West Coast Apocalyptic: a Site-Specific Approach to Ge Re

WEST COAST APOCALYPTIC: A SITE-SPECIFIC APPROACH TO GERE by Ryan James Melsom A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (January, 2011) Copyright ©Ryan James Melsom, 2011 Abstract Key studies of apocalypse in previous years have consciously and unconsciously understood the genre in terms of its paradigmatic consistency across examples. This emphasis points out valuable similarities among a wide range of texts, but also diminishes the significance of a text’s locally and historically rooted ways of depicting experience. This study reflects an effort to rebalance the meaning of apocalypse by looking at a specific locale – the North American West Coast. I examine popular, critical, and literary representations of the West Coast to trace out the unique ways that they configure regional identities. Ultimately, I make the case for site-specific criticism, which values provisional, locally rooted terminologies and tropes for analyzing cultural problems. ii Acknowledgements I must begin by thanking Doctors Sylvia Söderlind and Asha Varadharajan, two women whose combined intellectual horsepower could move mountains, including my occasional mountains of inertia. You have both been profoundly inspiring mentors, and I am humbled with gratitude in having had the opportunity to work with you. I would also like to thank my parents Jim and Kathy, and my brothers Andrew and Steve, for being the most complicated, rag-tag, loving bunch of geniuses I’ve ever seen. How we haven’t just burst into flames many times over is somewhat of an apocalyptic miracle in itself. I want to thank Iris, Charles, Cindy and Vince, for being the hippest, greatest new family a guy could ask for. I also want to acknowledge Heather, Jason, Jordan, and all of my amazing graduate school friends for countless nights of debate and debauch. I can’t forget the disbanded but spectacular members of the Teakwood, especially you Lindsay, who put the mad idea in my head of getting a PhD in the first place. And, finally, I must thank you Liz, my DCT! You have redefined happiness for me and I look forward to sharing every day I have left on earth with you. None of this would have been remotely possible without all of you, so thank you, thank you, and thank you again. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... v Chapter 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 “You Look Like Wise Men, and Talk Like Fools”: Early West Coast Explorers and the Evolution of Failure .......................................................................................................... 31 Chapter 3 What Lies Under Fire: The Search for New Grounds in West Coast Disaster Narratives 67 Chapter 4 Apocalyptic Ethics: Simulacra and Urban Legend in Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park .. 103 Chapter 5 Nobody Walks in L.A.: The Ecstasy of Movement in Volcano and Crash .................... 141 Chapter 6 "Zero Attrition Rate": Entropy and Revitalization at the End of the Western World .... 181 Chapter 7 West Coast Revelations .................................................................................................. 236 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 261 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 266 iv List of Figures Figure 3.1 Image from photo essay accompanying “Under Fire” ............................................... 72 Figure 3.2 “American Progress” (1872) by John Gast ................................................................ 84 Figure 4.1 The Twin Sisters with orth Vancouver in the background ....................................... 107 Figure 4.2 The Lions’ Gate Bridge. ............................................................................................. 107 Figures 6.1 and 6.2 Images from American Apparel’s website .................................................... 186 v Chapter 1 Introduction As far as geographic features go, mountains are pretty apocalyptic. Etymologically speaking, the word apocalypse itself is synonymous with revelation , the former deriving from the Greek root, the latter the Latin. Both carry, as Northrop Frye notes, “the metaphorical sense of an uncovering or taking a lid off” (135). So when you drive through the Rocky Mountains, the massive physical barrier that separates much of the North American West Coast from the rest of the continent, you can actually see millions of years of the earth’s history in the form of geological strata churning up from underneath the surface. The drive is literally a revelation of the earth’s secret history. Beyond this barrier, the immense volcanic range on the far side of the Rockies has earned the Pacific Slope region the nickname “the Pacific Rim of Fire.” Again, the unseen earth boils up from beneath one’s feet, into the light of day. These geological revelations can be spectacularly violent, as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 demonstrated. In many people’s understanding, apocalypse often has this sense of violence associated with it, but violence is not necessarily one of its requirements. To really understand what makes for apocalypse in a traditional sense, there are few better places to turn than the influential work of Northrop Frye and Frank Kermode. Their foundational work on the apocalypse has become indispensable for subsequent critical discussions of the topic and has generated the recent spate 1 of interest in millenarianism leading up to the year 2000. Despite all of my efforts to break new ground here, their influence on this project must be acknowledged at the outset. While Kermode’s seminal text The Sense of an Ending (1966) predates Frye’s The Great Code (1982), Frye’s constitutes the more traditional reading of apocalypse. Frye proceeds from the premise that the Bible, while not specifically literary in the sense that it does not appear to have a unifying aesthetic principle, nonetheless has had immense, irrefutable literary influence. He seeks to locate the Bible’s meaning as a work both outside of and “more” than a work of literature, borrowing his title from Blake’s statement that “The Old and the New Testaments are The Great Code of Art” ( xiv ). A key claim informing Frye’s stance throughout Code is that Man lives “not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns” ( xvi ). His interest in understanding the heritage of these concerns steers him away from a “specific culture” in search of more universal truths ( xvi ), and this is precisely what leads to his interest in the Bible. We can see how he structures his understanding of apocalypse through the lens of myth. Myth and mythology for Frye are not mere stories but the powerful means by which people navigate their sense of being. Apocalypse is a special myth unto itself, as it suggests the “remarkably open-ended” moment where the entire typology of the Bible itself both culminates and falls apart (137). According to Frye, the Bible involves seven phases from Genesis to Apocalypse, each of which “is not an improvement on its predecessor but a wider perspective on it” (106); each phase represents the revelatory expansion and fulfillment of the previous ones. 2 Apocalypse is special in Frye’s reading of the Bible, because it is the final revelation. He describes this with a tone verging on awe: “What is symbolized as the destruction of the order of nature is the destruction of the way of seeing that keeps man confined to the world of time and history as we know them. This destruction is what the Scripture is intended to achieve” (136). Here, finally, the explication of the Great Code crosses the boundary of literary analysis and sheds light on history itself, seeking an order beyond the finite, the human, and the knowable. If Man mediates his relationship to nature with mythology, then the destruction of nature absolves humans of the need for mediation. The subject-object duality causing desire ceases to exist: “[T]he reader completes the visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared” (138). The implications of Frye’s description of apocalypse are immense. The myth of apocalypse attempts to resolve all knowledge of history – all memory and apparent injustice and inequality: That knowledge, we now see, was wholly within the framework of law: it is contained by a ‘final judgment,’ where the world disappears into its two unending constituents, a heaven and a hell, into one of which man automatically goes, depending on the relative strength of the cases of the prosecution and the defense.

Load more