What Postcards Want to Say

人間生活文化研究 Int J Hum Cult Stud. No. 28 2018 What postcards want to say Sanae Tokizane1 1 Department of English Language and Literature, Otsuma Women’s University 12 Sanban-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan 102-8357 Key words：Travel, Postcards, Epistolarity, Post-modernism Abstract Annie Proulx’s first novel Postcards is a saga of the disintegration of a rural New England family, which is so realistically rendered that any connection with Jacques Derrida’s philosophical theory of the post in The Post Card seems unlikely to exist. At the same time, it is evident that the novel is committed to the quiddity of the postcard as a medium that is simultaneously postal and postmodern. Through the clever use of graphically presented patchwork postcards, the novel epitomizes the economical and cultural transfiguration of the twentieth century America. In Derrida’s postal theory, the postcard marks the end of the age of the postal system that transmits documents. This paper argues that what the postcards in the eponymous novel want to say is how Derridian “postcardization” corresponds to postmodernization at the most basic and personal level. The condition of Postcards may not be manifestly postcolonial, and the epistolary space is only partial, but the idea of the postmodern postal principle prevails in the novel, which registers the diasporic flux of people, place, and time with no destination whatsoever. to be displaced by the hollowness of twentieth-century What does a post card want to say to you? technology and consumerism. To put it another way, (The back cover of The Post Card) postcardization is postmodernization. This is not to suggest that Derrida’s writing had any direct influence Annie Proulx’s first novel, Postcards (1992), is a on the novel. Notwithstanding, it is possible to see how typical postmodern work comprising a fragmentary this novel of journey and transition embodies distinct narrative and a patchwork of graphically presented postmodern features of the traveling postcard in postcards. A saga of the disintegration of a rural New addition to its own stylistic feat and hardheaded England family, the story is so realistically rendered descriptions of reality, and how its narrative space and that any connection with Jacques Derrida’s space of narration are “postcardized.” philosophical theory of the post in The Post Card What the postcards in the eponymous novel want (1980), however slight, seems unlikely to exist. At the to say is how postcardization reflects post- same time, it is evident that the novel is committed to modernization at the most basic and personal level. the quiddity of the postcard as a medium that is The migration of people depicted in the novel, their simultaneously postal and postmodern. It even dispersal and drift in the decaying world of New provides the more advanced perspective of the England small-farm agriculture, is socio-economically postcard towards the “post-post” era. The postcard provoked by the destructive power of capitalism. imagined by Derrida is an emblem of postmodern Among many aspects of postal circulation discussed in epistolarity, or of what he calls “postcardization,” the “Envois” section of The Post Card, one significant which represents the last stage of the materiality of the factor crucial to postmodern concerns is that the post signifier. In the “real” world that is described in the (letters and cards) can always not arrive at its novel, the solidity of the agrarian way of life is about destination. Mail can be delayed, intercepted, or lost, What postcards want to say 116 人間生活文化研究 Int J Hum Cult Stud. No. 28 2018 and its destination is inevitably problematized. In other going missing, lost in the mountain. The only daughter words, its migration must compromise with the barrier, of the family, Mernelle, marries a stranger named Ray the boundary, or the geographical and cultural border. who has advertised for wife, and who later dies of Indeed, the postcard is restricted by its own physical cancer.[2] boundary: “We are to read against all boundaries, even against the boundary presented by the card’s small 1. The Bear Card rectangular shape” (Berg 333). The traveling letter/card It is a bear that haunts the novel. must travel crossing the border, and in so doing it Shortly after running away from home, Loyal unsettles the boundary. I have recently taken up diverse stops at a gas station, where he tries to seduce a woman. novels like The Color Purple, Crossing the River, and In the action of being physically ejected from the The Mixquiahuala Letters[1] to represent the idea of luncheonette, he comes into possession of numerous traveling as problematic “crossing,” and to explore the postcards when he is pushed into a card rack. They are epistolary effect of crossing on the postcolonial “seventy or eighty postcards all showing the same migration, in which the border is constantly questioned thick-bodied bear with a red snout coming out of the and the home irrevocably lost. The condition of black trees” (Proulx 30). These bear cards become Postcards may not be manifestly postcolonial, and the representative of the postcards in the novel. Royal epistolary space is only partial, but the idea of the starts to send them home one by one with brief postmodern postal principle prevails in the novel, messages without revealing his whereabouts, though which registers the diasporic flux of people, place, and he never knows that the address he’s sending them to is time with no destination whatsoever. no longer valid. The text of the novel is literally strewn The novel is largely set during the late twentieth with those postcards from Loyal and other cards century, a time when incompatibility between the rural related to the family and the farm ranging from 1944 to village values and capitalistic consumerism was 1988 (except two earlier ones below). Every chapter beginning to have a ruinous influence on small farms opens with a simulacrum of the postcard with an and their culture. The novel’s protagonist, Loyal Blood, epigraphic message in handwritten or typed letters and is forced to abandon the Vermont farm he loves more a three-cent George Washington postage stamp.[3] It than any other members of his family, when enraged to looks as if a real card is pasted onto the page, and learn that his girlfriend doesn’t favor the dull and naturally the front of the card is never to be seen. But somber life of the farm, he kills her and secretly buries we at least know what every card from Loyal is her body. Loyal runs far away from home into the supposed to show: “Another bear postcard for Jewell” American hinterland. Roaming mostly wild regions, (17). working itinerantly at odd jobs such as mining, digging The stories of the bear and of its photographer are for fossils, or trapping animals, Loyal keeps dreaming told respectively. In the card dated June 11, 1923, of his old farm. However, he is never successful in his which prefaces chapter 3, where Loyal’s embarrassing various jobs but remains unsettled, destined to be incident is related, an amateur cameraman named lonely and homeless. Oscar Untergans brags that he shot a good picture of a Fate has played cruel tricks upon the rest of the bear. Chapter 5 starts with a card addressed to an Bloods, too. Deprived of its main workforce, the farm electric company dated June 13, 1926, complaining cannot maintain itself. Loyal’s father, Mink, and that a bear has been found dead at the bottom of an brother Mervin (Dub) are arrested for arson, having set electric pole. The story continues that the fire to their own home for the insurance money. Mink photographed bear was born “in the late winter of kills himself in despair while in prison. Dub moves to 1918” (33) and seen to have come down to McCurdy’s Florida after his term and becomes a successful real “Lodge’s garbage dump” (33) in summer 1923, when it estate agent there. Loyal’s mother, Jewel, comes to live was captured on film, and was frequently sighted for a in a trailer home on the Blood property, but ends up couple of years until it abruptly disappeared. Untergans, What postcards want to say 117 人間生活文化研究 Int J Hum Cult Stud. No. 28 2018 the photographer who caught its image, “sold hundreds destined to decay in the modern world. The mansion of nature shots to postcard printers” (34). remains where it is to fall into ruin, but the bear leaves The messages of the above cards in 1923 and its own habitat and migrates into the human domain to 1926 combined, we can guess that it is by electric be killed, only to live in the photograph. shock that the bear was killed. The bear’s miserable The back[5] side of the card is photographically fate interacting with the human world illustrates the displayed in Postcards, as if the real card is collaged economic and ecological changes occurring in the onto the page, with those (verisimilar) handwritten or twentieth century on the American continent. The typewritten messages conveying only minimal and death of the beast, seemingly as a result of patchy information. This collage trick stands just electrocution at one of the newly built utility poles, opposite to the cards in Derrida’s “Envois,” where the epitomizes the clash between the world of nature and front picture is more than emphasized and the (alleged) that of civilization. More precisely, it embodies the messages flood out of the frame of the postcard to conflict between, on the one hand, ecological idealism, constitute the whole narrative.

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