford, UK: Zero Books. Vizenor, G. (1998). Fugitive poses: Native American Indian scenes of absence and presence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska. Whitman, W. (1855). Leaves of grass. New York, NY: Brooklyn. Wiesel, E. (1986, December 11). Nobel lecture: Hope, despair, and memory. Retrieved October 12, 2015 from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesellecture.html Wittgenstein, L. (2010). Tractatus logico-philosophicus (C.K. Ogden, Trans.). New York, NY: Cosimo, Inc. (Original work published 1922) Wydra, H. (2015). Politics and the sacred. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Yasuda, K. (1995). Approach to haiku and basic principles. In N. G. Hume (Ed.), Japanese aesthetics and culture: A reader (pp. 125–150). New York, NY: SUNY Press.

INDEX

9/11, 54, 109, 177–197, 213n97, 213n101 appropriation of, 180, 189 impact of, 19 media representation of, 13 narratives, 180, 184 spectacle of, 179 widows, 193, 194 See also September 11th Compensation Fund. 9/11 Memorial & Museum, 177, 178, 179 Abraham, Nicolas, 164, 167 Abramovic, Marina, 31, 32 abstraction, 87, 90, 149, 162 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 5 American Jazz, 104 Crescent, 12, 101–122, 123, 189 Abulafia, Abraham, 81, 83 addiction, 3, 156 Adorno, Thedor, 7, 40, 69–70, 72, 157 advertising, 7, 140 See also marketing. Aeschylus, 153 aesthetics, 6, 67–73, 190 expression of, 158 materializaton of, 20 modernist, 32 production of, 4 transaesthetics, 19–21, 20, 21, 22, 205n20 of violence, 39, 65, 70, 207n37 affect, 121–122, 141 See also emotion. Agamben, Giorgio, 13, 154, 157, 170, 183, 187 agency, 88, 182

aggression, 84, 115, 129, 197, 205n27 See also Thanatos; violence. Ahmed, Sara, 12, 61, 64, 103–104, 105, 106, 107, 108–109, 112, 114, 115, 132, 136, 139, 184, 208n54, 210n65 The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 101 Strange Encounters, 209n59 Alchin, Linda, 211n75 alienation, 8, 87, 94, 186 alterity, 101, 105, 114, 118 ecstatic, 85, 86–94, 113 American Dream, 58, 62, 116, 124, 130, 134, 141, 142, 152 See also promised land (America); utopia. American Idol, 57, 59 See also television. Americanization of Holocaust, 151, 155, 156, 211n80 amnesia, 154, 194, 197 See also remembrance. Annesley, James, 203n1 anti-racism, 104–114 See also racism. antisemitism, 82 See also Holocaust. apocalypse, 87 appetite, 172 bodily, 77 consumer, 151, 153, 192, 196 for destruction, 174 dystopian, 186 global, 152, 188, 189, 196, 197 multicultural, 112 for stories, 175, 184 for tragedy, 177, 196, 197

234 See also consumption; food; hunger. Arabian Nights, 108 Arabs Arab-American community, 101, 106, 111, 113, 115 females, 112 identity, 101, 112 Ares, 54, 59–66, 64, 77, 82, 89 See also war. aretƝ, 62, 83, 86 Aristotle, 55, 59 Armstrong, N. 67 Arnold, David, 209n59 arson, 154, 172 art, 41 and aggression, 65 artistic process, 44, 46 body art, 20, 23, 27, 29 (See also bodies [physical]) as commodity, 18, 204n14, 204n17 dystopia in, 19, 204n17 and ethics, 78 exhibitions, 151 as extinction, 43–47 high and low forms, 21 and language, 72 limits of, 197 as means of deflection, 38 as murder, 40 performance, 20, 24, 36, 95, 186, 204n13 spritual, 37 technology and, 162 as truth, 46 and war, 38, 42 See also artist; performance. artificial intelligence, 76, 78, 88, 92 See also digital technology. artist, 43, 199 Asher, Linda, 211n81 Asian Americans, 124 Asimov, Isaac, 77 assimilation, 13, 108, 109, 113, 114, 126, 135, 141, 155, 210n70

Index See also multiculturalism. A Thousand and One Nights, 103, 110 Atkins, Ellen, 54 attachment, 38, 108, 112, 117, 121, 127–128 Auschwitz, 149, 151, 162, 165 Auslander, Shalom, 5, 154–155 Hope: A Tragedy, 13, 149–175, 177, 186, 189 Austin, Jane, 56 authority, 68, 133 See also power. Avranescu, Cătălin, 203n2 awareness, 143–145 Badiou, Alain, 14, 30, 31, 154, 179, 182, 183, 190, 192–193, 195, 196 Badmington, Neil, 77, 86, 93, 207n41, 207n44, 208n49 Baghdad. See under Iraq. Barber, B. R., 125 Barker, G. M. G., 206n32 Barkin, S., 153 Barthes, Roland, 36, 40, 199 bathos, 151 Baudrillard, Jean, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 18, 19, 20–21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 40, 65, 67, 70, 75, 78, 85, 91, 94, 128, 129, 130, 134, 142, 150, 153, 182, 184, 187, 201, 205n20, 207n40, 210n69 on ecstasy, 203n5, 204n13 Fatal Strategies, 1, 17, 203n3, 213n100 Simulacra and Simulation, 51 The Transparency of Evil, 2 Beller, Jonathan, 4, 8, 10, 18, 37, 57, 186, 196 Benjamin, Walter, 40, 161, 175, 212n85, 213n95 Bergen-Belsen, 165 Berlant, Lauren, 135 Bettelheim, Bruno, 211n82

Ecstatic Consumption Biesenbach, 191 Bingham, Caleb, 110 Bird, Robert, 205n25 Birkenau, 149, 151 Black, Gregory D., 209n60 blackface, 112 Black Plague (1348), 54 Blanchot, Maurice, 78, 79, 80, 92, 93, 149, 161–162, 207n42 blogs. See social media. Blyth, Alistair Ian, 203n2 Boccaccio, Giovanni Decameron, 54, 66 bodies (physical), 26, 82, 139, 150 appropriation of, 167, 212n87 as art, 18, 20, 22, 23, 27, 29, 45, 95 becoming digital, 95 burnt, 22, 23, 24, 28, 34, 49, 153, 188 colonization of, 92 as commodity, 6 consumption of, 185 dematerialization of, 201 discomfort, 152 disembodiment, 33, 94 expression, 27 (See also language) and food, 27 historic, 164 and houses, 172 ideal, 91 and identity, 204n18 as mask, 20 materiality of, 23 and memory, 172 mutilation of, 28, 30, 32 objectified, 40, 188 and Otherness, 32 pain, 185 pleasures, 83 policing of, 70 and power, 204n18 private, 184, 185, 196 public dimension of, 185 reduction of, 93 rights over, 185

235

as site of perception, 27 and soul, 22, 31, 173 as text, 24, 164 of victims, 184 See also body politic. body politic, 10, 66, 184, 196, 200 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 123, 124, 136, 144, 210n67 border-crossing, 114, 122 Boxall, Peter, 25, 26, 31, 35, 203n1, 203n7, 204n17 Bozak, Nadia, 8 Bradbury, Malcolm, 8–9, 127, 203n4 Bradbury, Ray Fahrenheit 451, 173–174 Braidotti, Rosi, 3, 11, 75, 82, 86, 90, 105, 130, 142, 200, 208n48, 208n50 Brennan, Zoe, 194 Breton, André, 30–31 Brod, Max, 213n95 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 59 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 166, 173, 212n88 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 22, 213n94 Buñuel, L., 205n23 Burden, Chris, 31 burning, 153, 154, 192, 193 bodies, 22, 23, 24, 28, 34, 49, 153, 188 of books, 174, 213n92 house, 171–175 images of, 172 Burrows, Roger, 207n43 Bush, George W., 54, 60 See also Bush, Laura; Bush government. Bush, Laura, 189 Bush government, 11, 61, 177 See also Bush, George W.. Butler, Judith, 177, 181, 185, 186, 187–188, 189, 194 camera obscura, 38, 205n26

236 capitalism, 7, 8, 24–25, 75, 86, 90, 94, 105, 110 capitalist production, 40 and commidification, 8 and consumerism, 33, 77 global, 12, 80 techno-capitalism, 78 captivity, 110, 119 See also slavery. Carter, Greg, 137, 210n70, 210n71 Caruth, Cathy, 181, 213n99 Cassier, Ernest, 40 catharsis, 181 Cavedon, Christina, 177, 183 celebrity culture, 23, 55, 56 See also Hollywood. census, 137 Chandler, Marilyn R., 172 Chaney, Michael A., 190 Chang, Juliana, 135, 141, 210n69 child development, 140 See also socialization. Choi, Sungyoon, 181 Chow, Rey, 131, 132 cinema, 37, 40, 41, 51, 58, 114–120, 186, 190 and capitalism, 40 as escape, 70 experimental, 58, 205n25 as food, 115 and gaze, 187 history in, 151, 161 life as a movie, 197 perfect cinematic form, 38 and poetry, 46 pure, 43, 58 reliance of, 38 shaping humanity, 42 and war, 37, 38, 41, 42, 49, 52 civil rights movement, 134 clichés. See stereotypes. Cobb, William, 204n12 Cohn, Carole, 67 coincidentia oppositorum, 82, 91 collections, 112, 161 See also museums.

Index colonialism, 112, 209n63 postcolonialism, 12, 114 and violence, 123 colonization, 88, 92, 104, 111, 116, 130 colour-blindess, 123, 124, 126–134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 144, 210n68 See also racism. comic books. See graphic novel. commodity culture, 3, 14, 21, 56 concentration camps. See Auschwitz; Bergen-Belsen; Birkenau. conflict, 117, 173 conformity, 10, 72 conquest, 111, 113 consciousness, 5, 7, 34, 37, 40, 69–70, 75, 78, 80–81, 96, 109–110, 111, 138, 167, 195 diasporic, 131 global, 87, 207n46 self-consciousness, 154 unconscious, 4, 44, 167, 178, 205n24 war on, 195 See also memory. consumerism, 3, 12, 18, 21, 57, 66, 94, 116, 120, 142, 151, 153, 168, 172, 192 and art, 25 and capitalism, 77 consumer agenda, 189 consumer hell, 175 consumerist drive, 9, 14, 19 consumers as prosumers, 7 consumer society, 66 ethics of, 173 and gaze, 32 global, 67, 75, 150, 154 ideology, 8, 124 post-industrial, 140 quest for tragedy, 174 and racism, 124–125 values of, 60 voyeur-consumerism, 34 consumption, 105, 114, 205n20

Ecstatic Consumption of the body, 29, 66, 185 and commodity, 7 and desire, 60 as ecstasy, 3 as entertainment, 115 of ethnicity, 102, 137 of history, 52, 160, 172 logic of, 94–97 of the Other, 112, 134 spectacle of, 45 of stories, 108 symbolic, 171 and tourism, 162 of tragedy, 157, 189, 196, 197 of wars, 51, 54, 190 See also appetite; food; hunger. counterculture, 24, 26, 204n17 See also art. Cowart, David, 203n9, 204n16, 206n30, 206n32 creation, 37, 81, 86, 90, 170, 199 of art, 23 of golems, 82 of systems, 8 See also destruction. creativity, 77, 88, 92 culture commodity, 3, 56 consumer, 36, 54, 67–73, 68, 72, 116, 155, 174 cultural renewal, 22 digital, 72, 200 industry, 7 Jewish, 208n51 media, 11, 12, 25, 32 oral, 81 popular, 180, 190 postmillenial, 2 postmodern, 6, 57 scopophilic, 60 of spectacle, 5–14, 8, 13, 114, 200, 202 cyberpunk, 77, 78–86 cyberspace. See Internet. cyborgs, 76, 78, 80, 83, 88, 91, 93 anthromorphization of, 89

237

as art, 95 identity, 79 society, 94 as weapons, 89, 95 See also golems; machines. Dadge, David, 61 death, 30, 33, 41, 136, 151, 205n24, 205n27 bearing witness to, 161 desire for, 44 as disappearance, 26 ecstasy of, 29 fetishized, 188 figurative, 128 Freud's death drive, 42, 46 (See also Thanatos) and human experience, 188 importance of, 168 and life, 32, 37, 82, 86, 172 life-death cycle, 200 meaning of, 35 death camps. See Auschwitz; BergenBelsen; Birkenau. death drive. See Thanatos. Debord, Guy, 1, 6, 8, 18, 35, 40, 66, 67, 72, 155, 201 and multiculturalism, 13 Society of the Spectacle, 1, 2, 17 on spectacle, 1, 9, 17, 56, 178, 195, 196, 212n84, 213n95 de Chardin, Teilhard, 42, 47, 200 The Future of Man, 41, 207n46 See also noosphere; omega point. dédoublement, 30–34, 33, 34, 36, 41 DeGroot, Jerome, 11, 52 dehumanization, 56, 174 Deitch, Jeffrey, 95, 96 Deleuze, Gilles, 22, 28, 129 DeLillo, Don, 5, 8, 18, 52, 204n13, 204n14, 205n29 Americana, 204n17

238 The Body Artist, 11, 19–34, 185– 186, 188, 189, 204n17, 204n18 Point Omega, 11, 17–19, 34–49, 51, 75–76, 83, 92, 118, 186, 188, 189, 197, 206n32 Zero K, 200–201 depersonalization, 57, 71 desensitization, 8, 59 desire, 51, 59, 62, 66, 70, 71, 73, 76, 82, 92, 150, 155, 171–175, 191, 200 to consume, 171 nationalist, 186 for progress, 79 public, 191 See also love. destruction, 82, 86, 88, 92, 153, 170, 174, 199 awe of, 189 See also creation; war. detachment, 30, 35–36, 37, 40, 43–44, 51, 55 diasporic communities, 12, 109, 117, 155 Arab-American, 104 Asian-American, 124, 126 difference, 83, 101, 108, 114, 115, 125, 127, 130, 131, 135, 143 ecstatic, 150 tokenization of, 12 See also mystery; Other, the; unknown. Digby, Tom, 68 digestion, 172 See also consumption; food; indigestion. digital media, 7, 8, 11, 72, 75, 78 See also digital technology digital technology, 46, 75, 78, 83, 86– 94, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 200, 201 digitization, 77, 87, 95, 208n52 effect on humankind, 95

Index spectacle in, 2 See also artificial intelligence; cyborgs; digital media; social media. Dionysian rites. See rituals. DiPietro, Thomas, 205n29 DiPrete, Laura, 33, 204n19 discourses colonizing, 104 consumerist, 115, 125 global, 86, 189 hegemonic, 79 love, 54, 67 mass media, 11 minority, 131 multicultural, 6, 125 Nazi, 174 orientalizing, 115, 127 patriarchal, 85 public, 177, 182, 183 religious and spiritual, 77 of romance, 208n49 of war, 67, 70 See also narratives. discrimination, 126 See also prejudice; racism. disease, 66 disembodiment, 163–171, 185 dislocation, 105 dismemberment, 194 Disneyland, 65 Disneyfication, 154 displacement, 101, 102, 107, 118, 131, 141, 143–145, 157 of blame, 140 cultural, 108 Dixon, Lloyd, 193 Doane, Mary Ann, 48 DoCarmo, Stephen N., 203n1, 203n7 domesticity, 55, 67 See also family. dominance, 88, 113 Doss, Erika, 178 Drob, S. L., 82 Duncan, Pansy, 203n5 Duvall, John, 25, 203n7, 204n14

Ecstatic Consumption Dwork, Debórah, 149, 162, 212n86 Dworkin, Andrea, 52, 206n34 dystopia, 19, 20, 36, 86–87, 91, 126, 142, 144, 174, 186, 187, 196, 197, 204n17 aesthetics of, 19 appetite for, 189 global, 202 as new utopia, 2, 4, 7, 95 and reality, 156 spectacle of, 197 ecstasy, 5, 77, 94, 114, 131, 136, 142, 203n5 and agony, 156 of communication, 1, 184, 213n100 of consumption, 3, 200, 201 dangers of, 85 definition of, 3, 204n13 of emotion, 199 extension of, 182 of information, 189 of narrativization, 181 of pain and suffering, 161, 173 ecstatic consumption, 10, 173, 179, 189, 201 desire for, 171 drive for, 14, 19, 103, 196 ecstatic future, 77 embodiment of, 34 as excrescent, 4, 7 fetish of, 6 and food, 43, 154 and globalization, 3 as immoral, 4, 22 Jean Beaudrillard's notion of, 6 landmark of, 137 in literature, 11 rejection of, 195 and utopia, 196, 197 See also consumption; ecstasy; spectacle. editorialization, 152, 156, 158, 159, 163, 166, 168, 190

239

See also storytelling. education, 83 See also knowledge. Einstein, Albert, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 205n25, 205n27, 206n30 theory of relativity, 36, 46, 48 Eliot, T. S., 32–33, 46 elpis. See hope. Elwell, J. Sage, 95, 96, 208n52, 208n53 emotion, 104, 197 ecstatic, 199 hierarchies of, 106 politics of, 213n101 public, 186, 188, 189 topographies of, 202 See also affect. Eros, 77 Greek god, 54, 82 life-preserving instinct, 53, 55, 58, 59–66, 63, 64, 83, 89, 197, 205n27, 208n47 erotica, 52, 84, 205n27 ethics, 2, 6, 11, 59, 89, 92, 160, 188, 191, 200 and art, 78 consumer, 173 lack of, 56, 188, 196 limits of, 178 multicultural, 209n65 and nostalgia, 201 of postmemory, 171 and responsibility, 181 See also immorality; morals. ethnicity, 102, 105 consumption of, 137 ethnic ghettoization, 130 ethnography, 114, 117 exile, 101, 105, 107, 115 Arab, 106 and food, 105 See also loss. exotism, 106, 115, 122 exploitation, 133, 134, 208n50 exstasis. See ecstasy.

240 extermination, 134, 144, 155, 161, 162, 170 See also genocides; Holocaust. extinction, 43–47, 92 of art, 40 of the body, 40 dream of, 34–37, 38, 63 theory of, 41 fabula, 55, 142, 143, 186 See also stories. Facebook. See social media. Fadda-Conrey, Carol, 104–105, 113, 208n55 family, 114, 137, 158, 170 See also domesticity. fantasy, 57, 65, 92, 137, 164, 167, 170 of the Orient, 112 unconscious, 167 Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom!, 172 Feagin, Joe R., 140 Featherstone, Mike, 207n43 Federal Emergency Management Agency, 192, 193 Feinberg, Kenneth R., 192, 193 FEMA. See Federal Emergency Management Agency. feminism, 33, 52, 85, 121 cyber-feminism, 86 femme fatale, 47–49 fetishization, 57, 135, 150, 165, 167, 191 of 9/11, 177 of bodies, 185 of celebrities, 169 of the dead, 188 of reality, 213n95 of trauma, 189, 191 visual, 65 See also technofetishism. fiction, 42, 175 domestic, 67, 68 nonfiction, 152, 155 and reality, 17, 64, 173, 175

Index romance, 85 See also myth; narratives; stories; storytelling. films. See cinema. fire, 153, 171, 173, 174, 178, 211n82 Fischer-Lichte, Erica, 1, 7 Fish, Stanley, 131 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby, 172 flags American, 177 food, 43, 103, 115, 162, 166 Arab, 107 and body, 27 as comfort, 108 cooking, 107 culinary practices, 104 and exile, 105 foreigner as, 12 and gaze, 114–120 and identity, 102, 115 as metaphor, 104, 114 as story, 107 symbolic, 171 See also appetite; consumption; hunger; indigestion. forgetting. See under remembrance. forms cinematic, 205n25 ecstatic, 10, 189, 205n20 familial, 158 plague of, 67–73 (See also disease) See also language. Foster, B. R., 110 Foucault, Michel, 204n18 Fox, Killian, 159, 166, 212n83 Frank, Anne, 152, 165–166, 167, 173, 212n87 Anne Frank House Museum, 167 diary, 165, 168, 212n89 as a fictional character, 169, 173, 212n91 as Holocaust survivor, 169–170 See also Frank, Otto. Frank, Otto, 165, 166, 168, 169

Ecstatic Consumption See also Frank, Anne. freedom, 88, 90, 101, 144 Freeman, John, 21, 24, 30, 205n22, 205n23 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 64, 89, 91, 113, 187, 205n27 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 206n30, 206n35 Civilization and its Discontents, 205n24, 206n30, 206n35 death drive, 42, 46, 48, 63 See also Eros; Thanatos. friendship, 55, 63, 87 See also love. Fudge, R., 140 Gaiman, Neil, 190 Gallagher, Charles A., 123, 124, 126, 134 Gallway, Elizabeth, 211n75 Gana, Nouri, 105 gastronomy, 114 See also digestion. Gauthier, Tim, 180, 183, 187, 190, 191 Gay, P. 38, 39, 42, 205n27, 206n30, 206n35 gaze, 9, 13, 18, 31, 34, 43, 114, 115, 161, 171, 188 and the body, 33 cinematic, 187 consumerist, 32 ecstatic, 14, 186, 188, 196, 202 emancipated, 19, 24, 32, 204n13 ethnographic, 117, 119 feast for, 180 and food, 114–120 media's, 11 of the Other, 30 public, 27, 28, 166 of the seer and seen, 20 spectaclist, 18–19, 21, 29, 201 subversive, 204n17 travelling, 114, 117, 155

241

See also paparazzi; voyeurism. Gelbin, Cathy S., 208n51 gender, 67, 83, 90, 105 gendered behaviours, 69 genetic engineering, 12 See also posthumanism. genocides, 51, 62, 150, 154, 160, 174, 177 for consumption, 160 politics of, 159 representation of, 151 See also death; extermination; Holocaust; war. Gere, Charlie, 75, 94, 207n46 Gernsheim, Helmut, 205n26 Gibson, William, 77 Gies, Miep, 168 Gilbert, Sandra, 212n88, 213n92 Gladiatorial Games. See rituals. Glenn, J., 3 global economy, 19, 40, 62, 71, 85, 86, 90, 96, 105 globalization, 2, 75, 76–77, 86–87, 90, 94, 101, 125, 130, 135, 137, 142, 159, 200, 210n69 countergeographies of, 129 and ecstatic consumption, 3, 196 impact of, 208n50 and postmodern culture, 6 and power, 90 spectacle of, 87 and technology, 2, 77 global village, 3, 6, 86–87 See also globalization. god of sex. See Eros. god of war. See Ares. Gogol, Nikolai, 58 Goldberg, RoseLee, 19, 36 golems, 82, 83, 91, 94, 95, 208n51 golem-making, 76, 80, 81 legends, 77, 81 stories of, 92 See also cyborgs; Kabbalah. Google, 178, 213n97 Gordan, Douglas

242

Index

24 Hour Psycho, 17, 19, 34–35, 37, 42, 44, 178, 190, 191, 206n31 government, 52, 183, 62, 91 conservative, 70–71 corruption of, 38, 80, 192, 194 and media, 61, 136, 179–180, 183, 186, 188 See also Bush government graphic novel, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191, 195, 213n99 cinematic nature of, 190 greed, 66, 76, 83 Greek gods. See Ares; Eros. grief, 107, 108, 110, 179, 181, 182, 183, 196 embodied, 29, 31 grieving process, 184, 194, 204n19 and happiness, 185 housed, 171 limits to, 180 as nation-building, 188 politics of, 213n101 private, 184, 195 public, 186, 194 spectators of, 188 staging of, 205n20 tokenization of, 188 as ungraspable, 187 usurpation of, 186 See also death; loss; mourning. Grosz, Elizabeth, 203n7, 204n10, 205n21 Guattari, F. 201 Gubar, Susan, 212n88, 213n92 guilt, 107, 121, 169, 212n87 consumer, 172 transgenerational, 164, 173 white, 116, 124, 126 See also love. Gurman, Elissa, 207n41, 207n44, 208n49

Haraway, Donna, 12, 79, 82, 93, 200 "Cyborg Manifesto," 77, 208n48 Hartman, Geoffrey, 13, 157, 178, 179, 196, 197 Hatab, L. J., 143 hate, 61, 62, 64, 135–143, 138 crimes, 139 dynamics of, 144 economics, 136, 139 history of, 139 and intimacy, 150 racial, 155 for self, 129 structural, 136 violence, 136 Hauerwas, Stanley, 207n38 haunting, 163 See also phantoms. Hawthorne, 48 healing, 178, 179, 180 heartburn. See indigestion. Hemingway, Ernest The Sun Also Rises, 209n61 heritage, 153, 172 Herren, Graley, 43, 206n32 Hicks, Heather, 86, 207n41, 207n44, 208n49 Hirsch, Marianne, 157–158, 160, 203n1 history, 144 and art, 32 as commodity, 174 construction of, 195 consumption of, 172 dismembering of, 194, 195 editorialization of, 73, 152, 190 as fantasy, 57, 65, 186 fetishization of, 57, 65 as genre, 150 of hate, 139 historical violence, 65 and identity, 211n75 interpretation of, 170 Iraq, 110 limitations of, 154 lingering, 175

Ecstatic Consumption manufacturing of, 52 and memory, 173 myth-making, 171 patronization of, 170 personalization of, 157 Polish, 162 postcolonial, 137 public engagement with, 52 representation of, 67, 73, 149, 151, 157, 187, 190, 212n84 settler, 131 as simulated, 64 as spectacle, 13, 52, 177–197, 178, 181, 191 tokenism of, 171 See also 9/11; Holocaust; tragedy; war. Hitchcock, Alfred, 17 Hitchcock, Peter, 101, 102, 103, 129 Hoffmann, Gerhard, 203n1 Hollywood, 11, 52, 56, 58, 64, 109, 112, 116, 150 elite, 54–55 imagery, 114 See also celebrity culture. Holocaust, 13, 149, 154 Americanization of, 151, 156, 211n80 appropriation of, 177 as consumable, 151, 157, 212n91 education, 172 in films, 161 historicizing of, 157 memory, 153, 154, 155, 159 narratives, 161, 168 origin of term, 211n82 tourism, 151, 160, 162, 163 usurpation of, 165 See also antisemitism; extermination; genocides. homesickness, 108, 118 homogenization, 129 hope, 161, 170, 200, 211n81, 213n95 as deadly, 153, 156

243

and memory, 151, 152 power of, 165 as tragedy, 155, 171–175, 174 Horkheimer, Max, 7 houses as bodily edifices, 172 on fire, 173 Huang, Betsy, 210n69 hubris, 77 Hugill, Andrew, 203n6, 211n74 humanism, 11, 79 humanity, 77 and cyborgs, 93 future of, 78, 85 limitations of, 80, 170 meaning of, 93 hunger, 152, 166, 188 See also appetite; food. Hussein, Saddam, 103 Hutcheon, Linda, 5, 21, 59, 73 hybridity, 123, 124, 135, 136 postcolonial, 115 hysteria, 151, 170, 174, 186, 188 iconography, 56, 151, 154, 188, 190, 191 See also icons. icons, 10, 36, 37, 188, 189 See also iconography; images; symbols. Idel, Moshe, 81, 83 identity, 6, 10, 12, 79, 114, 130 American Jewish, 153 Arab, 101, 112 and the body, 204n18 Canadian, 211n75 collective, 152 crisis, 125, 152 cultural, 209n56 diasporic, 13, 107, 155 and food, 102, 108, 115 fragmented, 104 and images, 101 immigrant, 210n69 and loss, 185

244 and memory, 191 "monstrous," 143 multicultural, 103, 115, 127, 136 national, 117 posthuman, 75–97 and power, 114 racial, 135, 210n71 self-identification, 137 as social construct, 93 and traditions, 115 as victim, 154 West appropriation of, 113 "white," 209n58 ideologies colonizing, 115 colour-blind, 124, 128 consumerist, 8, 124 culture-specific, 144 feminist, 86 Messianic, 134, 210n68, 210n70 minority, 123 multicultural, 109, 117, 131, 136, 139 neo-colonial, 6, 130 of networks, 214n107 of Otherness, 143 political, 86 "Shinto," 87 "Volk," 174 West, 134 illness. See disease. illusion, 4, 17, 28, 66, 70, 119, 142, 144, 201, 204n14 images, 20, 48, 57, 59, 73, 87, 152, 171, 184, 190, 201 as benumbing, 182 and bodies, 29, 150 of burning, 20, 24, 28, 49, 153, 171–175 commodified, 40 culture of, 2, 38 and desire, 60 domestic, 67, 158 ecstatic, 187 Hollywood, 114 and icons, 36, 37

Index and identity, 101, 166 inter-image, 141, 142, 143 and language, 186 mass mediated, 20 materiality of, 23 of/as war, 52, 56, 153, 154, 178, 186, 195 patriarchal, 67 phallic, 67 photographs, 118, 120, 156, 158, 159, 161, 185 postmemory, 173 reproduction of, 40 simulated, 161 and truth, 186 violence of, 18, 182 of the West, 117 See also icons; illusion; imageverse; photography; visual economy. image-verse, 18, 196, 200 See also images. imagination, 88, 157, 159 immigrants, 210n69 Arab, 102 Asian, 127 community, 131 exploiting other immigrants, 133 Korean, 130 success, 132 See also immigration. immigration, 135, 138 See also immigrants. immorality, 30–34, 81, 182, 196 See also ethics; morals. imperialism, 60, 62, 67, 70, 71, 115, 117, 119, 211n75 inclusion, 131, 132, 144 indigestion, 152, 154, 163, 171, 172 industrialization, 89 information, 38, 93, 94, 162 consumption of, 94 ecstasy of, 189 etymology of, 207n45 exchange of, 94 glut, 75, 91, 213n100

Ecstatic Consumption media, 52 overload, 11, 76, 79 technologies, 8, 75 translation of, 91 warfare, 11 Instagram. See social media. Internet, 2, 7, 8, 9, 78, 88, 94, 207n46 See also digital media; digital technology; social media. interpretation, 117, 179 intimacy, 85, 92, 136, 150 Iraq, 120 Baghdad, 110, 111, 116 government, 61 history, 110 invasion of, 11, 19, 51, 60, 117, 119 "Land between Rivers," 111 war in, 11, 51, 57, 60, 117, 119 Jack, Albert, 211n75 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 7, 55, 56, 59, 67, 68, 72, 73 Jan van Pelt, Robert, 149, 162, 212n86 Jarry, Alfred, 142, 201, 203n6 Johnson, Ken, 191 Jones, Judith, 169 Kabbalah, 78–86, 81, 82 ideals, 76 teachings, 79 traditions, 77 See also golems. Kac, Eduardo, 95, 96 Kafka, Franz, 174, 175, 213n95 Kaganoff Stern, Rachel, 193 Kerner, Aaron, 161, 211n82 Kim, Jodi, 210n69 King-O'Riain, R. C., 137 Kingwell, M., 3 kino-eye, 45, 46 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 165, 167

245

kitsch, 56, 67–73, 69 Kleiman, Johannes, 168 Knight, Peter, 204n14 knowledge, 91 abstract, 81 hunger for, 152 and language, 80 limits of, 179 production of, 7, 116, 117 quest for, 94 See also education; information. Korea, 130 Kugler, Victor, 168 Kulka, Tomas, 69, 207n39 labour, 132, 186 Lacan, Jacques, 47 LaCapra, Dominick, 157, 159 lacuna, 13, 154, 157, 158, 160, 163, 165, 167, 177, 195, 196 of bearing witness, 13, 154, 157, 181 of meaning, 187, 196 of memory recall, 160, 163, 177 Lady Gaga, 18, 19, 24, 28–29, 30, 33, 44, 204n11, 204n13, 205n20 Bad Romance, 20–23 Lancaster, 83 language, 67, 91, 96, 107, 141, 170, 182, 212n82 communication, 1 dialogue, 72–73 ecstatic conception of, 79 of global future, 78–86 and imagery, 57, 186 and intimacy, 92 and knowledge, 80 limitations of, 22, 151, 181, 186, 187 literary, 199 of love, 206n36 naming, 88, 93 non-language, 187 politics of, 86

246

Index

and power, 32, 79, 80, 82, 86, 92 prophetic, 78, 79, 93, 207n42 and reality, 79, 96, 187, 188 speech, 83, 183 and success, 132 use and abuse of, 71, 92 and violence, 37, 82, 83 Lee, Chang-Rae, 5, 126–127, 169 Native Speaker, 13, 123–145, 150, 186, 187, 189 Lee, Erika, 124, 132 Lee, Rachel C., 210n69 Lee, Regina, 107, 131, 143 Leland, John, 137 Lerner, Paul, 203n2 Levy, Daniel, 149, 151, 155, 159, 211n80 Life, 35, 197 Lindberg, Carter, 206n36 literature, 2, 8, 9, 206n29 aesthetic value of, 19 American, 172 cyberpunk, 77, 78, 207n43 diasporic, 105 domestic, 55–59 dystopian, 19 and ethics, 78 genres, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 180, 187, 191, 195 memoir, 168, 169, 180, 190 postcolonial, 88 postmodern, 8, 55–59 tokenism of, 171 and war, 39 women's, 212n88 See also poetry; narratives; stories; storytelling. Little, Douglas, 110, 112, 118, 209n57, 209n59 Longmuir, Anne, 24, 25, 26, 33, 203n9, 204n18 Lorah, Michael C., 214n106 loss, 14, 105, 108, 164, 180, 181, 187, 205n20 and art, 25 and identity, 185

and language, 31 and love, 103, 185 narratives of, 115, 121, 179, 186, 188 physicality, 185 survivors', 192 See also death; exile. love, 59, 108–109, 114, 121 courtly, 54 language of, 206n36 and loss, 103, 185 national, 106, 107, 135–136 for the Other, 64 and pain, 180 patriotic, 61 political, 64 for self, 64 and society, 59 and war, 54, 66, 67, 86 See also desire; friendship; guilt; tragedy. Ludwig, P. W. 60 Lyotard, J. F., 33 machines, 83 See also cyborgs. MacKinnon, Catherine, 52, 206n34 Mahtani, Minelle, 137, 143, 144, 210n70 Mailer, Norman, 8 Maleh, Layla, 208n55, 209n56 marginalization, 101, 194, 197 marketing, 131, 140, 169 See also advertising. Marshall, D. 57 Martin, Emily, 180–181, 182, 187, 190 mass media, 2, 3–4, 6, 7, 9, 19, 52, 75, 119, 136, 139, 151, 154, 177, 183, 190, 200 24/7 coverage, 197 discourses, 11 goals of, 9 images, 158 information from, 52 limits of, 186

Ecstatic Consumption manipulation of narratives, 169 and reality, 8 violence, 181, 189 and war, 56, 61, 73, 189 See also cinema; digital media; Internet; television. materiality, 87, 173 matriarchy, 87, 88 McLuhan, Marshall, 9, 91 Meagher, Robert Emmet, 207n38 media. See cinema; mass media; social media; television. Mehta, Brinda J., 105, 114, 121, 208n55, 209n56 meignumi, 64 Melville, Herman, 95 memento mori dance, 22, 23, 28–29, 30–34, 33, 34 See also Lady Gaga. memorials, 151, 154–163, 177, 213n99 See also 9/11 Memorial & Museum; memory; museums; tourism. memory, 79, 81, 131, 149, 157, 164, 170, 177, 179, 180, 191, 213n91 appropriation of, 167, 212n87 artificial, 150, 152 and body, 172 collective, 151, 158 cultural, 104 disembodied, 164 embodied, 185 fragmented, 184 and history, 173 Holocaust, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 159, 163, 165, 177 and hope, 151, 152 and hysteria, 174 and identity, 191 limits of, 197 phantom, 167 sanitized, 162 selective, 152

247

transgenerational, 164 See also consciousness; memorials; museums; postmemory; remembrance. Mercer, Lorraine, 105, 115, 208n55 Metzler, Rebekah, 140, 211n72 Middle East, 110, 111, 118–119, 121 militarism, 67, 68 See also war. Miller, Vincent, 93 Mitchell, Breanna, 151 modernism, 32, 33, 205n28 Moghadam, Valerie, 87, 89–90 Moore, Alan, 190 morals, 1, 4, 149, 163 See also ethics; immorality. Morrison, Toni, 8 mortality. See death. Motion Picture Promotion Code, 116, 209n60 mourning collective, 184, 191, 194 expectations of, 181 imposed, 185 mourning process, 28 and performance, 29 prescriptive, 180 primary aim of life, 39 public, 179, 180–191, 181, 182 of reality, 65 transgenerational, 165 as unmarkable, 177 unresolved, 181 victims’, 194 See also genocides. movies. See cinema. multiculturalism, 12, 13, 87, 105, 106, 122, 123–124, 126, 129, 130, 134, 136 discourses of, 6 ecstatic, 107 ideals, 107, 108, 109 and identity, 103 politics of, 103, 104 white, 132

248 See also globalization. murder, 40, 43, 120, 133, 142, 144, 167 museums, 151, 154–163, 162, 170 Anne Frank House Museum, 167 tokenization, 165 See also 9/11 Memorial & Museum; memorials; memory; tourism. mystery, 107, 109, 113 Arab, 106 See also difference; Other, the; unknown. myth, 79, 126, 138, 156, 168 myth-making, 171 racism as, 134 See also fiction. Nadakate, N. 56 Naimon, David, 144, 211n76 narratives, 26, 61, 85–86, 123, 159, 163, 171, 205n25 of 9/11, 180, 184, 188 authority, 68 autobiographical, 190, 195 collective, 185 comparative, 157 counter-narratives, 69, 209n60 and ecstasy, 181 familial, 170 forms, 6, 21, 24, 67 and gaze, 43 of history, 178 of Holocaust, 161, 168 inaccessibility of, 181 interventionist, 69 of loss, 115, 121, 179, 188 masculine and feminine, 68 personal, 185 postmemory, 173 postmodern, 5 private, 190, 195 public, 182, 190, 195 of slavery, 110 and spectacle, 6

Index of suffering, 184 of survival, 195 of trauma, 157 visual, 59 See also discourses; literature; stories; storytelling. NASA, 194, 195, 214n105 National Flag Day, 194 See also flags. nationalism, 132, 150 Nealon, J. T. 93 Nel, P., 26, 27–28, 32, 33, 204n15 networks, 10, 86, 93, 200, 201–202, 214n107 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 129, 143, 144, 129 noosphere, 81, 200, 207n46 nostalgia, 19, 21, 33, 73, 79, 96, 108, 111, 115, 117, 151 cultural, 105 ethical implications of, 201 nursery rhymes, 144, 211n75 See also stories. Nussbaum, Martha, 64 Obama, Barack, 134, 137, 140 Olster, Stacey, 33, 204n14, 204n15 Olympic Games. See rituals. omega point, 41, 42, 47, 200 oppression, 101, 206n34 orientalism, 112, 209n57 orientalization, 118, 122 Osteen, 24, 25, 27–28 Other, the, 12, 93, 106, 114, 115, 121, 128, 181 Arab Americans, 104 becoming Other, 27, 46, 77 consumption of, 112, 134 disappearance of, 92 exotic, 122 opposition with the self, 29 ostracized, 174 Othering, 104, 116, 189 quest for, 113, 119 radical, 134, 136, 142, 143

Ecstatic Consumption simulation of, 209n63 as spectacle, 119 virtual, 94 See also Otherness Otherness, 31, 96, 106, 109, 112, 113, 127, 144, 150, 187 bodily, 32 ecstasy of, 31, 85, 86–94, 101 imaginary, 139 marketability of, 169 metaphors of, 202 See also Other, the Ovid, 54 pain, 150, 186, 187, 200 bodily, 185 collective, 184 as consumable, 160 economics of, 195 as ecstasy, 173 as fetish, 151 housed, 170 individual, 184 and love, 180 narratives of, 184 politics of, 184 spectacle of, 155 paparazzi, 21, 23, 205n20 See also gaze; mass media. paradise. See utopia. parody. See under performance. passing (for white), 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 124, 143 pastiche, 23, 54, 56, 65, 68, 72 pataphysics, 203n6, 211n74 pathos, 121–122 patriarchy, 69, 87, 173, 206n34 patriotism, 61, 210n66 Payne, Emily, 151, 211n79 Perez, Chris, 211n77 performance, 9, 36, 186 construction of, 213n101 and death, 29 as ecstasy, 24 emancipatory, 10

249

of mourning, 194 as parody, 28, 72 potential of, 25–26 and time, 31 of violence, 191 See also art. Perkins, Barbara, 203n4 Perkins, George, 203n4 Pettman, D., 203n3 phallic symbols, 52, 67 phantoms, 164, 167, 170, 173 philia, 55, 63 photography, 114–120, 158, 159, 161, 185 See also images. pictures. See images. Piercy, Marge, 5 He, She and It, 11–12, 75–97 Pines, Davida, 195, 213n99, 214n104 Pittman, Asa, 214n102, 214n103 Plato, 22, 59, 61, 77, 81–82, 93 The Phaedrus, 204n12 Symposium, 55, 60, 63, 64, 72, 86, 204n12 Poe, Edgar Allen, 172–173 poetry, 144 Japanese haiku, 46, 48, 92, 188 visualization of, 205n25 point omega. See DeLillo, Don; omega point. politics aestheticization of, 190 and art, 72 consumer, 3, 153 ecstatic, 188 of emotion, 213n101 family, 55 of fear, 195 of genocides, 159 global, 114, 196, 200 of grief, 213n101 of hate, 62 and language, 71, 86 of loss, 115 majority, 136, 138

250

Index

minority, 13, 130, 134, 135, 136, 138 of multiculturalism, 12, 103, 104, 115 of pain, 184 political resistance, 25 racist, 125 radical, 204n14 of return, 143 of the spectacle, 18 of violence, 123–145, 135–143 visual, 9 pornography, 29, 58 historical, 11, 57 Holocaust as, 150, 162 of imagery, 179, 189 of memory, 190 spectacle as, 52 war as, 67 posthumanism, 11–12, 77, 78–86, 83 postindustrialism, 86 postmemory, 157–158, 163, 169 challenges of, 160 definiton of, 158 ecstasy of, 154–163 ethics of, 171 images and narratives, 173 narrativization, 159 power of, 162 See also memory. postmillenial culture. See under culture. postmodernism, 5, 23, 57, 59, 69 post-postmodernism, 55 post-traumatic stress, 195 power, 78, 127, 129, 183, 184 aesthetic, 132 asymmetries, 3, 87, 105, 116, 120, 121, 139, 193, 208n49 and the body, 204n18 differentials, 114 dynamics, 143 ecstatic, 79 and globalization, 90 of hope, 165 and identity, 114

institutionalized, 4 of language, 32, 79, 80, 82, 86, 92 minority, 133 national, 180 of postmemory, 162 pursuit of, 207n40 relations, 136 and science, 75 spectacle of, 126, 195 staging of, 183, 195 white, 126, 130 prejudice, 129, 125, 135, 136, 139 See also discrimination; racism. privacy, 183, 184, 189, 195 private sphere, 10, 11 privatization, 157 privilege, 63, 113, 126, 143 promised land (America), 117, 152, 171, 174 See also American Dream; utopia. prophecy prophetic permutations, 80 prophetic speech, 76, 78, 79, 91, 93, 207n42 prophets, 82 Prose, Francine, 165, 168, 213n91, 212n89, 212n90 proximity, 116, 129, 143 public good, 59, 61 racism, 116, 129, 151 anti-Arab, 103, 109, 110, 112, 118 anti-racism, 125–126, 134, 136 and consumerism, 124–125 denial of, 135 institutional, 123, 126 internalized, 138 as myth, 134 "new racism," 124, 210n67 radical, 134 reverse, 124 traditional, 123 and violence, 125, 134 white, 132

Ecstatic Consumption See also anti-racism; colourblindess; stereotypes. Radway, Janice, 68, 85 Rall, Ted, 194 Rancière, Jacques, 7, 9, 18, 19, 21, 29, 31, 213n101 reality, 6, 18, 28, 30–34, 182–183, 189 and absurdity, 10 aestheticization of, 19 death of, 65 derealization, 179 and dystopia, 7, 156 fetishization of, 213n95 and fiction, 5, 17, 64, 73, 173, 175 fragmented, 190 and images, 196 and the imaginary, 211n74 and language, 79, 96, 187, 188 manipulation of, 11 mass, 196 and myth, 79 as nightmare, 175 readoubling of, 32 realness of, 8 simulated, 11, 73 (See also television) spiritual, 173 of suffering, 186, 187 traumatic realism, 197 Rehr, Henrik, 190 relations Arab-American, 103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 117, 122 "cinematization of," 18 cross-cultural, 117 cultural, 108 ethical, 92 immigrant, 133 orientalizing, 122 power, 115, 116, 136 race, 137 social, 44, 186 socio-political, 143 transnational, 107 religion, 41, 77, 150

251

See also spirituality. remembrance, 13, 160, 163, 170, 183, 185 forgetting, 143, 144, 150, 151, 152, 153, 162, 180 (See also amnesia) of heritage, 130, 131 limits of, 179 selective, 152 tourist, 154 See also memorials; memory. rhetoric, 64, 80, 93 anti-racist, 134, 136, 144 minority, 135 orientalizing, 110 See also discourses. Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea, 166, 173, 212n88 rituals, 1, 80 See also traditions. robots. See cyborgs. romance, 85, 121, 208n49 Romney, Mitt, 140 Rose, Jonathan, 213n93 Rosenberg, Roberta, 152, 155, 212n87 Roth, Philip, 8 Rowson, Susanna, 110 Ruby-Sachs, Emma, 214n102, 214n103 Ruland, Richard, 8–9, 203n4 Said, Edward, 117, 209n59 Salaita, Steven, 101, 104, 109, 209n58, 210n66, 209n57, 210n68 samness, 144 Sarfatti Larson, Magali, 207n39 Sassen, Saskia, 129, 210n67 satire, 180, 191 Schindler's List, 161 Schlovsky, Viktor, 45 Schneemann, Carolee, 31 Schryer, Stephen, 88, 207n41, 207n44, 208n49 Schuster, M. 26, 27–28, 33, 204n15

252

Index

Science, 75, 76 Scott, Gary Allan, 60, 63, 66, 72, 77, 82, 208n47 secrets, 113, 164 self as art form, 43 as data, 94–97 digitalization of, 208n52 hate, 129 self-identification, 137 selfies, 1, 179 See also social media. sentimental fiction. See fiction, domestic. September 11, 2001. See 9/11. September 11th Compensation Fund, 193 sex, 52, 67, 86 Shalal-Esa, Andrea, 104 shame, 64, 130 Shandler, Jeffrey, 165, 167 Shelley, Mary, 77 Shippey, T. A., 78 Shohat, Ella, 12, 105, 113, 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 136, 209n59, 209n60, 209n64, 209n65 Sidlinger, Paula, 137 simulacra, 25, 65, 70, 71, 162, 165 simulation, 7, 51, 64 of the Other, 209n63 and reality, 73 technological, 71 Skerry, Philip J., 206n31 slavery, 109, 110, 112, 172, 209n62 See also captivity. Slusser, George E., 78 Smiley, Jane, 5 Ten Days in the Hills, 11, 51–73, 75–76, 83, 90, 186, 188 Smith, Sidonie, 187 socialization, 112, 139, 211n75 of robots, 79, 92 See also child development; society.

social media, 1, 7, 9, 64, 75, 93, 94, 151, 200 society consumer, 169 social constructs, 143 social health, 66 and spectacle, 155 See also socialization. Sokurov, Aleksandr, 45 Sontag, Susan, 119, 120, 155, 160– 161, 212n84 On Photography, 209n64 Regarding the Pain of Others, 52, 150 Sophie's Choice, 161 souvenirs, 151, 155 space, 88, 201 assigned, 170 and/as time, 35, 45, 92 spectacle, 128, 132, 140, 212n84 of 9/11, 179, 196 alpha and omega of, 34 and consumption, 7, 45, 200 as criminal, 196 culture of, 5–14, 114, 196, 202 definition of, 1, 7, 77–78 of dismemberment, 194 as distraction, 71 of dystopia, 197 economics of, 13 ecstatic role of, 206n33 expression of, 150 global, 5, 87 (See also globalization) and history, 181, 191 Hollywood, 56 immorality of, 196 and literature, 2 as mask, 21 mass, 188 national, 182 of the Other, 119 of pain, 155 participants in, 18 as performance, 1 postcolonial, 114–120

Ecstatic Consumption of power, 126, 195 and society, 155 spectaclist drive, 8 of suffering, 31–32, 161, 177, 205n20 as terror, 196 tragic, 20, 64, 161, 188 of war, 186, 189, 206n33, 207n37 See also ecstatic consumption; spectators. spectators, 7, 120, 161 emancipated, 21, 213n101 of grief, 188 Spiegelman, Art, 190, 213n99 spirituality, 37, 173 beliefs, 77 mysticism, 96 spiritual metamorphosis, 83 spiritual transcendence, 35 See also religion. sports, 1 See also rituals. Stahl, Roger, 206n33, 207n37, 211n78, 212n84, 213n95 Stam, Robert, 105, 113, 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 123, 209n59, 209n60, 209n64, 209n65 Stelarc, 95 stereotypes, 102, 103, 110, 117, 122, 187 Arab, 110, 113 See also racism. Sternheimer, Karen, 51, 52 Stone, Robert, 8 stories, 26, 55, 71, 88, 92, 102, 103, 111, 115, 166, 169, 189 Anne Frank's, 167 appetite for, 188 food as, 107 of loss, 186 survivors', 184, 188 tragic, 165 (See also tragedy) and truth, 73 See also fabula; literature; narratives; nursery

253

rhymes; storytelling; traditions. storytelling, 10, 58, 69, 83, 85, 108, 109, 155, 190, 195 as food, 76, 175 See also editorializtion; literature; narratives; stories; traditions. Strachey, J., 39, 205n24 Strom, Linda, 105, 115, 208n55 survivors, 165, 169–170, 173, 183 insensitivity to, 179 miracle of survival, 161 narratives of, 195 pain of, 184 responsibility of, 157 stories of, 184, 188 violence towards, 181 See also 9/11; Holocaust; genocide; tragedy; victims; war. Sweeney-Turner, Steve, 144 symbols, 165, 167, 171 See also icons; iconography. Sznaider, Natan, 149, 151, 155, 159, 211n80 Tapscott, D., 9 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 37, 46, 49, 199, 205n25 Taylor, Charles, 180 techné. See technique. technique, 45 technofetishism, 206n33, 207n37, 213n95 See also fetishization. technology. See digital technology. television, 56, 57 and 9/11, 177, 182 reality TV, 8, 58, 69, 72, 150 soap operas, 72 "tele-suffering," 179 as war, 191 terrorism, 101, 119, 186 See also war.

254

Index

Thanatos, 52, 89, 205n27, 206n30, 206n35 The Book Thief, 161 The Burial of Count Orgaz (El Greco), 22 The Last Supper (Tintoretto), 22 The Pianist, 161 time, 19, 31 benumbing of, 182 and body, 28 frozen, 196 and human soul, 46 inferior, 44 irrelevant, 181 perception of, 41 and/as space, 35, 45, 92 and violence, 191 tokenism, 102, 107, 113, 115, 116, 122, 124, 169, 193 effects of, 186 historical, 171 Tolmie, Jane, 213n99, 214n104 topos, 164 Torok, Maria, 164, 167 Torres, Alissa, 5, 213n98, 213n99, 214n102, 214n103, 214n106 American Widow, 13–14, 177–197 tourism, 151, 154, 155, 179 9/11, 178 and consumption, 162 Holocaust, 151, 160, 162, 163, 170, 177 See also memorials; museums. traditions, 92, 103 and identity, 115 Kabbalist, 77, 95 oral, 76 (See also storytelling) See also rituals; stories; storytelling. tragedy, 20, 121, 153, 169, 177 appetite for, 188 as belonging to the masses, 183 fetishization of, 191 and heroism, 180 and hope, 155, 171–175, 174

interpretation of, 170 marketing of, 173 quest for, 174 tragic forms, 18 See also 9/11; genocides; history; Holocaust; love; surviors; victims; war. transaesthetics. See under aesthetics. transformation, 1, 32, 83, 105 transnationalism, 210n69 trauma, 150, 158, 159, 166, 183, 189, 200, 213n99 downplay of, 161 experience of, 195 historical, 157 minimalization of, 195 topographies of, 197 truth, 142, 152, 155 and art, 46 and fiction, 173, 73 and images, 186 inversions of, 205n26 Tsivian, Yuri, 205n25 Twitter. See social media. uncanny, 48, 59, 84, 135, 143, 172, 188, 191 universalization, 159 unknown, 113 See also difference; mystery; Other, the. utopia, 51, 86–87, 90, 91, 130, 152, 165, 196, 197, 200, 201 America as, 26 political, 131 post-racial, 138, 142 as replication, 7 turned-dystipia, 95 utopian expectation, 39 See also American Dream; promised land (America). Van Ausdale, Debra, 140

Ecstatic Consumption Veblen, Thornstein, 3 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 207n38, 211n81 Vertov, Dziga, 37, 25, 49, 205n25 victims, 154, 213n99 9/11, 178 bodies of, 184, 185 economic value of, 13 fetishization of, 188 reduction of, 194 as statistics, 192 victimization, 183 violence towards, 181 See also 9/11; genocides; Holocaust; survivors; tragedy; war. violence, 127, 154, 188, 191 absract, 90 aestheticization of, 39, 65 colonial, 123, 136 effects of, 186 of imagery, 18, 182 as language, 37 lust for, 39, 206n30 media, 181, 189 patriarchal, 69 politics of, 123–145 racial, 125, 126, 130, 134, 136, 138, 139 redoubling of, 183 structural, 136 symbolic and physical, 129, 139, 150, 189 against women, 206n34 See also hate; murder; racism; war. Virillio, Paul, 3, 10–11, 40, 41, 42, 49, 61, 186, 189, 190, 195 War and Cinema, 203n8, 209n64 visual economy, 8, 38–43 Vitale, Christopher, 199, 200, 201, 214n107 Vizenor, Gerald, 119, 141, 120, 209n63 voyeurism, 23, 34, 48, 213n101

255

See also consumption; ecstatic consumption; gaze; spectacle. war, 10, 11, 64, 71, 110, 150 as abstraction, 38–43, 42, 190 aestheticized, 70 as art, 38, 42, 92 capitalist warfare, 69 and cinema, 37, 41, 42, 49 commodification of, 52 consumption of, 190 as a cure, 205n28 economy, 37 fetishization of, 52 and fiction/literature, 39, 42 on human bodies, 69 imagery, 52, 56, 153, 154, 186 industrialized warfare, 89 in Iraq, 11, 51, 57, 60, 117, 119 literal and figurative, 20 and love, 54, 66, 67, 86 as a "manliness problem," 52 in the media, 56, 58, 61, 73 media culture as, 188, 189 in the Middle East, 111, 117 representations of, 212n84 sexualized, 52, 67, 86, 207n37 spectacle of, 186, 189, 206n33, 207n37 staging of, 183 symbolic, 189 visual, 61, 73, 196 war on terror, 19, 60 of words, 82, 83 World War I, 40 World War II, 151 See also 9/11; genocides; history; Holocaust; tragedy; trauma; weapons. weapons, 52, 89, 119, 189, 207n37 See also war. Welton, William, 60, 63, 66, 72, 77, 82, 208n47 Whitman, Walt, 39, 205n25, 205n28

256

Index

Wiesel, Elie, 150, 152, 157 Williams, A. D., 9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79 World Trade Center. See 9/11. World Wide Web. See Internet. Wydra, Harald, 131

xenophobia, 125, 136, 140, 150 See also racism; xeno-bind.

xeno-bind, 125, 133, 138, 142 See also xenophobia.

Zohn, Harry, 212n85

Yasuda, Kenneth, 39 YouTube. See social media.