European journal of American studies

5-3 | 2010 Summer 2010

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/8462 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.8462 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 5-3 | 2010, “Summer 2010” [Online], Online since 27 June 2010, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/8462; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.8462

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

America, the Old? [Keynote lecture, Netherlands American Studies Association, Amsterdam University, 5 March 2010] James D. Bratt

Fatigue, Indolence And The There Is, Or, The Temporal Logic Of Collage In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White Zuzanna Ładyga

“Invading Your Hearts and Minds”: Call of Duty® and the (Re)Writing of Militarism in U.S. Digital Games and Popular Culture Frédérick Gagnon

(Post)utopian Vineland: Ideological Conflicts in the 1960s and the 1980s Lovorka Gruic Grmusa

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America, the Old? [Keynote lecture, Netherlands American Studies Association, Amsterdam University, 5 March 2010]

James D. Bratt

1. Introduction

1 Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 was greeted in most of Europe with joy, or at least relief, an emotion that was shared in a great many precincts in the United States. In both venues a curious mix of language attended these celebrations. A new day had dawned, it was said; the American people had turned a page to give themselves, and the rest of the world, a fresh start. Paradoxically, that meant that the USA would return to being its old, familiar self—a country that played by the rules and acted friendly toward its neighbors, consulting them about mutual interests rather than rampaging around like a rogue elephant.

2 It is the mixed themes of old and new, fresh and familiar, that might be the most illuminating feature of this response. And since associating America with the “new” is altogether predictable, it is the role of the “old” in the mix that merits further scrutiny. Nor should the old be introduced simply as a counter-weight to create an ironic balance; instead, we should consider it fully and in its own right. Thus, the leading question of this essay, a question designed to provoke a new line of reflection across all our disciplines. We can call it history’s revenge upon Donald Rumsfeld: on the current scene, is it not America instead of Europe that is “old”? More precisely, what new insights into the United States in its current condition, in its art and literature, its history and politics, issue from our putting on a markedly new pair of glasses and viewing the United States as an aging country?

2. Ever-New, or Ageing?

3 That seeing America as old is a new approach can be illustrated from the opening remarks that the subject of my Fulbright project, Abraham Kuyper, made in the

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lectures he delivered at Princeton in 1898, where he had traveled to receive an honorary doctorate. Kuyper began: A traveler from the old European Continent, disembarking on the shore of this New World. . . [senses that] the old stream of life in which he has been moving [is] almost frost-bound and dull. Here, on American ground, for the first time, he realizes how so many divine potencies, which were hidden away in the bosom of mankind from our very creation but which our old world was incapable of developing, are now beginning to disclose their inward splendor, thus promising a still richer store of surprises for the future.1

4 There is a theological idiom in these phrases that is particular to Kuyper, but otherwise we recognize here a very common sentiment of learned visitors to America. Crévecoeur, Trollope, Tocqueville, Dickens, and Bryce: whatever else they said, with whatever tone, and whatever final evaluations they drew, these observers and a host of others agreed that America was new and different, that on those shores a fundamentally new project was being undertaken with great import for the rest of the world.

5 They had plenty of Americans at hand to assure them that this was so. In the founding generation, from Ezra Stiles in New England to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to the forgers of the Great Seal of the United States, it was agreed that the new nation spelled “a new order of the ages.”2 The canonical figures of the mid-nineteenth-century American literary renaissance—Emerson, Whitman, Melville—might have disagreed about other things but agreed that their young and rising nation deserved a whole new literature.3 The great politicians have followed along: Lincoln with his “new birth of freedom,” Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nation, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, John Kennedy’s New Frontier—they all share the magic adjective. American Studies as an academic enterprise was launched in the 1950s with major titles evoking the same theme: Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith, The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx, this garden presumably being another Eden, wherein, according to R. W. B. Lewis, dwelt The American Adam. The theme, finally, comes down to the present day, as the United States wrestles in the grip of the ideology fixed around the body politic by Ronald Reagan, whose most memorable phrases included the assurance that “it is morning in America.”4

6 Ronald Reagan also happened to be the oldest person ever to occupy the Oval Office, and by several accounts his last years therein were marked by incipient senility—and not in the metaphorical but in the clinical sense of the term. That paradox parallels a much larger irony attending the familiar trope of America the new. “America as new” is one of the oldest, most tradition-worn ways to view the United States. To see America as old instead might promise us a fresh start; in any case, it requires new lenses. I am not drawn to this question out of an academic fascination with irony, however, but from a public conversation that has been increasing in volume over the last few years in the United States, a conversation that registers a concern across the spectrum of public opinion that the country has taken a down-turn into the heretofore uncharted territory of constraint and decline. The United States faces, so these observers hold, the prospect of diminished power abroad relative to the rising nations in the world, and a future of reduced possibilities at home spelled by crimped budgets. Its repertoire of politically feasible policies dooms it to orbit in ever-tighter circles around obligations entailed by past commitments, be they noble or mistaken; and its rhetorical repertoire ranges from a president who says that “we can” (and seems to

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mean, we can survive this) to the hosts of right-wing radio whose fulminations amount to one great shriek: this can’t be happening to us! Reduced strength, reduced mobility, reduced flexibility, reduced resources, the constraints of the past and the iron cage of memory: if we hear these symptoms described of a person, we would readily (and correctly) conclude that he or she is aging, and not so gracefully.

7 At this point an American audience is conditioned to expect a sudden rhetorical reversal—an assurance that what goes for a person does not necessarily hold for a nation, followed by a recital of the reserves and potential that promise a return to vitality should only this new attitude or that new policy pill be taken. But this essay is not a Viagra commercial. The symptoms of an aging America are real. They may not be the whole picture, but they are major components in it and perhaps the frame besides. I cannot say this is an entirely new phenomenon in American history because, this being an unusual question, we have not generated the historiographical record to tell how new, or recurrent, the United States’ present circumstances might be. I would venture as a working hypothesis that, although the U.S. has experienced foreshadowings of this condition before, these have seldom gathered in such a perfect storm and without plausible relief on the horizon. The good news in this situation for academics is that, prodded by circumstances to explore within a new paradigm, we might come up with fresh insights that could be of real service not just to our future careers but to a larger public. The even better news for readers of this journal is that European scholars in American studies are especially well positioned to help in this regard.

8 Detailing the symptoms of America as ageing could easily absorb the rest of this essay, but as those comments would neither be original nor that suggestive for our scholarly work, I will give a brief sketch under the metaphor of an ageing couple trying to carry on in the old house where they raised their children. The title to this property (the Constitution) is almost 225 years old, and the building, or infrastructure, last renovated sixty years ago, is showing alarming signs of deterioration, as state governors, newspaper columnists, think tanks, and university experts have been pointing out now for a couple decades. Yet the residents are worried about their fixed income and so refuse to undertake the significant short-term borrowing that would yield long-term benefits. This particular couple, as part of the Greatest Generation, profited immensely, along with their own, now middle-aged children, from massive public investments made after World War II; but somewhere in their own middle age they became convinced by Ronald Reagan, himself an abject beneficiary of public largesse, that, in their current situation, “government is not the solution, government is the problem.”5 On the other hand, our couple will spend without stint on anything labeled “security.” However much their elected representatives pick over any discretionary social spending, they will pass an annual defense budget of over $700 billion with virtually no discussion or objection. Our retirees will also open their wallets for perceived neighborhood safety, particularly to lock up young men of color for non-violent offenses. Thus the American house still stands tall in the global village on certain indices: it controls nearly half of the world’smilitary expenditures, two-thirds of the international weapons trade, and imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than does any other nation in the world—more than Russia, more than Columbia, more than China, South Africa, Nigeria, more than Belarus.6 Never mind that military spending has a lower multiplier effect for economic growth than does infrastructure investment.

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Never mind that a year in jail costs almost as much as a year at Yale. "Millions for the military, sir, but not one cent for welfare!"

9 Hyper-sensitive though they are about their limited means, as is not unknown among ageing people our American household is still susceptible to scams and risky speculation. Most recently this was a massive real estate bubble whose explosion sent a shock through the entire world economy and has left the home-front struggling for revival. Nor does any widespread recovery appear in the offing. The bankers’ downtown penthouses are safe, and the professional neighborhood up the hill is holding on, but along ordinary middle-class streets, values are down and properties foreclosed or abandoned. Consequently the neighbors are all saving against an evil day rather than spending and restarting the economy. Unemployment is near 10 percent; underemployment over 20 percent.7 Figures for traditionally vulnerable sectors like young males of color are far worse, but the prospects for white males lacking advanced education are moving in the same direction with no end in sight.8 The social dysfunctions that our retired couple have long associated with the black inner-city are —and have been—rising without evident curtailment among rural, working-class, and even middle-class whites. When, in face of this dire prospect, our elderly couple— unable to spend any more on prisons, and reluctant to invest in schools—turns to its political class for leadership, they see the arteriosclerosis of the body politic. The current government has as strong and consolidated a majority as any since the early days of Reagan, but as the travail over the recent, relatively modest reform to the nation’s health-care system demonstrated, a filibustering forty senators can block or at least dilute any approach toward the bold changes needed for recovery or sound investment going forward. Not that the representatives among the majority are guilt- free; they too are locked up by commitments made to raise the cash needed to get elected in the first place.9

10 But what is most striking in the present circumstance is our couple’s constricted imagination—a constriction predictable at their later stage of life but foreign to their younger years. A trillion dollars of their money went to a war of choice in Iraq on the insistence of old men from the Nixon administration who, among other motives, were determined to exorcise once and for all the memory of defeat in Vietnam.10 Tuning in to television, our couple can hear the most popular speaker at the recent convention of self-described Conservatives, Glenn Beck, declare that the entire record of progressive legislation going back to and including Theodore Roosevelt needs to be wiped off the map.11 That is, Gilded Age policies for the not so golden years at hand. And why not? Income stratification in the American apartment complex is nearing that of the Gilded Age, and bankers and entrepreneurs of new industries are once again triggering panics and collapses.12 Railroads then, hi-tech now; Jay Cooke then, Lehman Brothers now; and J. P. Morgan all the time. If neither the return to Vietnam nor to the Gilded Age goes back far enough, there is the solution posited by Tea Party devotees and some Supreme Court justices: a return to the plain and simple meaning of the original Constitution, as if two centuries had not happened in the meantime. The most popular icon (using the word in its religious sense) of this mentality is the firearm, and the individual’s right to bear the same is taken to be the most sacred and inviolable of rights. Miranda rights, the right to a jury trial, even citizenship itself may be stripped from an accused terrorist by state fiat, on this thinking, but not that same person’s right to own an assault weapon. Never mind that the successful overturning of oppressive regimes around the world over the last quarter century have all occurred without armed

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uprisings; the American populist today is fixated upon the eighteenth-century frontiersman and his musket. Bold, new, innovative thinkers and can-do confidence? Look not to America, frozen in fear, nostalgia, and bills overdue.

3. A European Advantage?

11 In light of this picture, what might European academics do? I suggest that they exploit their advantage as outsiders and let a comparative, pragmatic, and post-imperial sensibility infuse their Americanist researches. Post-imperial, in that Europeans have already lost their empires and have come to terms with that, economically and psychologically, in a constructive way. Remarkably constructive, I would say, in light of so many Americans’ inability to imagine a state of less than complete world hegemony without fear and loathing—fear for their own security, and loathing for the specter of weakness such a situation would supposedly spell. We should push the bottom-line question: When were Europeans more prosperous and content, then or now? During their imperial phase or after? I think the answer is clear, and analyzing how your nation came to terms with and prospered after the loss of empire could provide a research agenda for European American studies, as well as a reassuring word to Americans.

12 First of all post-imperial, then, and secondly pragmatic. As Americanists we can appreciate the irony of the fact that, arriving in Europe, this American feels compelled to repeat Lincoln Steffens’ dictum upon visiting the Soviet Union in 1921: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Obviously, I repeat this with some trepidation since, in the long run, the USSR did not work, and right now the ripple effect of the crisis in Greek finances throughout the euro-zone augurs fiscal and commercial difficulties of significant dimensions. Still, it is important to list the significant ways that Europe has turned toward a workable future and that America has not. Much of Europe offers an integrated transportation system that is not dedicated to profligate use of fossil fuels for maximum individual convenience; it is embracing, rather than resisting, alternative energy sources; it is not religiously denying climate change; it is providing relatively affordable health care for all on a variety of models; its future citizens as school children perform relatively well on tests of basic competency. Europe’s children do lag, admittedly, in reported self-esteem and manifest obesity, but these are good races to lose. So let us for once send those nineteenth-century questions back across the ocean: How do Europeans make it work? From the shambles of World War II, how did they get here? What did they have to give up in the process? What of this was a genuine loss? This last is not a rhetorical question, for American fears that moving forward might cost something precious should not be dismissed out of hand. To glimpse some measure of that cost in a European mirror would be at least instructive, perhaps even comforting.

13 Finally, as these proposals suggest, European Americanists should be comparative. However it might be in other disciplines, this is an encouraging trend in American history right now, signaled by the publication of Thomas Bender’s A Nation Among Nations (2006).13 European academics’ remarkable bi- and tri-lingualism, especially compared with Americans’ lingua-phobia, affords a wonderful advantage that they should exploit. With access to a wide range of sources and within a broader frame of reference, they might offer alternative narratives, alternative frameworks of meaning,

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alternative landscapes of imagination. These are the ingredients of vision, and again, just now it is genuinely new vision that the United States lacks.

14 Informed by such a sensibility, what sort of research programs could be undertaken? The most obvious one might be dubbed “comparative slumpology.” Critics of the America-as-old trope are quick to point out that the United States has hit the wall before, that it recurrently emits noises of decline and foreboding. Think of Madison Grant’s lament over The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Theodore Roosevelt’s concomitant call that the “better” types in American society breed more vigorously lest the lesser sorts run off with the country. These manifestos were accompanied by the greatest outpouring of utopian and dystopian fiction in all of American history, as a small-town agrarian order tried to come to terms imaginatively with an urban- industrial system.14 Further back, no sooner was the War for Independence over than voices elite and popular from across the whole spectrum of Patriot opinion announced that the cause of liberty was being lost—lost forever!—to corruption and conspiracy. Farther back yet, of course, we hear the jeremiad rehearsed so repeatedly as to become a fundamental type of American literature.15 These cultural expressions often coincided with economic collapses, or wars, or both. To repeat an earlier question: do the current mood of atrophy and the material forces behind it parallel or significantly diverge from these earlier passages? Programmatic suggestion #1, then, is to study when and why these slumps occurred, how they were redressed, and what may (or may not) be different about the crisis this time.

15 My second suggestion is one I have already followed, and that is to study the down-turn of movements, be they political, social, or religious. Religion not only happens to be my own focus in American history but, especially in its Protestant evangelical form, offers special insight into the dynamics of revival and decline. I find American religious historians, like American historians more generally, devoted as much as sales-agents to the study of new beginnings, bright possibilities, the launch- and growth-phases of their subjects, to the relative neglect of the inevitable phases of institutionalization or decline. Some of my own work has addressed this bias with respect to the surge of evangelical revivalism in the first third of the nineteenth century, commonly known as the “Second Great Awakening.”16 What no historian had examined systematically, I discovered upon looking into the subject, was what happened when charisma finally failed, when the fires of the spirit had burned too hot or too long, when the circuit- rider dismounted and Charles Finney left the revival trail to become, of all things, a professor of systematic theology. Why was it that the Second Great Awakening did not, as promised, prevent but stoked the Civil War which, whatever else it was, amounted to a consummate failure of the political and cultural formulae to which antebellum evangelicals were dedicated? In the process of reconstructing the down-phase of this story, I discovered it not to be one of unrelieved failure. From the ashes of revivalistic excess emerged a wide array—left, right, and center across the theological spectrum— of creative new departures which together, already before the Civil War, set the template of religious options that prevailed in the US until the 1930s. Studies of downsides can uncover the genuinely new.

16 Asking questions about perceived ageing and defeat can also, thirdly, open a new eye upon American regionalism. The most obvious candidate here is the South, as C. Vann Woodward suggested long ago, but there are enough other candidates to make the “afflicted-region” approach more broadly viable.17 As a resident-native of Michigan I

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have been watching a whole state suffer catastrophe in slow motion for ten years now. In that time my state lost nearly a quarter million prime auto-manufacturing jobs. Public revenue in Michigan next fiscal year, adjusted for inflation, will approximate one half of what it was just twelve years ago. The city of Detroit has fewer people today than it did ninety years ago. A whole auto industry arose, thrived, and then withered in less than a century, leaving behind rusted plants, shattered office buildings, over- extended utilities, and forty square miles (the area of San Francisco) of abandoned space within the city limits.18 Anyone who has contemplated the ruins of Ephesus or traced the old circumference of Cahokia will, driving through Detroit (or Cleveland, or Buffalo), suddenly realize what heretofore has been inconceivable to the American mind: it can happen here, to us.

4. Chances of Revival

17 But American history also holds instances of old regions reviving. Consider New England in 1818. By then it was nearly 200 years old and three generations down a lowering trajectory that made it seem destined to become the American equivalent of the Canadian Maritimes: marginal, quaint, and left behind. Worse, to bulwarks of its old order like Timothy Dwight, that year the church in Connecticut lost its official standing. But by 1825 Dwight’s disciple Lyman Beecher was exulting that this was the best thing that could ever happen to the cause of religion, as it prompted him to devise the voluntaristic measures that created the “benevolence empire” of a united evangelical front. This empire waxed strongest along the Erie Canal, also completed in 1825, along which streamed the New England diaspora into the upper Midwest.19 In this case a bipartisan public works project by New York state coupled with an imaginative breakthrough by people like Beecher helped dramatically reverse the fortunes and influence of an old, once-declining region. We should investigate how the same generations of succession transpired in the now truly old West, in the repeated makeovers of Virginia, etc.

18 Let me suggest, finally, that some ancient ideological strains can offer promising resources for understanding and dealing with decline. Let us return to evangelical Protestantism as an example. Evangelicalism is dedicated to the new—new birth to start with, and renewed people, fresh glimpses of God, and ceaseless liturgical innovation in its train. But evangelicalism as we know it is 275 years old, dating back to the simultaneous work in the late 1730s of Jonathan Edwards, the brothers Wesley, and George Whitefield on either side of the Atlantic. Its elite forms postulated an early claim upon public life in the young republic, and its populist forms proclaimed that theirs was a new religion (while simultaneously being the very same as apostolic Christianity) perfectly fit for a new nation—a nation and religion alike free from the past, free from tradition, free from old Europe. As Mark Noll has detailed in America’s God, evangelicalism was exceptionally well adapted to antebellum America.20 Over- adapted, as it turned out. Evangelicals could not see beyond their original assumptions and so mostly became captives of the culture instead of the prophetic critics they might have been. I would go further and say that evangelicals have never shaken this molding; that, however much their trappings, technologies, and idioms might have changed since, in their notions of salvation and especially in their social ethic they remain fixed at around 1850, slavery excepted. They remain free-will, free-market

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individualists combining small-group social formation with a conviction that America is God’s chosen nation, emphasizing strong personal discipline, the litmus test of which is right sexual behavior.

19 Anyone who has looked into Sarah Palin’s thought and following has seen the noxious ends to which these assumptions can lead: a proprietary claim upon America for just this circle of believers, allegations that political opponents are demon-possessed, a militant Christian Zionism uninformed by the Hebrew prophetic tradition, grave suspicion of big banks—and rejection of any government regulation thereof; deep suspicion of big government—except for a national security apparatus whose total annual budget now exceeds $1 trillion; specious allegations about government- appointed death panels—and praise for torture, rendition, and wars of choice. This, surely, is the sour dead-end of a tradition premised on new life.

20 But there are evangelicals and there are evangelicals. American evangelicals are also among the most generous private donors of aid to sick, indigent, homeless, and displaced people around the world. They are the Americans most persistently concerned with and effectively alleviating the suffering associated with the AIDS-HIV epidemic in Africa. They show the highest consciousness of any Americans about Darfur. They work not only to provide emergency relief but to build programs of long- term development to be run as soon as possible by indigenous talent. If you’re a betting person and you run into a Western-founded health clinic or micro-finance project abroad, put your money on it having Roman Catholic or American evangelical roots. Back home, American evangelicalism has over the last twenty years grown a green wing, mindful that the world is not a commodity but God’s creation to be tended and preserved. Younger evangelicals are still as opposed to abortion as are their elders, but are more accepting of same-sex relationships.21

5. Conclusion

21 My purpose here is not to give a brief for or against American evangelicalism, but to use this particular slice of America that I know best to give what I think is a fair illustration of the potential for good and ill that lies within so many American movements, as in the nation itself. I hope that, over the careers that lie ahead of them, young European Americanists will find a way to bend their teaching and research to ease in some way the difficult transition the United States is undergoing. Here’s the Viagra commercial after all: nations and cultures are finally different from persons; the collective condition never has to be terminal.

22 When Lincoln delivered his first Inaugural Address, the United States faced, mostly unwittingly, the death of its accustomed order and the death of a very great many of its young men. Lincoln hoped, in vain, that the swelling chorus of the Union would drown out the antipathies in his audience. I think less of that Union than did Lincoln; I think it is composed irremediably of sound and toxic strains. Yet it is still worthwhile for us to consider how our work can support the notes arising, in Lincoln’s beautiful words, from the better angels of our nature. These do not have to offer re-birth or resurrection, just some light—whether new or old—down a long road.

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NOTES

1. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961 [1898]), 9. 2. Ezra Stiles, “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor: A Sermon . . .” (1783); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784/1787). 3. This is the theme of two foundational texts in the American Studies movement that was born out of the World War II era: F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); and Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). The canonical primary text is Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837). 4. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). “It’s morning again in America” first appeared as the opening line of a television commercial in Reagan’s 1984 presidential re-election campaign. 5. The phrase occurs in Reagan’s First Inaugural Address and quickly became the motto of his outlook that it remains today. Reagan’s father, John Edward Reagan, was saved from alcoholic penury in the Great Depression by a job in the Works Progress Administration of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan himself prospered by the explosive economic and demographic growth of Southern California that was ignited by huge federal spending on war production and infrastructure development there during and after World War II. 6. Current U.S. defense spending amounts to $708 billion, including regular appropriations and funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Closer analysis reveals a much larger figure for all defense-related spending. Robert Higgs of the conservative Independent Institute conducted such a calculation on the 2007 budget, adding to the Pentagon’s funding other relevant categories such as veteran affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the defense components of the State and Treasury Departments, plus interest charges on all these agencies’ proportionate share of the national debt. Higgs computes the total for all U.S. defense spending for fiscal year 2007 to be $1.028 trillion. Since these items have been growing at nearly ten percent per year in U.S. budgets, the total today would be well over $1,250,000,000. Robert Higgs, “The Trillion Dollar Defense Budget is Already Here,” http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941. On the U.S. share of international arms sales, see Thom Shankar, “Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows,” New York Times, 6 September 2009, summarizing the annual report of the Congressional Research Service for 2008. On incarceration in the U.S. and its racial bias, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); and Glenn C. Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). 7. April 2010 unemployment figure comes from Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor (http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.us.htm); the underemployment figure comes from the Gallup organization, http://www.gallup.com/poll/128060/improvement-underemployment-stalls-mid- may.aspx, both accessed 27 May 2010. 8. Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” The Atlantic Magazine,March 2010: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform- america/7919, accessed 27 May 2010. 9. See Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Knopf, 2009). His most telling statistics are these: in 1974, the average winning campaign for a U.S. Senate seat cost $437,000; in 2006, $7,920,000. The comparable figures for winning a seat in the House of Representatives are $56,500 and $1,300,000.

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10. See David Greenberg, “Why Vietnam Haunts the Debate over Iraq,” History News Network, 26 April 2004 (http://hnn.us/articles/4779.html). 11. The full text of Beck’s keynote speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on 20 February 2010 is available at http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action? articleId=281474978060978. Its opening line is, “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me, God bless you.” Its screed against “progressivism” as a “disease,” a “cancer,” and anti- constitutional starts at paragraphs 4 and 5. 12. David Cay Johnston, “Income Gap Is Widening, Data Shows,” New York Times, 29 March 2007, analyzing Internal Revenue Service data for 2005. 13. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006). See also Gary W. Reichard and Ted Dixon, eds., America on a World Stage: A Global Approach to U. S. History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 14. Frederic Cople Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885-1918 (New York: Free Press, 1964). 15. On the Revolutionary era, Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (1982): 401–41; on the jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 16. On the dominant syndrome, see Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995). James D. Bratt, ed., Antirevivalism in Antebellum America: A Collection of Religious Voices (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006); and James D. Bratt, “Religious Anti-revivalism in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 24/1 (Spring 2004): 65-106. 17. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1993); Edward Ayers, et al., eds., All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); William H. Katerberg, Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz, eds., Regionalism and the Humanities (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 18. Detroit’s population was 1,000,000 in 1920 and is estimated to fall to 800,000 in the 2010 census. Regarding abandoned land in the city limits, see the report by John Gallagher, Detroit Free Press, 15 December 2008, reproduced at http://www.cityfarmer.info/2008/12/23/acres-of- barren-blocks-offer-chance-to-reinvent-detroit/. On Michigan’s public revenue problems, see Citizens Research Council of Michigan, Outline of the Michigan Tax System, July 2008 http:// www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/1990s/1999/rpt327d.pdf. On the state’s political paralysis, see Peter Luke, “Michigan Economy Needs Investment to Grow,” 2 March 2009, MLive.com, http:// blog.mlive.com/peterluke/2009/03/michigan_economy_needs_investm.html. All sites accessed 28 May 2010. 19. Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), is a classic account of New England’s stagnation. On the Erie Canal, see Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), and Gerard T. Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009). A good study of the resulting cultural ferment is Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 20. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21. Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Corwin Smidt and James Penning, Evangelicalism: The Next Generation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002); Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from

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Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2009); Bruce Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel, eds., Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008); Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Readily accessible profiles of evangelical and Roman Catholic activity in sub-Saharan Africa are available in Nicholas D. Kristof’s columns in the New York Times; see, inter alia, “Learning from the Sin of Sodom,” 27 February 2010, and “A Church Mary Can Love,” 17 April 2010.

AUTHOR

JAMES D. BRATT Department of History, Calvin College, Grand Rapids MI,USA (Spring 2010: Fulbright-Dow Distinguished Research Chair, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands)

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Fatigue, Indolence And The There Is, Or, The Temporal Logic Of Collage In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

Zuzanna Ładyga

1 “I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear,” says Snow White in the opening pages of Barthelme’s first novel (Snow White 6). One of the words she has every right to be tired of is “collage,” the critics’ all-time favorite among labels for Barthelme’s literary method. Once legitimized by Barthelme himself in his famous proclamation that collage is the central principle of art in the twentieth century, the term began a long career of the most precise and self-explanatory critical shortcut to D. B.’s fiction. In the criticism of the 1970s and 1980s collage is mostly associated with fragmentation and self-referentiality. In the ideological criticism of the 1990s, the fragmentation becomes “cultural” and “political” rather than linguistic, but still, nobody seems to care about the intricate mechanism of referentiality in Barthelme’s collage method or about its complex affective dynamics. That the referential and affective dimension of collage is deeply problematic becomes clear if one returns to Barthelme’s first presentation of his collage principle, which dates back to an epistolary interview with Jerome Klinkowitz between the fall of 1971 and the summer of 1972. In the interview, when Klinkowitz asks Barthelme to expand on the rule, the latter dismisses the possibility that he, in a typically post-modernist fashion, would think of collage as an abstract aesthetic category. That would probably be “wrong or too general” (Roe 98). Instead, Barthelme explains: New York City is or can be regarded as a collage, as opposed to, say, a tribal village in which all of the huts (or yurts, or whatever) are the same hut duplicated. The point of collage is that unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality. This new reality, in the best case, may be or imply a comment on the other reality from which it came, and may be also much else. It is an itself, if it’s successful: Harold Rosenberg’s “anxious object,” which does not know whether it’s a work of art or a pile of junk. (Maybe I should have said that anxiety is the central principle of all art in the etc., etc.?). (Roe 98)1

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2 Collage is, therefore, not just a pile of “verbal trash” (Dickstein 62), an “overtly metafictional” collection of fragments (McCaffery 153), but an instance of referential bidirectionality, of spatio-temporal confusion in which a new reality is being created as the collage’s future, but this new reality simultaneously “comments on,” i.e. explains and responds to another reality that is its past. What Barthelme suggests is that the referential potential of such illocutionary and perlocutionary acts as collage is governed by a specific temporal logic. And as Richard Ohmann, one of the most insightful students of performativity explains, this temporal logic is the reverse of the immediately perceived. Although mimetic effect seems to emulate the work of memory in its constant reference back to the memory’s past in the real event, the actual time vector of recollection is opposite; it is a future-oriented, reality-building performative that anachronously constructs the memory it refers to. The two-directionness also works the other way round; the synchrony and creative power of perlocutionary acts are an illusion because their causative potential relies on their anachronous iterability.

3 But this is only a part of Barthelme’s definition. For it is one thing to say that collage works due to the spatio-temporal confusion within the referential faculty of language, and quite another to liken this spatio-temporal confusion to anxiety.2 At this point of his definition, Barthelme is not simply parroting Rosenberg, or humorously evoking the Heideggerian Angst. Rather, he presents anxiety as an affective condition of oscillation between the disorderly state of being (junk, in a pile) and the orderly state of being (a piece of art, as a work), that is, as a condition from beyond the limits of epistemological inquiry (the anxious object “does not know”). It is, in short, an anxiety caused by an overabundance of reality rather than by its instability or uncertain ontological status.

4 What are the poetic consequences of this definition? How does the vision of anxiety as the motor of referentiality influence Barthelme’s literary subjects? One way of pursuing the implications of the collage principle is prompted by a philosophical concept of the there is authored by the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a concept which denotes the experience of a terror caused not by the lack of being/ reality but by its excess and inescapability. According to Levinas, this inescapable, and utterly impersonal, horrific overabundance of being provides an environment for subjective development, i.e. for the traumatic encounter with the Other in exposure to his/her presence, even though it never partakes of the process and in fact must be left behind in its course, if the subject is to emerge at all. Levinas calls the experience “the first emergence of the self,” of being which in its eruption starts “the construction of a subject, who, from out of the neuter, will affirm and posit himself” (Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? 212). Crucially, by saying that the self emerges out of the there is in an attempt to escape the horror of its abundant impersonality, the affect that Levinas situates at the basis of the subject’s affective development is none other than anxiety, which Barthelme associates with the performance of collage,3 anxiety over the terrifying presence of “beings and things that collapse into their ‘materiality’” (Existence and Existents 54). 4 Because Levinas’s notion of the there is narrates the subjective process as a sequence of anxiety-driven eruptions and collapses of realist abundance into the materiality of there is, it might serve as a useful lens for discussing the way in which “anxious” elements of Barthelme’s collage interchangeably establish and collapse the referential scaffolding of his texts’ literary subjectivities.

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5 What follows is therefore an attempt to pursue the conceptual correspondence between collage and the there is and to examine Donald Barthelme’s first and most collage-like novel, Snow White, from the perspective of Levinas’s ethical philosophy. For if we investigate the phenomenological implications of Barthelme’s definition of collage, then clearly there is much more to say about Snow White’s referential method and the subjectivity constructed by its discoursethan the book’s commentators have been willing to acknowledge. Levinas, a thinker famous for his relentless preoccupation with how the real impinges on an essentially language-based subjectivity seems to be a good ally in a search for those “different words” that Snow White wishes for so much.5

1. Snow White’s Collage as the There Is

6 Let me begin with a hypothesis that the temporal and affective structure of the there is reflects the dynamics of the collage method of constructing literary subjectivity in Barthelme’s first novel. This reciprocity operates on all narrative levels, so that whether we focus on the book’s characterization, its intertextual allusions, its autobiographical aspect, or its rapport with the reader, Snow White’s subjectivity appears to replicate the pulsating rhythm of ontological and epistemological withdrawals and escapes that Levinas associates with the experience of anxiety towards the rustling there is. For Levinas, the temporality of the experience of there is is complicated by its componential events of fatigue and indolence, which involve the same temporal movement of anticipation and refusal as does the affect of anxiety, and which just like the anxiety from Barthelme’s definition of collage have an impossible-to- pinpoint relation to the present. The murmuring diachrony of the there is gives way to existents only through a directionless “time-lag,” occasioned by the hypostasis of fatigue and indolence, a temporal gap that is inevitable just as it is unbearable (EE 25). Accordingly, the time-lag that characterizes the experience of the there is is responsible for the jerky and “disturbing” narrative line of Snow White as well as for its method of referential and performative uses of language.

7 Barthelme’s poetics emulates the rhythm of the there is, its withdrawals and hypostases, so as to organize the ethical time structure of the novel’s collage subject construct. And it does so vigorously already on the first page which features the first of the novel’s emphatic withdrawals: She is a tall dark beauty containing a great many beauty spots: one above the breast, one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttocks, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down: F0 A8

F0 A8

F0 A8

F0 A8

F0 A8

F0 A8

F0 A8 The hair is black as ebony, the skin white as snow. (SW 3)

8 This perfect illustration of the idea of de-centering presents Snow White as a line of beauty spots on an invisible map of fragmented body parts. At first glance, both the etymology of the beauty spot (a landmark) and the layout of the novel’s first page

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foreground the spatial character of Snow White’s identity ― Barthelme’s parody of the blazon form and of the traditional trope of a woman as an unknown, fetishization- prone landscape ― which in turn immediately discloses Snow White’s explicit commentary on itself as a printed text whose physical form constitutes its entire content and is just about all the reader can be certain of.

9 Yet, at the second glance, a glance that resists the automatism of reading practices usually applied to postmodern fiction, one notes that despite the whiteness of her body parts, Snow White is a “dark beauty,” as if the darkness of her beauty spots were the only available things to define her. And furthermore, that although the spots are said to be located on the three-dimensional map of a body, they form a landscape that only has two dimensions. Both color and two-dimensionality bring the description of Snow White close to what Levinas defines as the “first ontological experience” ― the there is (Is it Righteous to Be? 212). She is a nocturnal discursive landscape which may host the ethical subjectivity, for the description offers the novel’s first commentary on its yet undifferentiated stage and the yet undifferentiated status of its characters, all of whom seem immersed in the anonymity of the impersonal space of the there is of the novel’s discourse.

10 The notion of the limitless topography of the there is justifies Snow White’s being a line of bullets whose ordering counters the horizontal organization of other printed symbols on the page. As Levinas explains, “the points of nocturnal space [of the there is] do not refer to each other as in illuminated space” (EE 53). Instead, “there is no perspective, they are not situated. There is a swarming of points” (EE 53). Read in the context of Levinas’s words, Barthelme’s description of Snow White introduces her not as a character of any kind but as the nocturnal landscape of the novel’s pre-subjective discursive abundance in which a consciousness of being, and with it, the possibility of the subject, has not yet emerged.

11 That such an interpretative conclusion with regard to Snow White is actually quite feasible finds support in Barthelme’s 1974 stage adaptation of Snow White, in which the book’s opening description of vertically distributed bullet-marks is substituted with the image of Snow White’s black hair hanging from the window, being “immensely long, falling almost all the way to the stage” (Snow White [1974] 299). Just like the bullets in the printed text, the oppressive abundance of the hair distorts the perspective of the otherwise realist surroundings of the following events. Of special relevance for the role of Snow White in Barthelme’s novel is Levinas’s word “swarming,” whose implication of dense plurality will frequently resonate on the level of plot in the image of the dwarves’ communal cohabitation and the image of numberless waves of women street protesters. Similarly, it will resound on the level of narrative organization in the density of the “we” narrative position which Barthelme calls “floating” (“Pacifica Radio Interview” 252), as well as in the profusion and indistinguishability of the book’s numerous individual narrators. Finally, the swarming of points on the first page anticipates the revolutionary subversiveness of both the characters and the narrative structure as such, because via the connection to collectivity the image brings to the fore the social aspect of the there is and the intimate relation between the impersonal space-time of the latter and the genealogy of collective freedom and justice. Most importantly, however, it accentuates the position of Snow White as an undifferentiated, two-dimensional, self-sufficient pre-subjectivity.

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12 So adequately thematized by Barthelme in Snow White’s description, the effacement of perspective is soon revealed to be the key architectural principle of the novel’s universe and the first evidence for the non-ontological structure of its subjectivity. Even the purely visual elements such as the image of feminist protesters, viewed through the window as flat, topographic symbols (“the plum colored head the center of the target, the wavy navy skirt the bold circumference. The white or black legs flopping out in front” (SW 8)), or the image of typewriter girls hiding Olivettis under their skirts take their oneiric and/or absurd quality from a reductive compression of viewpoints announced at the novel’s onset, in the two-dimensional portrait of Snow White. Of course, such compressions of visual perspectives as the above are only the most obvious ones; however, the conflations of different levels of reference are much more complex. Adamant in their thematic focus on Barthelme’s referential technique, these are, for example: the episode of Snow White’s writing poetry by means of rearranging the apartment (SW 37), the scene of her watering the blooming flowers of the Maoist revolution (SW 16), or the event of Hogo hiding his plan to get rid of Paul in the “humidor” to keep it “fresh and exciting” (SW 153).

13 Although a canonical postmodern reading would tend to classify these perspective-less images as typical instances of“playing” with language and its dysfunctional uses (McCaffery 160; 162), a reading inspired by Levinas’s conception of the perspective-less there is prompts another explanation. In its light, the removal of perspective is not a sign of dysfunction. Instead, it makes perfect sense as regards the sustention of the basis for the construction of an ethical literary subjectivity, because Barthelme’s radical rejection of perspective, this Renaissance-born consolidator of totalizing ontological models of the subject, indicates that the subjectivity of Snow White aims to emerge otherwise, and that its construction will focus on avoiding the totalizing conceptualizations.

14 It is in this context that we should perhaps interpret the fact that the directory of Snow White’s body parts listed in the opening description does not include her head. Barthelme’s gesture of centering the narrative around a figure who lacks the center of cognitive powers is to lay bare the absence of any consciousness and self-reflexivity, and consequently, to question the possibility of conceiving literary subjects in purely ontological or epistemological terms. The absence of consciousness in the description of Snow White’s all-encompassing presence confirms our initial speculations about Snow White’s role in the book; representing the dimensionless there is, her discursive presence in the novel serves to prepare the ground for the emergence of affective non- indifference and finally, the subjectivity. Barthelme himself confirms this view in one of his interview comments: “I think it would be wrong to try and locate, say, the character of Snow White. She is a pretext for being able to write, to use certain kinds of language” (“Pacifica Radio Interview” 255). His comment displays remarkable proximity to the definition of the impersonal there is, because it similarly insists on the total absence of any traces of personhood in his literary “pretext.” In other words, the language construct known as Snow White turns out to be sublimely compatible with the structure of the there is.

15 Speaking of anonymity and impersonality of the there is in the context of Barthelme’s eponymous character, it is impossible not to mention the nameless third person narrator of the initial description. Especially since, for Levinas, the linguistic event of the third person in general is one of the best empirical illustrations for the anonymity

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of the there is, which is not to be understood as uncertain authorship but as no authorship (EE 52). What is interesting about this narrator is that his intrusive, voyeuristic gaze at Snow White’s physicality clashes with the dispassionate, mechanical tone of his listing of her body parts. From the perspective of radical ethics, this clash embodies the paradox of what Levinas calls the “impersonal vigilance” of the there is,a simultaneous participation and immersion in, as well as a detachment from, the there is (EE 55). In the plot of Barthelme’s novel the paradox is exhibited in the attitude towards Snow White that prevails among the dwarves. On the one hand, they wish for a life without her, but on the other, they cannot imagine that sort of existence. For example, when Snow White complains that her “uninteresting” life has been the result of insufficient imagination, the dwarves understand her complaint as a “powerful statement of [their] essential mutuality, which can never be sundered or thorn, or broken apart, dissipated, diluted, corrupted, or finally severed, not even by art in its manifold and dreadful guises” (SW 59). Because this passage comes from the dwarves’ conversation with Snow White conducted at the time when she is struggling creatively with her “dirty great poem,” its manner of elaborating the idea of a Levinasian rapport- without-egress seems to mark the moment when the novel’s subjectivity is unsuccessfully struggling for the emergence out of the there is. Just like Snow White’s imagination, the language of the novel is at the same time barren but “stirring,” vigilantly withdrawn but ready to participate in the pre-subjective preparation, which is nevertheless still delayed. The preparatory character of the poem episode is confirmed by Snow White’s choice of its first words ― “bandaged and wounded… Run together” —which she claims to be a metaphor for the self’s defensive reaction towards the Other (SW 59). Snow White’s explanation of the metaphor, the reversed chronology of bandaging and wounding, and finally, the fact that the expression “bandaged and wounded” does not actually run together, testifies to the novel’s inability to transgress the immobilizing and totalizing regime of its language and allow for any, most notably the reader’s, otherness to participate in the radicalization of the book’s semantic structures for the purpose of the emergence of the text’s counter-solipsistic subjectivity, in the form of the Saying.6 Therefore, counter to those readings of Snow White which emphasize her rebelliousness and place her at the pantheon of the most radically feminist literary characters, we might conclude that despite all the efforts at creative playing with the discourse of the novel, she is a much more domesticated figure and a much less subversive narrative element than she at first appears. This is perhaps why John Leland talks about Snow White in terms of “ontological despair” (806), an implosive impasse that transpires in a monotonous, almost “mechanical” manner of poetic randomization and fragmentation occasioned by Snow White’s appearance in the novel (Dickstein 62).

16 Using ethical terminology, one might carry this argument further and think of Snow White as a textual construct whose experimental, subversive potential remains constrained by the mechanic monotony of the Said. Although her presence in Barthelme’s novel as the epitome of the pre-subjective “murmur of discourse” indicates that she is also the embodiment of the subjectivity-founding urge to escape this murmur, the fact that her rebelliousness is predictable, her experiments never truly experimental, and thus never implosive with regard to the ontological structure of the book’s subjectivity, suggests rather that Snow White represents the discursive barrier to the emergence of the ethical subjectivity. This is visible both on the level of plot and in the type of linguistic experimentation that characterizes Snow White’s utterances.

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17 As far as Snow White’s plot is concerned, the title character appears, on the one hand, to be the symbol of rebelliousness against the conventions of the dwarves’ world she does not “like” (SW 68) and from which she wants to escape (SW 102) since she feels there as if she were “in a wrong time” (SW 131). Her disgust with the surrounding reality, because “what is, is insufficient” (SW 135) states the ethical desire for something more than the there is. On the other hand, however, Snow White’s tendency to search for ways of rebelling in the already existing and standardized body of literature from Sartre to Mao indicates that her revolutionary potential, her creative and ethical capacity is in fact quite limited.

18 The superficiality of Snow White’s subversiveness is particularly apparent in the attempts at linguistic experimentation that accompany her appearance in the novel. For example, even though she is the one to interrupt the narrative stability by speaking in a mixture of stream of consciousness and cut-ups, these are frequently the most comprehensible and the least surprising and undecipherable elements of the story. Consider a sample sequence of the first cut-up, whose bits cohere so easily that the effect of any radical writerly-ness their fragmented form initially promised is totally lost: Those men hulking hulk in closets and outside gestures eventuating against a white screen difficulties intelligence I only wanted one plain hero of incredible size and soft, flexible manners parts thought dissembling limb add up the thumbprints on my shoulders Seven is too moves too much and is absent partly different levels of calculated emotional release calculated paroxysms… Edward never extra density of the blanched product rolling tongue child straight ahead broken exterior facing natural gas To experience a definition placed neatly where you can’t reach it and higher up Daytime experiences choler film bliss. (SW 31)

19 Read from the perspective of the passage in which Snow White says that not to find real men “would be a disappointment” because she would have to satisfy herself “with the subtle falsity of color films of unhappy love affairs, made in France, with a Mozart score” (42), this apparently experimental fragment reveals itself to be a dispassionate, realistic description of Snow White’s stereotyped perception of her lover’s hulking and paroxysmal body movements during sexual intercourse. The fragment owes its mimetic precision to the random jumps of her thought from past colorful wishes (“I wanted a hero”) to a series of film poses, as if taken from French melodramas, as well as to musically rhythmical jerks of Snow White’s perspective on her lover’s body from “dissembling” to “straight ahead,” from the view of the “limb” to “parts of faces” to “tongue.” As the most experimental of poetic techniques creates the opposite effect to the expected, the equation between the category of postmodern subject and the notion of syntactic disassemblage (so often emphasized in metafictional criticism) loses its validity. In this fragment and other similar ones, there is no implosion of meaning and no questioning of the ontological dimension of the book’s subject construction. Instead, the subjective process is paralyzed by the endless profusion of its possible references. Although the desire for an emergence out of this linguistic abundance is somehow there in the effort to experiment, no actual utterance betrays traces of the an-archic ethical encounter with alterity, i.e. no actual utterance mobilizes an unleashing of semantic and tonal vertigoes that would effectuate the shattering of the conventions of the Said.

20 A similar regularity is observable in Snow White’s capitalized insertions. Given that the ethical subjectivity occurs as a rupture of language, one might rush to classify these

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“narrative breakers” as the dialogically disruptive, ideal candidates for the role of the subjectivity-producing Sayings. Yet, the mechanical interruptiveness of the insertions as regards narrative cohesion does not yet make them ethically radical. Sometimes, they echo Snow White’s memories, “WHAT SNOW WHITE REMEMBERS: THE HUNTSMAN/THE FOREST/THE STEAMING KNIFE” (SW 39), or her fears, “IN THE AREA OF FEARS SHE FEARS MIRRORS/APPLES/POISONED COMBS (SW 17). Sometimes, like real bits of a visual collage, they reproduce the newspaper headlines such as “ROME. ANOTHER DEFEAT…THE ITALIAN POSTAL SERVICE ABIDES NO RINGERS IN ITS RANKS” (SW 115). And sometimes, they parrot academic discourse, especially the bizarrely referential collocations of literary criticism, for example, “THE SECOND GENERATION OF ENGLISH ROMANTICS INHERITED THE PROBLEMS OF THE FIRST” (SW 24), or “PUSHKIN DISPLAYED VERBAL FACILITY…AS A STYLIST DOSTOYEVSKI HAD MANY SHORTCOMINGS” (SW 143). Yet, whatever they refer to, and however intrusive they appear, the insertions never manage to unsettle the ontological or epistemological stability of the Barthelme text. In fact, they strengthen it. The allusion to the Romantics quoted above coincides with and explains Paul’s speech about his identity problems and Henry’s confession of his personal weaknesses. The coincidence creates the effect of a natural continuity between the Romantic escape and the sense of being socially besieged, as compared with Paul’s penchant for the retractive poetics of palinodes, and Henry’s definition of his misery as the “Inmitten-ness of the Lumpwelt” (SW 29). Provided that we understand subjectivity in Levinasian terms as a non-totalizable, anti-ontological structure of substitution-for-the-Other, the “narrative breakers” do not seem interpretable as ruptures of the text’s Said because their violation of literary conventions is only illusive. However, as in the case of Snow White’s fragmented visions, they do mark the moments of struggle with/within the ontological there is.7

2. From the There Is To The Hypostatic Event of Subjectivity

21 The identity of Snow White’s observer whose words begin the novel does not remain undisclosed for too long. It is soon revealed by the floating “we” narrator of the second segment announcing: “Bill is tired of Snow White” (SW 4). The revelation not only anachronously identifies Bill, the dwarves’ leader, as the impersonally attentive voyeur, but also dispels any doubt as to the kind of affective motivation Bill might have had for his peeping. His attitude towards Snow White is that of total weariness. What is more, his tiredness, we are told, is coupled with a refusal to be touched. Faced with such a condition of their leader, the dwarves resort to philosophical speculations as to whether Bill’s rejection of physical contact is a symptom of withdrawal understood in a Heideggerian manner as “a mode of dealing with anxiety,” or as a sign of withdrawal understood in the vein of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “a physical manifestation of a metaphysical condition that is not anxiety” (SW 4).

22 Of course, at this point one might focus the interpretation on the political aspect of Barthelme’s poetics, from whose perspective Bill’s dissidence is nothing more than an alarming signal of passive resistance, whereas Bill’s tiredness and refusal to be touched are straightforward thematizations of Barthelme’s withdrawal of narratorial authority, which performed so early in the story, releases the text’s politically subversive

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potential.8 However, without denying the legitimacy of this interpretative possibility, it may also be argued that Barthelme’s juxtaposition of Bill’s weariness and untouchability with the viewpoints of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty encapsulated in the dwarves’ speculations about Bill’s relational withdrawal is much more significant for the structure of the novel’s subjectivity than it may appear at first.

23 Even though Bill’s attitude does not mean he negates the tangibility of the surrounding world, it certainly means that he distances himself from Merleau-Ponty’s viewpoint, that unmediated access to an external reality is a real possibility. In this way, Bill’s attitude comes to express Barthelme’s principle of referentiality, his poetic strategy, which from the opening episode onwards will exploit the connections between representation possibilities and the affect of weariness on the one hand, and the affective mechanism of refusal on the other. That such a strategy involves the problematics of the ethical becomes apparent if we bear in mind that the notions of weariness and refusal play a crucial role in shaping the affective geography of the Levinasian there is.

24 As Levinas writes in Existence and Existents, the there is itself is the excess of being in being from which there are no exits for beings, i.e. existents. An existent’s relation to the there is manifests itself in the interrelated mental or affective phenomena of fatigue and indolence and their temporal relation to the present. 9 In his discussion of the former, Levinas discovers that the sense of weariness that makes us realize we exist is not tied to people or tasks we get tired of, but concerns existence itself. It is the impossibility of escaping existence, an impossible refusal to the commitment to exist (EE 12). We might say that fatigue is fatigue as a result of the exhausting “hesitation of a refusal” that cannot be effected because existence is inescapable. A similar suspension of refusal is characteristic of indolence, another feeling by means of which the existent establishes his/her relationship with existence. Having nothing to do with either relaxation or inactivity, indolence resembles fatigue in that it involves an attitude with regard to action. [It] is not a simple indecisiveness, a being overwhelmed by the choices to be made […] it is also not a material impossibility of performing an action that is beyond our strength, or the consciousness of that impossibility, [or] a fear of pain […] Indolence is essentially tied up with the beginning of an action. [It] concerns beginning, as if existence were not there right off, but preexisted the beginning in an inhibition. There is more here than a span of duration, flowing imperceptibly between two moments. Or perhaps the inhibition involved in indolence is also the revealing of the beginning which each instant effects in being an instant. (EE 13)

25 It follows that indolence is the reverse side of fatigue. Its future-oriented suspension of refusal is, in a sense, the opposite of the past-oriented suspension of refusal in weariness. But it is not different from fatigue in occasioning the momentary, temporal excess in which the necessarily mediated awareness of the existence (the there is) emerges on the part of the existent. Note that Levinas does not really use time as a transparent category to describe what it means to be tired or inactive. Rather, he constructs his own understanding of time. He defines time by its relation to the there is, which is either that of fatigue or that of indolence. Therefore, the present moment is defined by Levinas as occurring in the interval created by the temporal delay of fatigue: the “almost self-contradictory moment of the present that tarries behind itself could not be anything but fatigue. Fatigue does not accompany it, it effects it; fatigue is this

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time-lag” (EE 25). And it is precisely this time-lag, this moment of suspension that Levinas associates with the birth of the consciousness of the pre-ethical Same. Fatigue is to be sure not a cancellation of one’s contract with being. The delay it involves is nonetheless an inscription in existence, but what is peculiar to this inscription, its sort of hesitation, enables us to surprise it, to catch sight of the operation of assuming which the existence that is taken up always already involves. (EE 25)

26 To make his point crystal clear, Levinas describes the “emergence” of consciousness, the beginning of the awareness that it is impossible to escape being entirely, as a hypostasis (EE 25-6), a performative event of self-reification which triggers a desire for the Other and thus paves the way for an (ethical) subjectivity. Because of the very nature of hypostasis, which apart from substantiation is also, as Jeffrey Nealon notes, a logical error, the desire for alterity and the impossible escapemay actually be accomplished in language even if it is by nature an instrument of permanent ontologization. This is how the performative hypostasis comes to signify “the birth of subjectivity” out from the there is, as a Saying (Alterity Politics 59); the subject is born from a collision of the past-oriented fatigue and future-oriented indolence.

27 It is precisely this sort of colliding rhetoric that informs the subject construction in Barthelme’s first novel. The novel’s pre-subjective drecky murmur of the there is, represented by Snow White, becomes mediated through the tropes of fatigue and indolence. Their interaction, in turn, creates opportunities for the hypostatic disruptions within the text that occasion the emergence of the novel’s subject construct. Consequently, since the path to subjectivity leads through such an event of substantiation that starts in fatigue and indolence and ends in the Saying, and since in Snow White the problematics of these affects are introduced via the character of Bill, the dwarf leader, then our scrutiny of the novel’sliterary subjectivity must begin with an examination of Bill’s weariness and indolence and the way in which the tropes develop.

28 Let us begin with fatigue. One of the first telling instances when fatigue reveals its tropological significance and hence its role in the construction of the novel’s subjectivity is the scene when Bill “develops a shamble” (SW 62). Initially diagnosed as “a sign of a lost mind,” his “shamble” is then quickly re-appraised as a “refreshing” mode of striding “across something that is not true” (SW 62). Probing further into the nature of this sign’s and mode’s mysterious reference, we might find it revealing that the moment when we learn about Bill’s awkward gait ― a movement emulating the decelerating energy of feeling weary towards the there is ― directly coincides with his speech about the genealogy of his fellow dwarves: “We were all born in National Parks,” he says, “Clem has his memories of Yosemite, inspiring gorges. Kevin remembers the Great Smokies. Henry has his Acadian songs and dances” (SW 62). Bill continues the list only to end with the assertion of the tremendous regional diversity of their origin; however, his seemingly pointless proclamation of the dwarves’ non-fictional roots in real national parks of America loses its innocence in the context of the second meaning of the word “shamble,” since apart from signifying an awkward gait, “shamble” also stands for “a scene of carnage” (OED). The sense of brutality and massive murderousness inherent in the word opens the whole scene to an interpretation in which Bill’s shamble relates to the violent aspect of the novel’s referential use of language. By pointing to the brutal nature of poetic acts, of using “old realities” to create new ones, the fragment about Bill’s “shamble” sheds some light on Barthelme’s definition of collage as an anxious object. Bill’s speech is resonant with the memory of

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mimetic carnage that gave rise to Clem’s, Kevin’s and Henry’s fictional identities, a memory underpinned with the horrible murmur of the unceasing there is. It thus textualizes the anxiety of a literary collage, a kind of fearful wonder at the delayed recognition of the literary work’s immersion in the solitary landscape of the there is (in the novel represented by Snow White), coupled with the momentary realization of a desire to transgress the there is in order to enter a non-murderous relationship with the reader.

29 This anxiety should be distinguished from the traumatizing fear of the ethical encounter with reality, along the lines of the distinction between the violence of linguistic incursions on reality described in Bill’s speech and the violence of the ethical event that I earlier referred to as the rupture of the Saying. Referentiality is in itself always a modality of the counter-subjective totalizing murderous efforts and thus it cannot instantiate the subjective moment in the text. In contrast, the shattering and undermining of all, especially the referential standards in a literary text might be construed as ethical violence, as the traumatizing textual rupture out of which a literary subject may arise. In this context, Bill’s speech seems to comment on Snow White’s entanglement with referentiality and perhaps even to mark Barthelme’s recognition of the latter’s ethical dimension.

30 What happens to the notion of violence inherent in referentiality as Bill’s story progresses? The next significant manifestation of weariness takes place in the episode describing his reaction to Snow White’s hair hanging from the window. Bill finds Snow White’s act, the “significance of this act” and “the sexual meaning of the hair itself” utterly “distasteful,” because, as he explains, the situation confronts him with “multiple meanings” about which he does not know what to do (SW 92-93). Such an aversion to Snow White’s act on Bill’s part may be best understood in the light of the earlier argument about the hair serving as a metonymic representation of contact and creativity. In this context, Bill’s negative reaction to the hair bespeaks of his strong refusal to both form a relation with Snow White and use it creatively. Furthermore, given that Snow White’s hair might stand as a transitional object for the dreck of popular culture, Bill’s unwillingness to have anything to do with the “hair-project” reinforces the message conveyed through the image of the “referential shamble.” Like the hair, the dreck of pop-cultural allusions is overabundant, but at the same time, some individuals, like Snow White for example, mistake it for the exit which Bill, parodying Heidegger, calls the “not-with” (SW 92). Bill’s allusion to the German philosopher gives clues about the true object of his own disgust, which seems to be Snow White’s pressing desire for authenticity10 and for abandoning the inauthentic state of being-in-the-world, being-with-others. Such an aversion to the category of authentic being on Bill’s part indicates that the map of his affective responses overlaps, in fact, not with that of Heidegger’s Dasein but more readily with Levinas’s counter- Heideggerian idea of necessary evasion of the “authentic” there is. Explaining to himself Snow White’s performance, Bill says: It [the performance] means that she is nothing else but a goddamn degenerate! is one way of looking at it, at this complex difficult question. It means that the ‘not-with’ is experienced as more pressing, more real, than the ‘being with’. It means she seeks a new lover. Quelle tragédie! But the essential loneliness of the person must also be considered. (SW 92)

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31 Although Bill is trying to understand Snow White’s motives, his verdict is that her performance is wrong, degenerate, and tragic in its blind faith in the search for authenticity. Moreover, the dwarf leader senses that the attempts to transgress being are even “more real” in their attachment to being than the latter’s affirmations. They reestablish one back in the there is. Consequently, Bill’s reaction to the hair seems to occasion the novel’s second commentary on the conundrums of its referential strategy. Importantly, this time the commentary is more direct as it draws the connection between the error of referentiality and the error of desperately seeking counter- subjective authenticity by reverting to consciousness and the there is. Bill’s reaction implies that just as he cannot avoid reacting to the hair in one way or another, even if his reaction is that of disgust, Barthelme’s text cannot avoid some sort of a referential relation to its cultural material, even if it knows this relation to be brutally usurpatory. Although the referential motion cannot be stopped, the recognition of its link to a separated Sameness and its illusion of subjective authenticity constitutes the literary subject’s hypostatic “awakening” into the ethicity of language’s referential gestures, the beyond of ontological authenticity.

32 In this context, it is hardly surprising that the significance of the discussed episode for the novel’s subject construction is verified by its prominent position in Snow White’s 1974 stage adaptation, which locates the scene of the hair hanging down from the window together with Bill’s reaction to it at the very beginning of the first act. Moreover, in the play the scene neighbors on the odd, apparently autobiographical conversation about writing, whereas in the novel there is no adjacency or connection between the two episodes. In what sounds like a confession of a writer who lost his inspiration Bill addresses a “you” (in the play, the “you” is Kevin) with a confession that he has always “hoped to make a powerful statement, coupled with a moving plea,” “wanted to provide a definitive account [...] to substantiate an unsubstantial report, [to launch] a three-pronged attack” (SW 51-52), but he never managed to succeed, whereas his audience always either laughed or was disinterested. The passage marks another of Bill’s recourses to the issue of brutality inherent in creative endeavors. Just as in the episode about his shamble, here too, Bill refuses to execute the violence he indolently anticipated and because of which he is now disarmed and weary. In the play Kevin summarizes this state with an utterance that is not present in the novel: “You’ve lost your… ability to deal creatively with the many-faceted problems of existence!” (303). Thus, the fact that Snow White’s stage adaptation amplifies the ethical dimension of the referential fabric of its subject construct suggests the writer’s growing awareness of the ethical dimension of his semantic experiments, an awareness whose exemplary case is the 1975 The Dead Father.11

33 Reading Bill’s fatigue as a trope of the relation between the aesthetic uses of language and the reality to which they refer, either by trying to reflect it or by avoiding any representation, allows us to explain why Bill’s presence in the narrative is always marked by his radical refusal to be creative and to participate in any enterprise of his fellow dwarves or Snow White. Crucially, his constant repudiations occasion the affective overlapping of fatigue and indolence. Whether Bill says no to tending the vats, reacting to Snow White’s hair, or composing “powerful statements,” Bill enacts the consciousness of a need to escape the state of being forever immersed in the chain of references (the Levinasian there is), and a recognition that such a flight is an impossible possibility that cannot be realized in language other than by a denunciation of

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consciousness itself, a denunciation observable only through hindsight. What Bill’s fatigue signifies is therefore the delay of Barthelme’s text’s momentary renunciation of the ontological structure of its subjectivity as consciousness, i.e. its momentary self- questioning and exposure to the reader that the latter registers post factum as a creative impulse to make sense of the text. The ethical moment of the reader’s participation is fleeting because, as Bill’s story has allegorically shown us, by miming Bill’s attitude of refusal to participate in referentiality the reader’s creative impulse becomes inhibited, delays its performativity, and becomes its own past. Thus, it ends up participating in the self-impeding performance of collage that shapes Snow White’s referential structure.

34 Not just because of its lagging referentiality, but also because of its self-annulling tendency inherent in its causative structure, the collage of Snow White is pervaded by anxiety which stems from two sources. From the perspective of Levinas’s ethics, the future-directed self-hindering performativity characteristic of collage is dubbed indolence in order to emphasize that the possibility of a subjective emergence inherent in the time-lag of its relation to being/language paradoxically rests in radical passivity. Whereas fatigue is the past-directed trope of referentiality that narrates the ethical problem of violence and sacrifice inherent in the relation between the literary subjectivity and the referential status of language, indolence is the trope of performativity whose future-directed structure narrates the text’s passive and traumatic exposure to alterity. In other words, heralding the trauma of the passive exposure, indolence is indispensable to make complete the process of subjective becoming. In Snow White the work of indolence is best observable in the episodes featuring Bill’s double, the lethargic prince-figure Paul.

35 Unlike Bill, Paul rarely worries about his past; rather, he constantly interrogates himself on “what to do next?” and “what is the next thing demanded of me by history?” (SW 55). Although he does not do much, spending his days on aimless meditations “in his baff” (SW 13; 94), Paul seems to be Bill’s exact opposite when it comes to contemplating the relation between one’s actions, especially artistic actions, and reality. He is an abstract expressionist painter who “persists in the image alone” (SW 48), who perceives himself as “more experimental than he [his father] was” though at the same time as “more withdrawn” (SW 27). When he does not paint he “poses” for paintings, pretends to be a monk, and develops fantasies about perfecting the art of writing palinodes. Sometimes his reflections are direct, such as when in his “baff” he says: “retraction has a special allure for me. I would wish to retract everything, if I could, so that the whole written world would be…” (SW 13). Sometimes Paul’s allusions to creative acts are more veiled, such as when in a sort of interior monologue his wish to “retract that long black hair hanging from that window” develops significantly into a sociology lecture about the abundance of trash (SW 94).

36 Paul’s motivations for retracting everything could be read as symptomatic of a sensibility that seeks authentication in the undoing of being, were it not for the fact that Paul knows ultimate reneging to be in the end impossible. Although unlike Bill Paul is not terrified by the referential character of his enterprise, and for most of the time is satisfied with the minimalist poetics of creating by retracting, his creativity is haunted by the same hopelessness as the one found in Bill’s refusals. That the visions of the two characters are complementary (one might even say, interchangeable) is best expressed by Bill in one of his melodramatic confessions: Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be content. Actually, when you get right down to it, I should be the monk, and Paul the leader here. (SW 139)

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37 Bill is not alone in thinking that Paul’s attitude is more suitable for the role: Hubert’s reply to the proposal is that the dwarves “have entertained the notion” of Paul’s leadership (ibid.). Despite being inert, withdrawn, and passive, Paul nevertheless attracts other characters because his attitude carries the promise of a “new reality.” Bill’s, Hubert’s, and even Snow White’s trust in Paul’s potential does not seem misguided because he is indeed creative enough to divert the plot of the fairy-tale, the most evident example of which is his sacrificial act of consuming Snow White’s poisonous drink (SW 174).

38 If we single out Paul as the carrier of the creativity-related trope of indolence, we cannot disregard how clearly the prince’s artistic method of retractions and withdrawals, so radical as to include the deletion of himself, mirrors the poetic strategy of the novel’s author. As Barthelme frequently admitted, his literary strategy was fashioned under the tremendous influence of the minimalist, “retractive” poetics of Waiting for Godot, the text which he first read in 1956, and which gave him his ultimate literary model (Moore-Barthelme 46).12 The autobiographical charge of the trope of indolence becomes evident if we conceptualize it in the light of the parallelism between Levinas’s ethical moment of subjective becoming in the linguistic event of the Saying and Deleuze’s idea of affect understood as the formal substantiation of real emotions. While Deleuze’s perspective considers affect (in general) to be an autobiographically charged element, the above Levinas-inspired reading of Snow White traces the autobiographical in two interrelated affects of indolence and fatigue, whose participation in the plot triggers the emergence of literary subjectivity. Bill’s anxiety- driven weariness about the impossibility of fully escaping referentiality and Paul’s counter-productive, retractive creativity textualize the conflicting impulses in Barthelme’s novelistic method, still under construction. Sometimes, the method tends towards the more referential, while at other times it attempts to instantiate explosions of non-referential pure nonsense. This is why, in Snow White, the conflict is not only present in the shifting volume of linguistic experimentation. It also appears in the shifts of authority between Paul and Bill, of which the most vivid illustration is that even after Paul’s act of ultimate self-retraction ― his voluntary death ― Bill’s thematization of the unavoidability of referentiality (the there is)returns to threaten Paul’s creative acts even after his death: Bill will become one of those sub-deities who govern the calm passage of cemeteries through the sky. If the graves fall open in the mid-passage and swathed forms fall out, it will be his fault, probably. (SW 179)

39 Read autobiographically, the remark expresses the victory of Barthelme’s recognition of inescapable referentiality over the dream of its creative overcoming, but at the same time, it highlights the inseparability of both trends in the constitution of his literary subjects.

40 Let me briefly recapitulate what has been said so far about the relation between the tropes of fatigue and indolence and the novel’s literary subjectivity. By analyzing the temporal dynamics of Bill’s affective condition and its relation to the novel’s self- commentary about its literary method, I have argued that because the figure of fatigue and indolence functions in a more or less explicit connection to the themes of the past, the origin, the memory, or the process of naming, and because it is always aimed at foregrounding the violence inherent in these themes’ problem of representation, fatigue performs in Barthelme’s novel the function of the trope of referentiality. With each

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instance of Bill’s tired behavior, the book thematizes its internal uncertainty about the violence of its referential method of manipulating elements of the surrounding cultural context of the American sixties. When it comes to the trope of indolence, and its future- directed potential to transcend referentiality, the potential which is nevertheless blocked starts playing the role of the trope of performativity. With each instance of Bill’s weariness or Paul’s exaggerated indolence, the subjectivity of Snow White originates in their inevitable overlap, or time-lag as Levinas calls it, in which reference exposes its performative potential whereas speech acts acquire the qualities of undisguised mimetism.

41 A similar conclusion has been formulated by Stanley Trachenberg, who, while defining Barthelme’s technique of literary collage, concludes: “Barthelme’s fiction does not create recognizable speech but a reproduction of it, one which evokes not the way people speak but the way they sound” (167-168). What Trachenberg’s opinion seems to imply is that Barthelme’s poetics is grounded in a paradoxical strategy of performing representation, in which performance becomes mimetic and mimetism depicts the idea of performativity, thus enacting the temporal confusion that we have associated with the hypostatic moment of subjectivity emerging out of the consciousness of the there is. As a result, at the most basic level, Snow White is virtually a story about this confusion, a tale about how the fatigue and indolence overlap. This is what makes up its collage structure that Barthelme defines as anxiously oscillating between referentiality and performance.

42 By manipulating the two tropes of fatigue and indolence Snow White conducts a thematization of its self-doubts and a questioning of its textual strategies. Every instance of the text’s doubting and questioning of its own textual strategies, to which the text as text has no alternative, is precisely the moment when a literary subjectivity, understood in Levinas’s terms as a “putting into question” of ontological certainty and temporal coherence, has the chance of emerging. What is interesting here is that the emergence of ethical subjectivity does not have to coincide only with radical literary experimentation; in Snow White it substantiates itself in fragments which amplify the referential within the referential without resorting to self-referentiality or auto- thematization.

43 Of course, the ethical subjectivity emerges only temporarily, since the necessity of ontological closure, dictated most ostentatiously by the very physicality of the novel, causes Snow White’s discourse to plunge back to the rhythm of the there is. Interestingly, the book allegorizes this process by means of a strikingly regular sequence of punishments which follow Bill’s refusals. It is as if every attempt to break out of the totalizing ontological subjectivity model had to be met with a reprisal from one of the existing, totalizing philosophical or religious thought paradigms. The ideology that haunts Bill after his first refusal, namely, when he develops a shamble, is named plainly: he is being “followed by a nun” (SW 71). In the second case, the totalizing frame of thought seems to be that of modernist aesthetics. When Bill “refuses to take off his pajamas” like everyone else, the narrative terminates abruptly and its perspective is uncontrollably distorted as the pajamas “in a sense” “fill the room” (SW 106), so that all the semantic brutality which Bill himself was desperately trying to avoid is now mercilessly exercised upon him. Finally, Bill’s various subversive actions are undercut by the economic rationale: each time he adopts a passive-resistant attitude to the communal life, by either refusing to sing chants while “washing the buildings,” and

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“tending the vats,” or just generally refusing to continue working, “the loss of equanimity” among the dwarves becomes so critical that eventually they decide to exterminate their unproductive leader (SW 112). In this way, the descriptions of Bill’s endeavors to challenge the murderousness of the language of the Said, to subvert the referential from within the referential, are always undercut by the narrative subservience to one totalizing idea or another.

44 Yet among those hypostatic becomings of the novel’s subjectivity, occasionally interrupting what might be called the “discursive noise” of the pre-subjective there is represented by Snow White, there is one which exemplifies the subjective event in the most striking manner. Not only does it demonstrate how fatigue and indolence signify the tracing of performative representations and referential performativity, but also points to an understanding of the relation between the ethical moment of their co- presence with the moment’s political potential.

3. From Ethical Hypostasis to Political Resistance

45 Answering Snow White’s wish to hear words she has never heard before, Bill proposes the word “Injunctions!” (SW 6). Although initially Bill’s proposal might be understood through the context of his aversion to touch as a fairly straightforward formulation of a demand for solitude, its true significance is actually revealed in the novel’s final scene, the scene of Bill’s court hearing. As he explains to the court how and why he has hurt his childhood scoutmasters Fondue and Maeght, it becomes clear that the legal sense of the word injunction is nothing but a summary of Bill’s campaign throughout the novel against any violent incursions of literary language on the real. That this rebellion is a signal of ethical subversion and of political dissidence may become clearer if we consider a fragment of the interrogation scene: “‘Bill,’ to return to your entanglement of former times with Fondue and Maeght, in what relation did they stand, in those times,” “They stood to me in the relation, scoutmasters.” “They were your scoutmasters. Entrusted with your schoolment in certain dimensions of lore.” “Yes, the duty of the scoutmasters was to reveal scoutmysteries.” “And what was the nature of the latter?” “The scoutmysteries included such things as the mystique of rope, the mistake of one animal for another, and the miseries of the open air.” “Yes. Now, was this matter of the great black horse included under the rubric, scoutmysteries.” “No. it was in the nature of a threat, a punishment. I had infracted a rule.” “What rule?” “A rule of thumb having to do with pots. You were supposed to scour the pots with mud, to clean them. I used Ajax.” “That was a scoutmystery, how to scour a pot with mud?” “Indeed.” “The infraction was then, resistance to scoutmysteries?” “Stated in the most general terms, that would be it.” “And what was the response of Fondue and Maeght.” “They told me that there was a great black horse, and that it had in mind, eating me.” “They did?” “It would come by night, they said. I lay awake waiting.” Did it present itself? The horse?” “No. But I awaited it. I await it still.” (SW 163-4)

46 According to Paul Maltby, such passages instantiate the politically dissident poetics of “sign-reflectiveness,” that is, a poetics of “laying bare the process of signification,” and therefore “permitting a degree of disengagement from the sign system” (42). As a sign- reflective episode, Bill’s testimony critiques the cruelty of ideological repression and systemic coercion that perform their enslaving job dressed up as innocent (childlike/ scout-like) “scoutmysteries.” In the light of such an Althusserian vision, Bill’s refusal to treat the horse as an empty metaphor defamiliarizes the problem of the fact that

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despite their imaginary origin, ideological systems have real consequences. The most visible of those, as feminist critics of Snow White point out, is the barring of the title character’s actual concerns (probably listed in that poem we never actually hear that begins with “bandaged and wounded”) from the “authorized version of reality” and her place in its social structures (Berman, 126).

47 Snow White’s example once again draws attention to the actuality of the system’s effect, Bill’s personal tragedy is where political subversiveness uncovers its ethical source. Bill’s transgression of the law that has brought him before the tribunal, as well as his testimony, disclose his conviction that no linguistic reference is innocent, and that performative acts of language such as the threat of a black horse have concrete consequences. For the threat of the horse which Bill “still awaits” turns out to have been the sole source of all his withdrawals and refusals. Furthermore, provided that the Freudian connotations of the image of the horse are too imposing to go unnoticed ― just as in The Dead Father,Barthelme lays bare his allusion to Freud’s metaphor by making this animization of the unconscious dark and mute ― one is justified in interpreting Bill’s fear as a sense of being threatened by the return of the repressed, that is, by an encapsulation of his identity within the depth model of subjectivity, where violence towards the real is a mode of existence.

48 Just like the ethical aspect of Snow White’s situation was not discussed in the feminist readings, the ethical dimension of Bill’s rebellion is not accounted for in Maltby’s interpretative scheme. However, Maltby’s idea that the poetics of sign-reflectiveness “redeems” the possibility of critical detachment makes it possible to move his political reading towards its ethical conclusions. If, from Maltby’s perspective, Bill’s imitation of formal, legal jargon through the invention of terms such as “schoolment” would mark political “resistance to the prevailing forms of language […] by means of a discourse which defies assimilation to linguistic norms” (46), the perspective of Levinas’s ethics expands this conclusion by accounting for the complex temporal processes of reference and performativity that partake of rebellious shattering by such words as “schoolment” (or expressions such as “dimensions of lore”) of the integrity of language norms of the Said.

49 Bill’s testimony describes the details of the process. Asked about the nature of scoutmysteries, Bill remembers three which combine into a noteworthy sequence of “mystique” - “ mistake” - “mystery,” faithfully depicting the process of signification and thus the complex process of subjective emergence in the referential collage of Barthelme’s text. Beginning with the “mystique,” especially the “mystique of rope,” reminiscent of the image of Snow White’s hair as a metaphor of creativity and interactivity, we might associate its fascinating aura of awe and power with that moment in the evolution of the subject when, as Levinas describes it, the consciousness of one’s immersion in the there is slowly consolidates itself in the mode of egoistic search for satisfaction and mastery over the surrounding reality. In Barthelme’s definition of collage, whose structural development resembles that of Levinas’s subjective coming out of the there is, the stage of the “mystique of rope” marks the beginning of the referential process. It corresponds to the moment of incorporation of elements of the extra-textual, “past” reality into the body of collage. The name of the next stage in the sequence of subjective development in Snow White could not be defined any better than as a “mistake,” and particularly a “mistake of one animal for another,” because it is synonymous with the meaning of hypostasis as a substantiation

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of the subject, as a performative substitution of one being for the Other, and as a logical error. In the narrative of Snow White,particularly in such moments as Bill’s testimony, when the realist and the absurd become one, ‘mistake’ in all of those senses constitutes the central moment in the process of subjective development.13 Not only does the name of this scoutmystery obey the hypostatic grammar, but it also successfully captures the logic of substitution, operating in those moments in the text where, as described earlier, the text questions and exposes itself passively to the otherness of the reader. Again, in Barthelme’s description of collage dynamics, this is the moment of the anxious temporal confusion in which referentiality and performativity give rise to a “new” reality. Such a becoming, an exposure, opens the subject to the “misery” of being hostage to the situation of ontological doubt, because it shatters its dream of ontological certainty. No wonder it is such a traumatizing and anxiety-ridden state. However, it is also the only vista leading to “the open air” of subjectivity.

50 Both political and ethical interpretations of Snow White view the “mystery-mistake- misery” sequence as a laying bare of the process of signification. However, whereas the political reading perceives this defamiliarization as permitting a critically detached active judgment of the sign system and its ideological implications, the ethical one interprets it as opening the possibility of the passive exposure to alterity which is the only source of a successful rebellion. After all, ethics-wise, the subject’s entry into language is not an act of self-positing by means of critical detachment but rather the act of passivity of an exposure. The words neither record nor represent or signify exposure, but rather affect it in the process of reading, so that the collage actually brings into life a new, politically dissident discursive reality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacchilega, Christina. “Cracking the Mirror Three Re-Visions of Snow White.” Boundary 2, 15.3/16.1 (Spring/Fall 1988): 1-25.

Barthelme, Donald. “After Joyce.” Not-Knowing. The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. New York: Random House, 1997; 3-10.

— Snow White [play]. The Teachings of Don B.: The Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. Intro. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1992; 299-340.

—Snow White. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

—“A Symposium on Fiction: Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Grace Paley, Walker Percy." Shenandoah 27 (Winter 1976): 3-31.

— “Interview with Jerome Klinkowitz, 1971-72.” Donald Barthelme. A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Studies in Short Fiction Series. Ed. Barbara L. Roe. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992; 98-99.

Barthelme, Helen Moore. The Genesis of The Cool Sound. (Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities, 13) College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2001.

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Berman, Jaye. “A Quote of Many Colors: Women and Masquerade in Donald Barthelme’s Postmodern Parody Novels.” Feminism, Bakhtin, and The Dialogic. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991; 123-134.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Concept, Affect, and Percept” What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. London: Verso, 1994; 163-199.

Dickstein, Morris. Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

— “Fiction at the Crossroads.” Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme. Ed. Richard F. Patteson. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992; 59-69.

Gass, William. “The Aesthetics of Trash.” The New Review of Books. (April 25, 1968): 5-6.

Gordon, Lois. Donald Barthelme. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1991.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

— “Interview with François Poirié.” Is It Righteous to Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Jill Robbins, Marcus Coelen, and Thomas Loebel. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001; 23-83.

— “There is: Existence without Existents.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán Hand. Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1989; 29-36.

Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with Donald Barthelme.” Paris Review 49.2, (1982): 186-197.

— “Interview with Donald Barthelme.” Anything Can Happen. Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983; 32-44.

— "Donald Barthelme: The Aesthetics of Trash (Snow White)." Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme. Ed. Richard F. Patteson. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992; 153-63.

— Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.

McClure, John. “Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality.” Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (Spring 1995): 141-163.

Morace, Robert. "Donald Barthelme's Snow White: The Novel, the Critics, and the Culture." Critique 26.1 (Fall 1984): 1-10.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.

— “Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme's Snow White.” Twentieth Century Literature 51.2 (Summer 2005): 123-141.

Ohmann, Richard. "Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature." Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (1971): 1-19.

— "Speech, Literature and the Space Between." New Literary History 5 (1974): 37-63.

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Patteson, Richard F. Ed. Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme. Ed. Richard F. Patteson. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992.

Roe, Barbara L. Donald Barthelme. A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Rosenberg, Harold. The Anxious Object. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Edition, 1982.

— Tradition of the New. London: Thanes & Hudson, 1962.

Trachenberg, Stanley. Understanding Donald Barthelme. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1990.

Ziegler, Heide. “Interviews with Donald Barthelme.” The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition: Interviews with English and American Novelists. Ed. Heide Ziegler and Christopher Bigsby. London: Junction Books, 1982; 39-59.

NOTES

1. Although he will later return to the collage principle in the 1976 “Symposium on Fiction” (“Symposium” 24) or the 1978 interview with Heide Ziegler, which brings into play the famous “Corbu, Mies, Neutra” architectural analogy to collage (Ziegler & Bigsby 52-53), it is in this 1971 conversation with his later bibliographer that Barthelme formulates his definition of collage with the greatest precision. 2. Barthelme’s definition of collage writing in one gesture affirms the existence of the concrete affectively charged relation between the text and the real, and locates the core of this relation in the temporal confusion of linguistic performativity in which progressive creativity overlaps and becomes identical with regressive referentiality. However, the writer’s overt affirmation of the referential as well as the affective aspect of collage was consistently ignored by his critics. Even the first apparent exception to this rule, Philip Stevick’s 1981 study of Barthelme’s technique, gradually moves away from its initial assumption that the writer’s collage method “far from being pure design” serves a “classic” mimetic function, towards the conclusion about the self- referentiality of verbal junctures (Alternative Pleasures 23-25). It was as late as in 1991 that Jerome Klinkowitz finally acknowledged both the referential power and the implications of the temporal indeterminacy of the collage structure. In his monographic study of Barthelme’s work entitled Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition, Klinkowitz historicized collage as the dominant method of Barthelme’s early fiction, by juxtaposing it with another technique of combining fragments, the silk-screening, which he nominates as the governing principle of Barthelme’s work from The Dead Father period. In his comparative description of collage and silk-screening, Klinkowitz argues that whereas silk-screening lets all elements of the composition “perform an equally valid syntactic and referential function within the same smooth phase,” collage does not disguise its fragmentary character, leading to an instantaneous disruption of the reading experience and the creation of a new reality (Donald Barthelme 8). Instead of shock, which is the first impact of the collage, the effect of silk-screening seems initially acceptable to the reader’s “censors of the ridiculous,” even though in fact it is “a clever little time bomb” that soon shatters his/her understanding of the text (ibid.). Otherwise put, if silk-screening exploits the illusion of the mimetic optics in a more deceptive but also less disturbing manner of a delayed effect, the collage targets the core of this illusion in each of its fragments so that its temporal logic becomes impossible to reconstruct. It is hard to overestimate the clarity and accuracy of Klinkowitz’s analysis, however, the valorization of collage as inferior to silk-screening seems to miss the point of this technique’s performative potential. The shock and profound disturbance of the reader,

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which results from the reception of this technique, establishes the moment of the most intimate contact between the text and the reader. 3. According to Levinas, the subject formation process involves three stages: the anxiety triggered by the recognition of the there is develops into desire and enjoyment that are symptoms of the self’s affective non-indifference, which in turn give way to the subjectivity-forming ethical affect of responsibility for the Other. 4. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2003). All subsequent references are to this edition and are shortened to EE. 5. That the project of construing Snow White’s subjectivity through the lens of Levinasian ethics might be worth the effort is suggested by the most recent piece of criticism on Barthelme’s first novel, the 2005 essay “Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme’s Snow White” by Jeffrey T. Nealon. In the essay, Nealon observes that despite their intentions, the existing readings of Snow White define the book’s radicalism as stemming from the strategy of distorted reproduction of traditional aesthetic ideas (125), whereas a truly postmodern subversiveness should come, as he repeats after Blanchot, from the performance of an aesthetic disaster (135). This performance carries the promise of opening literature to a response, i.e. the promise of actually reifying the postmodern polyphony; however, it always occurs at the cost of the literary work’s ontological coherence. According to Nealon, Snow White stops short of such an ethically fertile catastrophe; however, applying Levinas in a bit different way from Nealon I would like to argue that it indeed possible to trace in Snow White a series of radically ethical tropes. 6. “Saying” is Levinas’s term for the event of language in which the ontological certainty of this language, and thus also of the subject who is constituted bythis language, is totally shattered. Levinas opposes this dynamic, contestatory type of language use to the “Said,” i.e. to linguistic rules, norms, and conventions that create the illusion of comprehensibility in relations with Others and perpetuate the belief in the possibility of self-expression. 7. What comes to mind as an illustrative definition of the role of Barthelme’s insertions, is the atmosphere of a room buzzing with bits of street conversations coming through an open window, which by the way, according to Helen Moore Barthelme and Jerome Klinkowitz, was one of Barthelme’s favorite and most notorious research methods in his poetic strategy. In her biographical The Genesis of the Cool Sound, Barthelme recalls her husband writing his first fiction seated near the window onto a busy Houston street and fishing for conversation lines, whereas Klinkowitz in his Keeping Literary Company makes the point about the sounds and situations on the street of Greenwich Village becoming the undigested material of Barthelme’s fiction (112-120). Such an intrusion of background sounds is of the same kind as the murmuring heard from behind the wall in Levinas’s definition of the there is as insomnia. It also signifies that which cannot be disposed of and exited, that which remains, once the subject-to-be discovers that his subjectivity will not be established by the relation to being but by a momentary transgression of being and its abundance in his/her exposure to the Other. 8. Such is the focus of Paul Maltby’s reading of Snow White in Dissident Postmodernists to which I turn at the end of this article. 9. It is precisely their temporality that makes it possible to speak of fatigue and indolence as tropes. 10. If Bill is right in asserting Snow White’s attachment to the idea of authenticity, that is, to the ontological paradigm of subjectivity, then his judgment constitutes yet another reason for interpreting Snow White as a thematization of the Levinasian there is. 11. Returning to Bill’s confession about his artistic failure, let us note that its illocutionary effect of the second person pronoun differs dramatically from the effect of Barthelme’s famous questionnaire for Snow White’sreaders — containing questions such as “Do you like the story so

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far? Yes ( ) No ( )” or “Is there too much blague in the narration? ( )” ― that terminates part one of the novel (SW 82-83). Despite its interactive outlook, the questionnaire does not invite the reader’s response in the way that it is done in the case of Bill’s refusal to creatively exploit the “mystery” of language’s referentiality even if it means his public’s disappointed “weeping” (“SW” 303, SW 51). While Bill’s speech exposes the book to the readers’ creative activity, the questionnaire is a totalizing act of authorization which powerfully reinserts into Snow White the element of Barthelme’s control ― a synonym for the desire for authenticity and ontological closure — thus hindering the possibility of the reader’s responsiveness to the events of parts two and three of the novel. 12. While I repeat this biographical detail after the author of The Genesis of the Cool Sound, Barthelme’s fascination with Beckett is very well known and has been acknowledged and discussed in virtually every interview as well as in most critical essays on the postmodern character of Barthelme’s poetics. For a relatively recent and refreshing example of how the two writers can be brought together see Lance Olsen’s “Narrative Overdrive: Postmodern Fantasy, Deconstruction, and Cultural Critique in Beckett and Barthelme,” The Fantastic Other: An Interface of Perspectives. Eds. Brett Cooke, George Edgar Slusser and Jaume Marti-Olivella, (Amsterdam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi Press, 1998), 71-86. 13. Other typically hypostatic moments are, for example, Snow White’s watering the flowers to aid the “blooming” of Maoist revolution, or Hogo’s allowing his plan to cool down in the specially constructed “humidor,” and many others.

ABSTRACTS

The essay examines Donald Barthelme’s Snow White’s from the perspective of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Drawing on a reciprocity between Barthelme’s collage principle and Levinas’s notion of the there is, the paper applies the concept in the analysis of Snow White’s referential and affect construction strategies. The novel is proven to textualize the ethical dimension of Barthelme’s referential uses of language, while the figure of Snow White is demonstrated to be the trope of the referentiality-performativity conflict that lies at the core of a literary collage. The tension between referentiality and performativity is further developed in Barthelme’s novel via the figures of Bill and Paul, who, in the context of Levinas’s concepts of fatigue and indolence respectively, are interpreted as the tropological markers of the temporal mechanism of Snow White’s collage. Accordingly, Bill’s constant weariness is interpreted as a trope of referentiality, and Paul’s inertia as narrating the mechanism of language performatives. Since the suspension between the two tropes propels the text’s constant self-questioning, a process mirroring Levinas’s idea of how ethical subjectivity hypostatically emerges in language as a questioning of its ontological stability, it is argued that the mechanism of subject construction strategy in Snow White follows a similar logic.

INDEX

Keywords: affect, affectivity (ethical), collage, ethical there is, fatigue, hypostasis (ethical), indolence, performativity (temporal structure of), political, referentiality (temporal structure of), resistance, subjectivity

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AUTHORS

ZUZANNA ŁADYGA Institute of English Studies, Warsaw University

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“Invading Your Hearts and Minds”: Call of Duty® and the (Re)Writing of Militarism in U.S. Digital Games and Popular Culture

Frédérick Gagnon

1. Introduction

There’s a soldier in all of us. Call of Duty: Black Ops TV Commercial (2010) The visual and audio effects […] make the [war] experience appear real. In fact the experience is sterile. We are safe. […] It takes the experience of fear and the chaos of battle, the defeating and disturbing noise, to wake us up, to make us realize that we are not who we imagined we were, that war as displayed by the entertainment industry might, in most cases, as well be ballet. Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (2002) Dear Ron McLean. Dear Coach’s Corner, I’m writing in order for someone to explain to my niece […] the function the ritual serves in conjunction with what everybody knows is, in the end, a kid’s game.

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Propagandhi, lyrics from “Dear Coach’s Corner,” Supporting Caste (2009)

1 January 1, 2010, was a special day in Boston. The Boston Bruins were about to face the Philadelphia Flyers at Fenway Park, in the third hockey “Winter Classic,” an annual event held by the National Hockey League where two teams play an outdoor game. “It’s a perfect day for hockey in Boston,” said Hockey Hall of Famer Bobby Orr as he watched the game. “It’s a thrill to see all these pros turn into kids again. […] This day […] truly is a classic” (quoted in Shaughnessy 2010).

2 The Bruins finally won the “Winter Classic” 2-1, but the event also produced other (less noticeable) winners: those who favour a strong U.S. military and who support the wars the United States and its allies wage abroad. Indeed, like many sports events taking place in the United States, the “Winter Classic” instantly became a pretext for the glorification of the U.S. war machine. The crowd assembled at Fenway offered one of its loudest ovations when the ceremonial opening puck drop was made by a member of the U.S. military. In addition, members of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard joined music artist James Taylor in singing the National Anthem. Then “a United States Air Force B-2 Spirit flown by the 509th Bomb Wing of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and the 131st Bomb Wing of the Missouri Air National Guard soared overhead” (Morreale 2010). Most people flashed their cameras and cheered when the B-2 flew over Fenway’s Green Monster, but nobody seemed particularly surprised (or outraged) to see that hockey – or what Canadian rock band Propagandhi calls a “kid’s game” – was being used as a vehicle for militarist promotion/propaganda – right before their eyes!

3 In fact, hockey is not the only popular culture artefact that has been a vehicle for the militarization of post-9/11 everyday life. For instance, it could be argued that Hollywood war movies such as Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave (2006) and Sidney J. Furie’s The Four Horsemen (2008) have included messages condoning militarism 1 and ideas analogous to those of the George W. Bush administration (for example, the idea that Americans should give their unconditional support to U.S. troops or the argument that the United States must wage wars to fight “evil” enemies and protect democracy in the world)2. The goal of this article is to discuss how digital war games3 have played a similar role. Building bridges between the humanities approach to Game Studies 4, American Studies, International Relations and Critical Geopolitics, it starts from the assumption that digital games are more than “kid’s games” or “lowbrow irrelevant child’s play” (Souri 2007, 537); they are “sophisticated vehicles inhabiting and disseminating” specific ideologies (Leonard 2004, 2). Accordingly, it uses the example of the Call of Duty series to highlight how digital war games contain images and narratives that elicit consent for the U.S. military, militarism and the wars the U.S. and its allies wage abroad. Call of Duty is a first-person and third-person shooter series franchise that began on the PC and later expanded to consoles such as Playstation 3 and XBOX 360. Published and owned by Activision and developed by companies such as Infinity Ward and Treyarch, the majority of the games in the main series (Call of Duty, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3, Call of Duty: World at War and Call of Duty: Black Ops) have been set primarily in World War II or the Cold War, except for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which are set in modern times. While the first four games are relevant to a discussion of digital games and militarism, since they embrace an overwhelmingly positive view of the U.S. military along with a “patriotic willingness to

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support [U.S.] foreign ventures” and to portray World War II as a “good war” (Boggs and Pollard 2007, 53), this article focuses on how Call of Duty constructs images about the future of international relations, the threats the United States faces in the post-9/11 world and the role Washington should play in this context. Therefore, our references in this article will be to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

4 The methodology of the article builds on Vit Sisler’s contribution to the content analysis of digital games. Thus, we “play[ed] the whole game[s] while taking notes and screenshots of relevant visual signifiers, recording the narrative and analyzing the structure of gameplay” via qualitative description (Sisler 2008, 206). Building on Luiza Bialasiewicz et al., we hope to generate a deeper understanding of the (pre)dominant discourses about U.S. identity, Americans’ views about their soldiers, the military, and the role the United States should play in the world by identifying the “citational practices that are reiterated in [these] cultural and political sites outside the formal institutions of the state” (Bialasiewicz et al. 2007, 409). In line with this methodology, Call of Duty is studied as a discourse: we look at the characters, plot and setting of the games and see those elements as a “specific series of representations and practices through which meanings are produced, identities are constituted, […] and political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible” (ibid. 406). While the first section of the article offers a review of some of the relevant literature on digital war games and U.S. militarism, the second part turns to the content analysis of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Specifically, this analysis focuses on three themes to highlight the ways in which Call of Duty (re)writes U.S. militarism and illustrates that these games (1) resonate with and reinforce a tabloid imaginary of post-9/11 geopolitics; (2) glorify military power and elicit consent for the idea that state violence and wars are inevitable; and (3) encourage our myopia by depicting a sanitized vision of war and by downplaying the negative consequences of state violence.

2. The Politics of Militarism in Digital Games

5 Since 9/11, an increasing number of authors have studied the links between U.S. militarism and digital games. For example, in a book called Joystick Soldiers, Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne have assembled various contributions on the history of the links between militarism and military-themed games, the representation of war in video games, the use of video games for training military personnel, the effects of military-themed games on those who play them, and the acts of anti-war resistance that can be performed in and through war games (Huntemann and Payne 2010). Particularly relevant to our discussion is David Nieborg’s contribution, which investigates how America’s Army, a series of video games developed by the U.S. Army, is used for the dissemination of “state-produced propaganda as a part of a wider U.S. strategic communication campaign” (Nieborg 2010, 54). Nieborg explains that, with its narrative justifying U.S. military interventions abroad and propagating the U.S. army ethos, America’s Army can be seen as a “powerful vessel for disseminating U.S. Army ideology and foreign policy to a global game culture” (ibid. 63).

6 Other authors have used the case of America’s Army to make similar arguments about the links between militarism and digital games. For instance, David Leonard explains that the games in this series “exist as virtual advertisements for the present and future glory of the U.S. Armed Forces” (Leonard 2004, 5); Marcus Power shows how the series

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“puts a hospitable face on the military, manufacturing consent and complicity among consumers for military programmes, missions and weapons” (Power 2007, 278); Roger Stahl notes that the game has been one of “the most successful experiments in recruiting history” (Stahl 2006, 123); Johan Höglund argues that it portrays the Middle East as “a frontier zone where a perpetual war between U.S. interests and Islamic terrorism is enacted” (Höglund 2008); Alexander Galloway describes it as “a bold and brutal reinforcement of current American society and its positive moral perspective on military intervention” (Galloway 2004); and Ian Bogost argues that it “supports a moral code that corresponds with the U.S. Army’s focus on duty and honor” (Bogost 2007).

7 Those who study America’s Army (or other war games such as Kuma\War, The Medal of Honour or Full Spectrum Warrior) often rely on James Der Derian’s concept of the “military–industrial–media–entertainment network” (MIME-NET) to highlight the relationship between the U.S. military and government and the videogame industry. According to Der Derian, this relationship has reached symbiotic proportions: U.S. Marines have trained on Doom, a landmark 1993 first-person shooter game; “military war games and computer video games blend” (Der Derian 2001, xi); and members of the U.S. military are consulted on the production of digital games. Jean Baudrillard’s and Paul Virilio’s contributions are also popular among scholars who study the links between digital games and war.5 For Baudrillard, postmodernity means a blending of reality and representation (Baudrillard 1994); for Virilio, major powers such as the United States have developed powerful tools for aiming militaristic propaganda at the civilian population. In Virilio’s words, “The central electronic-warfare administration — such as the so-called ‘3Ci’ (control, command, communication, intelligence) in place in each major power — can now attend in real time to the images and data of a planetary conflict […], tak[ing] charge of all tactical and strategic representations of warfare for the soldier, the tank or aircraft pilot [and the civilian population]” (Virilio 2000, 1-2). Ian Bogost’s concept of “procedural rhetoric” can also be of great interest for scholars who study how digital games contribute to the militarization of everyday life (Bogost 2007). Bogost defines it as the “practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively.” (Ibid., 28) Using multiple examples such as the 1982 digital game Tax Avoiders, in which the player’s goal is to become a millionaire by accumulating income and avoiding taxes, Bogost shows how digital games are programmed in specific ways that “force the player to make decisions with social and political implications” (Ibid., 45).

8 The fact that Call of Duty was not directly developed by the U.S. Army probably explains why it has received less attention from scholars than games like America’s Army6. Yet the desire of the designers of the game to recreate realistic troops, scenarios, tactics and weapons is crucial to our discussion. As Matthew Thompson explains, digital contemporary war games have become more and more “realistic” and “authentic” (Thompson 2008, 23). Since most gamers know that the digital game industry is now capable of producing games that make one “feel” (almost) like a “real” soldier, the realism and authenticity of digital war games have become vital to their economic success. Call of Duty project leader Jason West seems particularly aware of this when he notes the following in an interview about Call of Duty 4: “My favourite vehicle in Call of Duty 4 […] is the AC-130 Spectre Gunship because, I mean, when you see those web videos, it looks just like that. I mean, you are in the Gunship… you know… using the cannons… annihilating anything in your path” (West 2007). Furthermore, when asked

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how the developers ensured that Call of Duty 4 would be authentic, West’s answer shows the relevance of Der Derian’s argument about the “blending” of U.S. military personnel and digital game programmers. Indeed, West noted that the creators of Call of Duty have “talked to soldiers that have come back from war,” discussed with “military advisors,” “went to military bases,” and “stood there while they fired tanks.” To use West’s words, the goal of those who made Call of Duty was to “put those things into the game” and to “put the player there” (ibid.). Of course, these quotes do not prove beyond doubt that West and his team had the deliberate intention of disseminating militarist propaganda. However, our point is that their fascination with the U.S. military and arsenal, combined with their willingness to emulate “real” environments and characters, prompted them to produce a series that contributes to the (re)writing of militarism and the U.S. war machine.

9 Our definition of the “(re)writing” concept comes from the disciplines of American Studies and International Relations: it builds on David Campbell’s and Lene Hansen’s contributions and is based on the assumption that the accepted way of speaking about an event, an object and identities is “not fixed by nature, given by God” (Campbell 1998, 9) but, instead, is “constructed through discourse” (Hansen 2006, 6). In other words, “there are no objective identities [or definitions of the objects that surround us] located in some extra-discursive realm” (ibid.); individuals of a given society help to ascribe particular meanings to words like “soldiers,” “threat” and “war.”

10 That being said, in a diverse society like the United States, there are many concurrent interpretations of these words. In line with this argument, the U.S. society can be seen as a “marketplace of ideas” (Abelson 2006) where concurrent social and political actors compete to ascribe particular meanings to identities, objects and events. To exemplify this, Frank Costigliola reminds us that an event such as the bombing of a factory can be described in many ways. For example, one reporter could say that the “missile struck the target in a clean hit,” while another could say that “the ceiling of the factory burst open, and most of the people working there burned to death in the ensuing blaze” (Costigliola 2004, 279). According to Michel Foucault, power struggles in a given society and the power to assign meaning to such events are inextricable. In Discipline and Punish, he writes that “truth” is not outside power and that powerful individuals within a society are often able to impose their discourse as the accepted way of interpreting or speaking about an event or an object (Foucault 1975, 36). Foucault sees discourses as unquestioned beliefs, practices, and rules that restrict how people think and act.7 David Campbell adds to the theory, claiming that a good way for individuals to contribute to the emergence of a (pre)dominant discourse is to repeat this discourse constantly so it becomes perceived as conventional wisdom/common sense by the majority. Following Judith Butler’s analysis of gender and identity (Butler 1990), Campbell argues that identities and meanings are “instituted” through a “stylized repetition of acts” and a “regulated process of repetition” (Campbell 1998, 9-10).

11 Drawing on such theoretical considerations, we argue that the creators of Call of Duty are directly involved in the stylized process of repetition described by Butler and Campbell. Indeed, Call of Duty constantly echoes ideas similar to those of various foreign policy hawks who have supported George W. Bush’s response to the terrorist attacks of New York and Washington, thereby (re)producing a mindset that has often pervaded the U.S. national security debate since 9/11. For instance, it invites gamers and Americans to conceive war and the preparation of war as the chief instruments of

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foreign policy and it feeds what some call an “addiction to war” (Andreas 2004) by “cherishing” and “fetishizing” the “ethos of armed power” (Boggs and Pollard 2007, 13). Moreover, the fact that Call of Duty is one of the most popular war games is not without significance here: it shows that the messages embedded in the series have reached millions of people. Many analysts believe that the digital game industry may eclipse Hollywood for dominance in the entertainment sector within five or ten years (Newsweek, date unknown), and the commercial success of Call of Duty suggests that their prediction might come true. For instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 grossed $310 million within 24 hours of going on sale in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, making it the biggest money maker in entertainment history, ahead of other games such as Grand Theft Auto 4 and movies such as Warner Brothers’ The Dark Knight (which grossed $158.3 million in its first three days and is one of the greatest opening box office successes in movie history) and James Cameron’s Avatar (which netted $352,000,000 in its first 17 days in the U.S.) (Johnson 2009 and Gray 2010). Thus, the programmers of Call of Duty have become important actors in the “marketplace of ideas” about U.S. soldiers and the war of terror. In the sections below, many examples highlight how the series (re)writes the ideology of militarism.

3. The (Re)Writing of Militarism in Call of Duty

3.1. A Tabloid Imaginary of Post-9/11 Geopolitics

We’ve got a civil war in Russia […] and 15,000 nukes at stake Gaz, British Special Air Service Veteran in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare What the hell are we gonna do now, man? Russians got us outnumbered, shit’s falling from the sky. We’re screwed, man! We’re totally... Corporal Dunn, United States Army Ranger in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

12 The first theme of U.S. militarism (re)written by Call of Duty is the idea that the U.S. faces ruthless and evil enemies in the post-9/11 world, enemies it must absolutely destroy to protect itself and the American people. Extending François Debrix’s analysis and building a bridge between Critical Geopolitics and Game Studies, our argument here is that Call of Duty feeds Americans’ “fears, anxieties, and insecurities” by promoting a “tabloid imaginary” of post-9/11 geopolitics (Debrix 2008, 5). Building on John Agnew’s work, Debrix defines geopolitics as the “study of the geographical representations, rhetoric and practices that underpin world politics” (Agnew 2003, 5 quoted in Debrix 2008, 9). He also argues that our leaders, intellectuals, thinkers — but also the popular culture products we consume (for example, the Reader’s Digest) — provide us with “ready-made explanations,” “cartographical depictions” and “systems” of “visualizing the world we live in” (ibid. 9-12). In particular, Debrix uses the concept of “tabloid geopolitics” to describe the system of visualizing the world that has pervaded the post-9/11 national security debate. In Debrix’s words, the discourse of tabloid geopolitics seeks to generate some meanings and truths in (inter)national politics by sensationalizing and spectacularizing world politics at all

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costs. Often recognizable because of the language and imagery of fear, danger, and destruction that they typically mobilize, geopolitical “issues and problems” introduced by tabloid geopolitical agents (media networks or intellectuals and academics or statecraft) are depicted in such a fashion that it now appears to the public that these so-called geopolitical problems can only be solved by means of military violence. (Ibid. 14-15)

13 This “discourse of tabloid geopolitics” is overtly present in the Call of Duty series. In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (MW), U.S. and British forces face Imran Zakhaev, a Russian Ultranationalist who is determined to bring his country back to the Soviet era.8 Zakhaev, who harbours strong feelings of hatred toward Western countries, argues that the Russian government has “prostituted” his homeland to the U.S. and its allies.9 To topple the Russian government, he orchestrates a political crisis that leads to a civil war in Russia. His goal is clear: to take power of Russia and gain access to the entire Russian nuclear weapons arsenal, which includes 15,000 nuclear warheads. Zakhaev knows that the U.S. will take vigorous measures to thwart him, so he funds a coup in some unnamed Arab country, organized by his ally Khaled Al-Asad, to draw public attention to the Middle East instead of Russia. Khaled Al-Asad, who is a military commander in this Arab country, leads what he calls a “noble crusade” against his government, which “has been colluding with the West.”10

14 When Al-Asad takes control of his homeland, the U.S. Marine Corps invades the country, a move to which Al-Asad responds by detonating a Russian-made nuclear bomb that kills large numbers of Marines. The U.S. and British governments soon discover that Russian Ultranationalist Zakhaev’s plan was to divert the attention of both countries from the Russian civil war, and they decide to dispatch troops from the Special Air Service and United States Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance to kill Zakhaev and his son. In response, Zakhaev threatens to launch ICBMs against eight U.S. cities: Baltimore, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., Richmond and Norfolk. We soon learn that such an attack could kill over 41 million U.S. citizens.11

15 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) revolves around a similar “discourse of tabloid geopolitics.” This time, however, the game depicts an even scarier world than the one pictured in MW. MW2 is set five years after the conclusion of MW. In this game, Zakhaev’s Ultranationalists (the same as in MW) have seized control of Russia, and the Russian people have made Zakhaev, who was killed by the West in MW, a hero and martyr.12 MW2 revolves around a new threat: Vladimir Makarov, one of Zakhaev’s former allies, who begins a reign of terror against the U.S. and its allies by staging terrorist attacks such as the bombing of a Swedish furniture store in St. Petersburg and of the offices of a U.S. oil company in Baku, Azerbaijan. The game begins in Afghanistan, where U.S. Army Ranger Private Allen takes part in an operation to retake an Afghan city from local militia13, but we soon learn that Private Allen must join the CIA to lead a secret operation as an undercover agent inside Makarov’s organization in Russia. Thus, in the fourth campaign mission of the game, called “No Russian”, the gamer impersonates undercover CIA agent Allen (alias Alexei Borodin), working alongside Makarov and taking part in a gruesome terrorist attack at Zakhaev International Airport in Moscow. The goal here is to open fire on civilians at the airport (though the player can abstain and let Makarov and his three colleagues do all the damage). At the end of the level, Makarov finally kills Allen after finding out that he is a CIA agent. Makarov is then able to convince the Russian people that the terrorist attack

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was carried out by military-trained American terrorists, a situation that leads to a surprise Russian invasion of America.

16 The following scenes probably are the most significant examples of the ways in which Call of Duty (re)writes post-9/11 fears, anxieties and insecurities. Indeed, in the “Wolverines!” campaign level, the player impersonates Private James Ramirez, a member of the U.S. Army Rangers, who must help his team to repel Russian attacks on U.S. soil. Taking advantage of a malfunction in NORAD’s early-warning systems, the Russian military sneaks in via the East Coast undetected and launches attacks in major U.S. cities.14 Specifically, “Wolverines!” takes place in an almost destroyed city in the state of Virginia. As the player proceeds through the level, she can see the effects war would have on an average American suburb. Houses and cars are on fire, enemy tanks roll on the streets, the sky is filled with thick clouds of black smoke, U.S. soldiers are panic-stricken, and dozens of gunshots and explosions can be heard simultaneously. Later in the game, MW2 invites players to imagine the impact war would have on a city such as Washington, D.C. In a campaign level called “On their Own Accord,” the Russians have stormed most of the buildings around the National Mall and ruined the Washington Monument and other objects of national pride. Here again, destruction, fire, smoke, gunshots and explosions give the city an apocalyptic look.

17 As one can see from such plots, MW and MW2 clearly disseminate and reinforce a discourse/narrative that was constantly promoted by the Bush administration and other foreign policy hawks after 9/11. This vision has been studied extensively, and there is no need to remind the reader how often Bush and his advisors told Americans that the post-9/11 world was a dangerous place. For example, in countless speeches that could have been directly inspired by a game like Call of Duty (or a Tom Clancy book), Bush and his team stressed that there were “thousands of terrorists” in the world who would not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. and kill millions of innocent civilians (Jackson 2005). Other U.S. national security intellectuals15 gave credence to such arguments, warning Americans that 9/11 was only the tip of the iceberg and that the worst was still to come. For instance, in a 2005 article titled “Ten Years After,” Richard A. Clarke “imagined the future history of the war on terror” and predicted a second wave of Al-Qaeda attacks on America, with suicide bombings in Las Vegas, Florida, California, Texas and New Jersey (Clarke 2005).

18 Just as Clarke does, Call of Duty (re)activates post-9/11 fears when it reminds Americans that Arab terrorists such as Khaled Al-Asad could acquire nuclear weapons from “rogue states” and use them against U.S. interests in the Middle East or elsewhere. In the same way as other war games such as America’s Army, it portrays Arabs as “savages” and “uncivilized warriors,” thereby “providing ideological sanction for America’s War on Terror” and military intervention in the Middle East (Leonard 2004, 5). Equally interesting is the fact that Call of Duty echoes not only Bush’s discourse of tabloid geopolitics but also Ronald Reagan’s vision of the Cold War. Indeed, MW and MW2 invite gamers/Americans to see Russia as a “terrorist sponsor” and a “hotbed of terrorism,” and, more importantly, as a state willing to relaunch the nuclear arms race with the U.S., regain its superpower status, and become an “Evil Empire” again. When playing Call of Duty, Americans are thus encouraged to see Russia in the same way George Kennan saw it when he wrote his famous Long Telegram in 1946 —as a “rival” with whom there is no “possibility of a permanent happy coexistence” (Kennan 1947). Therefore, the games “encourage divisiveness” (Sisler 2008, 204) and reinforce

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stereotypes about other cultures by suggesting that Russians are cold-blooded individuals who can not be deterred from trying to destroy the West and engaging in acts of mass destruction. In this sense, Call of Duty’s discourse of tabloid geopolitics is also consistent with the vision of International Relations theorists such as “offensive realist” John Mearsheimer, who argues that international politics is a ruthless and dangerous business driven by “revisionist” great powers willing to shift the current balance of power in their favour (Mearsheimer 2001, 2).

3.2. Glorifying Military Power and Disseminating the Myth that State Violence and Wars are Inevitable

19 In addition to promoting a storyline that “could be pulled from today’s headlines” (Mastrapa 2009) or from one of Mearsheimer’s books, Call of Duty also promotes militarism because it glorifies military power and disseminates the myth that state violence and the wars waged by the U.S. abroad are unavoidable. Specifically, it conveys a clear message about the role the U.S. should play in the world: just like former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it invites gamers/Americans to believe that “the best defense and in some case the only defense” against national security threats is a “good offense” (quoted in Flounders 2002). Consider the following excerpt from a speech given by U.S. Army Lieutenant General Shepherd in MW2: “Learning to use the tools of modern warfare is the difference between the prospering of your people, and utter destruction.”16 In other words, Call of Duty invites gamers/Americans to believe that a nation like the United States must either develop a strong military or fade away. This idea has been promoted by many U.S. national security intellectuals since 9/11, especially neoconservative thinkers like Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz and other members of neoconservative think-tanks such as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).17 Indeed, Kagan and others have stressed the “need to increase defense spending” (PNAC 2007), arguing that there is “no substitute for hard military power” (Kagan 2010).

20 In MW2, Lieutenant General Shepherd even goes a step further in echoing the neoconservative vision when he argues: “We [the U.S.] are the most powerful military force in the history of man. Every fight is our fight, because what happens over here matters over there. We don’t get to sit one out.”18 With such a discourse, Call of Duty’s message is clear: it (re)writes the thesis of the American Manifest Destiny — the belief that the U.S. is a “sacred space providentially selected” to embark on a “mission” to promote and defend democracy and American values throughout the world (Stephanson 1995). In the same line of argument, it also suggests that the U.S. has the duty and the “overarching rights” (Paterson and Dalby 2006, 19) to go anywhere and to take part in any war in order to protect its hegemony. Here again, Shepherd’s speech echoes neoconservative arguments: just like Donald Kagan, it “fetishizes the imperial perspective” (Sisler 2008, 210) and tries to convince players that they should be proud of the fact that the U.S. has “forces deployed in every theatre” (Kagan 2010).

21 Through the multiple campaign levels the gamer must complete in order to beat MW and MW2, at least three other aspects of the games reveal how they invite players to “love the bomb” and to see state/military violence as an “inevitable”, “mandatory” and “normal” — if not “banal” — step in resolving conflicts. First, the characters of Call of Duty never consider the possibility of relying on diplomacy to settle disputes with Arab

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military leader Khaled Al-Asad or Russian Ultranationalists Imran Zakhaev and Vladimir Makarov. On the contrary, in the vision of world politics on which MW and MW2 are based, prospects for peace are dismissed as unrealistic. We are told that the true role of the state is to kill those who threaten U.S. and British national security. Here, Ian Bogost’s concept of “procedural rhetoric” (described above) is relevant to explain how the rules of Call of Duty are used to put the player in contact with the ideology of militarism. Given the linear gameplay of MW and MW2, the player is never allowed to adopt a different course of action than the one imposed by the creators and the fixed sequence of challenges they imagined. For instance, contrary to “non-linear”, “open world” or “sandbox” games such as Fallout 3, Fable 2 or Red Dead Redemption, which allow players to choose between different paths to glory and to make moral choices between good and evil actions (Schulzke 2009), MW and MW2 imprison the player in a web of restrictive rules that only allow her to follow the path that was drawn by the programmers. As a result, the player is never given a chance to negotiate with U.S. enemies; instead, she is invited to participate in “shock and awe-like” military interventions, counterinsurgency operations reminiscent of the real U.S. wars in countries like Afghanistan, or secret operations and assassination missions. As Matthew Thomson notes, in a digital war game like Call of Duty, “the player must learn and internalize [the] rules of warfare and therefore learn how to win according to the logic” of war (Thomson 2008, 46). In this respect, Call of Duty gives players/Americans the opportunity to “be there” alongside computerized versions of U.S. soldiers and to annihilate “virtual copies” of the U.S.’s “real” enemies in the world (Ouellette 2008). Admittedly, MW and MW2 can probably serve as a release mechanism for those who had to endure the vicious attacks of 9/11.19 However, the fact remains that the games not only encourage maniacal revenge against other international actors but also oblige players to conform to a violent vision of the warrior ethos and to (virtually) perform the (often) brutal and gruesome acts concomitant with such a vision. For instance, in the Call of Duty environment, the player is soon told one basic fact about war: shooting enemies in the head is preferable to shooting them in the arms, legs or body, since it is more lethal. In the multiplayer modes of MW and MW2, players even earn more points for “headshots.” They can then use the points to unlock new weapons and equipment (grenades, flashbangs, gun silencers, etc.), which, according to the game’s logic, is the surest way to become a better and more efficient and effective warrior.

22 A second aspect showing how Call of Duty glorifies military power concerns the military equipment that the player can use in MW and MW2. As Scott Lukas writes, an important feature of the contemporary digital game is that “it is, often above all, about guns” (Lukas 2010, 76). The Call of Duty series is no exception to the rule: it gives the player the opportunity to arm herself with most weapons U.S. soldiers can use in “real” contemporary wars. Among the most popular weapons in the games are the following: the Colt M4A1 carbine, an assault rifle tracing its lineage back to the M16; the Winchester Model 1200 Defender, a pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun; the Raytheon and Lockheed Martin FGM-Javelin anti-armor system; and the Cheytac LLC Intervention M-200 sniper rifle. Here again, the goal of the creators of Call of Duty was to depict these weapons in the most “realistic” and “authentic” fashion, a situation that illustrates the relevance of aforementioned arguments made by Jean Baudrillard about the blending of reality and representation in the time of postmodernity. Thus, the programmers of MW and MW2 depict weapons in detail and with great exactitude: for example, shooting the Intervention M-200 “feels” different from shooting the Colt M4A1, and some

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weapons are more accurate and/or more lethal than others. When asked about what their interaction with digital games weapons constitute, many players say that using the weapons is a “strategic decision” and a “means of achieving missions” (Lukas 2010, 87). Accordingly and in line with Ian Bogost’s concept of “procedural rhetoric”, Call of Duty encourages players to identify the best military tools out there, to develop an attachment to certain guns and to make these guns their “weapons of choice.” Often, the weapons used in MW and MW2 are the very same weapons the Pentagon and defense companies such as Lockheed Martin praise in their lobbying effort to convince elected officials in Washington to invest more money in arms development and production20. In the multiplayer modes of MW and MW2, players are rewarded new (and often deadlier) weapons, weapon attachments and/or bonus equipment as they advance and reach new levels. Here, the player’s performance is measured with points, which are earned most and foremost by killing opponents. In MW, players can even unlock golden- skinned versions of the guns used in the game. These guns are not more powerful than their “normal” versions, but they are meant to look “sexier” to the player. The fact that they actually do look like jewels invites players to see them as an ultimate reward and as precious objects in the game. In short, Call of Duty trivializes violence and invites players to cherish and fetishize weapons by applying a simple equation: killing people = unlocking deadlier/“sexier” weapons = killing more people.

23 The third aspect highlighting how MW and MW2 glorify military power and the use of force is the fact that both games show famous pro-military quotes each time your character dies. The quotes are from leading intellectuals, philosophers, military officials or former leaders. They include Albert Einstein’s “So long as there are men, there will be wars,” which stresses the dark side of human nature and the inevitability of international conflict, General John J. Pershing’s “The deadliest weapon in the world is a Marine and his rifle!,” and Condoleezza Rice’s “We’re in a world in which the possibility of terrorism, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry that we didn’t act.” Of course, many other quotes, such as George Washington’s “My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth,” clearly have an anti-war or anti-militarist bias. That being said, such quotes are given only limited discursive space and importance in MW and MW2, since the game plots revolve around ideas that contradict most arguments made by peace advocates.

3.3. A Sanitized Vision of war

24 Besides Call of Duty’s tendency to glorify the use of military force, the last major tenet of the ideology of militarism that we observed in MW and MW2 is the fact that the programmers of the games decided to refrain from showing the “real” consequences of armed conflict. To be sure, MW and MW2 are violent games replete with scenes reminding players that war is hell and that armed conflict often means violently taking the lives of other human beings. However, as Roger Stahl points out, games like Call of Duty never tell the entire truth about war: “[W]hen humans are hit with gunfire, they crumple noiselessly to the ground. Sometimes a mist of blood escapes an invisible wound, but the victims neither flail nor cry.” (Stahl 2006, 124). In other words, MW and MW2 never show you dismembered bodies, “little girls with smashed up faces” (ibid. 126), people with their skin burned or corpses lying on the ground, soaked in blood or massed together. You can kill someone using a grenade or a knife, but you never see

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graphic details of the “real” effects of an explosion on a human body or of a throat slit by a blade.

25 Thus Call of Duty’s narrative gives credence to the arguments of those who praise the “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). This revolution, it is often claimed, inaugurates a new form of warfare, one that is precise, clinical and clean (Metz and Kievit 1995; Rumsfeld 2002). Consistent with the RMA vision is Call of Duty’s tendency to keep silent about “collateral damage,” or the adverse effects of war on civilian populations. To be sure, some campaign levels in MW and MW2 remind you not to shoot civilians. But the truth is that most cities and locations in the games are depicted without inhabitants and the U.S. and British war effort is shown not to hurt civilians21. In fact, at least one level in MW2 provides graphic details of the effects of war on civilians. In this level, called “No Russian,” you are required to shoot at civilians deliberately. As mentioned earlier, this is a part of the story where you play a CIA agent taking part in a terrorist attack at Zakhaev International Airport in Moscow alongside Russian Ultranationalist Vladimir Makarov, who is your enemy in the game. One game critic recounts his experience playing the level: As part of a group of four men with guns, you walk toward a security line full of civilians at a Russian airport. And then you kill them. I’ll admit it — I pulled the trigger. The game had instructed me to follow the lead of my fellow terrorists, and I had been told that preserving my undercover status was important for the country […] As the travelers screamed and fled from the indiscriminate slaughter, I strolled through the airport. I didn’t fire my weapon anymore, but I watched the three Russian terrorists kill. One of the men shot a passenger as he crawled along the blood-streaked floor and pleaded for his life. And then I started shooting again. I thought that a guard was going to kill me, so I went after him first. The bullets hit his corpse — he was shot first by one of the other men — and it shuddered on the ground […] The rules of play were clear: If you want to go forward, if you want to keep playing, you have to kill these [individuals]. Do something awful with me, the game asked. And I did. (Suellentrop 2009)

26 As one can see from the critic’s account, MW2 sometimes invites players to think about the dark side of war and to make moral choices between good and evil paths (shooting innocent civilians or not). That being said, the fact that the only scenes showing the slaughter of civilians are those in which Russians lead the way — instead of American or British soldiers — can also be seen as an attempt to emphasize the idea that only “our enemies” are capable of initiating such unjust and gruesome actions. For this reason, Call of Duty seems to tell players that crimes against humanity and acts of mass murder do happen in war but are most often performed by “them,” not “us.” As David Campbell explains, such binary oppositions have often been present in discourses about U.S. foreign policy (Campbell 1998). Relying on examples such as the National Security Council document number sixty-eight of 1950 (NSC-68), which is widely seen as having established the rationale for U.S. policy of containment of the Soviet Union after World War II, Campbell shows how interpretations of danger and national security threats have played a crucial role in the attempts of U.S. leaders to fix the contours of U.S. national identity. For instance, in addition to observing that U.S. foreign policy texts are often replete with references to the threatening, barbaric, sick, evil or dictatorial nature of “others” like Saddam Hussein or the USSR, Campbell shows that the very same texts have been used to describe the pacific, civilized and democratic U.S. society. In other words, U.S. leaders or national security intellectuals have relied on these texts to construct a moral hierarchy between “us” (the United States) and “them” (the Soviet

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Union). This is exactly what the programmers of Call of Duty try to do when they depict (bad) Russians as “sadistic individuals who kill civilians” and (good) Americans as “compassionate individuals who spare the lives of civilians.”

27 In addition to depicting U.S. foreign adventures as benign, Call of Duty downplays the effects of war on the boys. No matter which character you embody in MW or MW2, U.S. soldiers are depicted in the same way Hollywood often depicts them in war movies, i.e., as invincible individuals “embarked upon life-and-death situations” (Boggs and Pollard 2007, 69) or, in other words, as men with Rambo-like strengths who can heal themselves from practically any wound22. For instance, it is often easy for your enemy to shoot at you, but it is equally easy for you to hide behind a wall and automatically regain energy. In a similar vein, MW and MW2 never show the graphic reality of the death of your character, nor do they suggest that war has any psychological effect on the boys23. War is shown as being safe, as having little consequence for the individuals who wage it, and as being “high-tech, fun, and hip” (Halter 2006, xvii).

4. Conclusion

28 The goal of this article was to show how a digital game such as Call of Duty can become “an artefact that legitimizes modern militaries as a natural part of social and personal life” (Flusty et al. 2008, 626). We have shown how MW and MW2 echoe and (re)write ideas reflecting the militarist ideology that has often been (pre)dominant in the post-9/11 U.S. national security debate. In particular, Call of Duty resonates with and reinforces a tabloid imaginary of post-9/11 geopolitics when it tells players that “we” are constantly on the brink of war with international actors such as Arab terrorists and Russia, who will not hesitate to invade “our” countries and attack “us” with nuclear weapons. In keeping with such a catastrophic and pessimistic vision of world politics, the idea that the U.S. and its allies have to maintain a strong military is constantly (re)inscribed in MW and MW2, the plots of which are based on an “all-pervasive rhetoric of warfare” (Leonard 2004, 6) that glorifies the U.S. war machine, downplays the monstrosities of war and encourage our myopia by depicting a sanitized vision of armed conflict.

29 Granted, it would be going too far to argue that those who play Call of Duty will automatically embrace militarism and the values embedded in the games. Though the 1999 Columbine High School massacre has led many academics, media, parents and government officials to argue that digital game use among children has “deleterious consequences, ranging from aggressiveness and violence” (Souri 2007, 542), video game experts such as Joe Bryce and Jason Rutter show that the research trying to prove that digital games are a catalyst for violence is “inconclusive and often contradictory” (Bryce and Rutter 2006, 218). Matthew Thomson agrees with Bryce and Rutter when he writes, “any suggestion that computer games influence public understandings of warfare must concede that the process of audience reception is far more complex than the passive acceptance of meaning that the ‘hypodermic needle’ model of media effects once suggested, and that the interaction between game and player involves processes of encoding and decoding, as well as resistance and rejection” (Thomson 2008, 20-21).

30 In her study of the meanings players create about their engagement with war digital games, Nina B. Huntemann gathered data in multiple focus group and participant observation sessions with a sample size of 26 male players ranging from 18 to 36 years

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of age and observed the following: “The players I interviewed retained their skepticism about current military actions, questioning the motives, strategies, purported goals, and likely success of U.S. foreign policy and military intervention” (Huntemann 2010, 232). Having discussed the potential effect of games on understandings and perceptions of warfare with dozens of MW and MW2 players, we also observed that there are probably as many players who are seduced by the vision of the military portrayed in Call of Duty as there are players who are repulsed by it. For instance, one player from the Middle East confided that he loves the game even though he rejects militarism, U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and state violence in general. Thus, as the literature on audience reception of digital games and interviews with players show, Call of Duty will not necessarily make you want to join the military or support the wars waged by you country.

31 That being said, we have showed in this article that MW and MW2 certainly has – at least – the potential to make you “love the bomb” and embrace militarism. This is why we think David Leonard is right to argue that educators, scholars and — most importantly — players must “think about ways to use video games as means to teach, destabilize, and elucidate the manner in which games employ and deploy racial, gendered, and national meaning, often reinforcing dominant ideas and the status quo” (Leonard 2004, 1). In other words, playing Call of Duty primarily because it is fun — and millions of players can confirm it is! — is probably not wrong in itself. But playing it for the sake of “making the familiar strange,” and “disrupting the taking for granted that blinkers our thinking and reading” (Costigliola 2004, 280) should be encouraged. Indeed, it can help us to critically analyse the moral implications of the (hyper)militarization of our everyday lives, denounce the trivialization of (state) violence, and raise the hard questions that might prompt our leaders to make the world safer for peace, international reciprocity, and social and international justice.

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NOTES

1. Our definition of “militarism” follows Cynthia Enloe’s analysis. Enloe (2000) defines it as an ideology that frames military force as a necessary resolver of conflict. This definition is consistent with Albert T. Lauterbach’s analysis. According to Lauterbach (1944), “militarism” is an “attitude toward public affairs which conceives war and the preparation of war as the chief instruments of foreign policy.” 2. On Hollywood war movies and the war in Iraq, see Gagnon 2009. 3. As Marcus Power (2007) and Aphra Kerr (2006) point out, the term “digital games” is preferable to “video games” since it refers to the entire field and embraces arcade, computer, console and mobile games in all their diversity. 4. The goal of this approach is to understand the meanings constructed through games. See Zagal 2008, 21-22. Thus, in the debate over how digital games should be studied, or the so-called debate between “narratologists” and “ludologists”, we tend to prefer the former approach and think that one can rely on theories from existing disciplines (International Relations, American Studies, Film Studies, etc.) to treat digital games as “stories”, “representation”, “texts” or “discourses” disseminating specific values, ideologies and myths. That being said, we do not totally reject the “ludologist” perspective, developed by scholars who argue that “game analysis should focus on the structural features of gameplay – the rules and goals – along with its unique features – interactivity, simulation, configuration, and the manipulable elements of games” (Thomson 2007). As will be argued below, some rules of Call of Duty greatly contribute to the (re)writing of militarism (for instance, the rule that invites players to perform “headshots” when killing opponents, since it rewards more points than a shot to the body, arms or legs). However, it is a fact that this article focuses more on the narrative of Call of Duty than on its structural features of gameplay. For more information on the “Narratology vs. Ludology debate”, read Bogost 2006; Juul 2001; and Simons 2007. Narratologists include Murray 1997 while scholars such as Juul 2001 and Aarseth 2004 have promoted “Ludology.” 5. Leonard 2004 and Li 2004 are good examples of this.

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6. Grant Tavinor (2009) and Matthew Thomas Payne (2010) provided some of the rare analyses of MW. However, they do not address the case of MW2. Joel Penney (2010) also focused on Call of Duty. However, he studies the installments in the series that are set in World War II. 7. This is Frank Costigliola’s interpretation of Foucault’s definition of a discourse. See Costigliola 2004, 289. 8. For more information about the plot of MW, see a website called “Call of Duty: No One Edits Alone” at http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Call_of_Duty_4:_Modern_Warfare 9. See Zakhaev’s speech during the cutscene before the “Ultimatum” campaign level in MW. 10. See Khaled Al-Asad’s speech during the “The Coup” campaign level in MW. 11. Play the “All in” campaign level in MW. 12. For more information about the plot of MW2, see a website called “Call of Duty: No One Edits Alone” at http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_2 13. Play the “Team Player” campaign level in MW2. 14. For more information about the plot of the “Wolverines!” campaign level, play it or see a website called “Call of Duty: No One Edits Alone” at http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/ Wolverines! 15. Our definition of “U.S. national security intellectuals” is similar to David Grondin’s concept of “national security governmental regime.” He defines the regime as “all agents of the U.S. government and of the private sector (particularly think-tanks and unofficial advisers) who participate, to a certain extent, in the national security debate and who, incidentally, influence the ways Americans think about national security, threats and the role the U.S. should play in the world” (Grondin 2010, 93, note 1). 16. Play the “Team Player” campaign level in MW2 to hear the speech. 17. To learn more about the neoconservative ideology, read Kristol 2004; Marshall 2003; Kagan 1998; Kristol and Kagan 2004. For an introduction to neoconservatism, read Gagnon and Mascotto 2010. 18. Play the “Team Player” campaign level in MW2 to hear the speech. 19. As Marcus Power (2007) writes, “[Digital war games] offer the possibility of getting back control, of overcoming fear […] [Y]ou can pretend you have some sense of agency, some control, or at the very least some part in trying to make the world a better place.” 20. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Lockheed Martin’s total lobbying expenditures accounted for more than $15 million dollars in 2008 and almost $14 million dollars in 2009. For more information, see this website : www.opensecrets.org 21. Vit Sisler observes that this aspect of MW and MW2 is common in many western war games. 22. David Leonard (2004, 5) makes a similar observation about the depiction of U.S. soldiers in the game Conflict : Desert Storm. 23. For similar arguments, read Power 2007 and Stahl 2006.

ABSTRACTS

The goal of this article is to discuss how digital war games such as the Call of Duty series elicit consent for the U.S. military, militarism and the wars waged by the U.S. and its allies abroad. Building bridges between the humanities approach to Game Studies, American Studies, International Relations and Critical Geopolitics, we start from the assumption that digital games

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are more than “kid’s games”; they are sophisticated vehicles inhabiting and disseminating specific ideologies (Leonard 2004). Accordingly, our goal is to conduct a content analysis (Sisler 2008) of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to show how these games contain images and narratives that (1) resonate with and reinforce a tabloid imaginary of post-9/11 geopolitics (Debrix 2008); (2) glorify military power and elicit consent for the idea that state violence and wars are inevitable; and (3) encourage our myopia by depicting a sanitized vision of war and downplaying the negative consequences of state violence (Stahl 2006). The conclusion invites players to think about ways to criticize the way games like Call of Duty employ and deploy values that (re)write the militarist mindset that has often pervaded the post-9/11 U.S. national security debate.

AUTHOR

FRÉDÉRICK GAGNON Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Québec at Montreal, and Director of the Center for United States Studies of the Raoul Dandurand Chair

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(Post)utopian Vineland: Ideological Conflicts in the 1960s and the 1980s

Lovorka Gruic Grmusa

1 Any attempt at comprehending a particular text from a historical perspective must look far beyond the specifically esthetic parameters of a text and consider social, political, historical and economic factors that condition both the writer and his work. The point of departure for this textual analysis is the study of poetics that involves transgression between society, writer, text, and critic. This reading strategy envisions the text as an integral part of the historical context in which it first appeared and as it interacts today with a multiplicity of readers.

2 Thomas Pynchon, arguably America’s most important living novelist, started publishing his work during the period of the Vietnam War. Under the influence of the antiwar movement and the counterculture, and the dramatic social struggle and ideological conflicts in the 1960s, early 1970s, and more conservative 1980s, he attacks the military, the state, and other forces of domination. A very fashionable topic of socio-historical and cultural research, the American sixties were widely interpreted in the late eighties and early nineties, revealing a backlash against Reagan’s and Bush’s conservative presidencies.

3 Pynchon’s Vineland is the novel that mirrors the sixties and eighties in the U.S. and is therefore particularly suitable for the analyses of historical phenomena, with various social and political issues, ideological clashes, anti-war struggles, and the rise of counterculture, when drugs functioned as a literal opiate of the masses. Although it focuses on the sixties, it brings controversial aspects of U.S. history and culture into view, beginning with the execution of Joe Hill in 1915, to the labor conflicts in the 1930s, the blacklist period in the 1950s, the hippie movement in the sixties, to the Reaganomic politics of the eighties, “pictured as a chronicle of violent class struggle and ruthless governmental repression” (Dickson 140). Thus, this article offers a comprehensive perspective on ideological conflicts in the sixties and eighties, as presented in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. It locates and follows the various trajectories of events and developments that the book invites the reader to pursue,

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presenting them against the background of important political events that eventually led to the escalation of right-wing violence, paranoia and even nostalgia for the 1960s.

4 Vineland very title draws attention to its historical background. “Vinland” was the name used by Vikings for the American soil which they came upon about four hundred years before Columbus discovered it, the land which was afterwards named after another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci (Dickson 139). These triple “discoveries” of America indicate various beginnings of a nation, pointing out that in time a land can be discovered over and over again, and multiplying its beginnings. The novel’s title also implies the place of wine and abundance, an American dream of innocence and of Western utopian endeavor. The novel depicts both historical and individual attempts to construct alternative ideologies through art, love, and the labor movement, seeking to replace Christianity and mechanistic science. The narrative reveals the inherent instabilities of these transcendent new ideologies, rendering their collapse, and proving that utopia in postmodern society is already/also post-utopia.

5 The novel demonstrates how the hippie movement had a lot of potential but was destroyed from within, as is so often the case — people destroy their own causes. Or as Samuel Chase Coale notes: they are “destroyed by government agents, government snitches, and co-opted flower children who betray their own kind” (164). It also depicts the eighties as a much calmer, seemingly less active period that concentrated on family values and bonding, which turned out an excellent protection against political authoritarianism and made people more resistant to cooptation. The eighties gave the impression of being more effective (in the long run) than the sixties, which sort of “burnt out” quickly. As in his masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, the author here illustrates how historiography has been co-opted by power interests to make unethical behavior acceptable, and how all-powerful processes of history intimidate people into accepting them as inevitable phenomena, presenting “repression as normal,” so that vast power structures control their lives “confronted with the brutal fact that the State no longer needs to disguise its hostility” (Madsen 126; 128). Pynchon demystifies the origins of authoritarianism, demonstrating that modern technocracy and its subsidiaries are just constructs which can be dismantled the same way they were built (like weapons of mass destruction).

6 Pynchon does not pack Vineland with innumerable references to history, nor does he impregnate the text with philosophy, science, social theory or art, as he does in the minutest detail in Gravity’s Rainbow. Mostly relying on the atmosphere of the sixties and eighties, eroding the boundary between fact and fiction, the text and its readers, and using abbreviated and diminished, flattened language (words such as: “rilly” or “s’matta?”), the author denies the readers the expected comfort of aesthetic distance that enables them to control the text. It brings them within Vineland. In the place of sophisticated conceit are countless references to the quotidian. The contemporary world of television, cars, computers, and music abounds in the novel, often with the names and dates of the shows, people, songs, and places that are commonplace in this world, such as the Eagles song “Take it to the Limit” or the 1983-84 NBA playoffs.

7 Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, where the 1960s appear only as prolepsis and displacement, in Vineland they appear analeptically, as a series of reminiscences. The emphasis on discontinuity, entropy, and virtuality clearly indicates an exploration of discrepancies, turbulences and ideological battles of postwar social life. But Vineland is not from the 1960s but about them:

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It thematizes the mediated nature of the 1960s by filtering it through stories and anecdotes told by its middle-aged ‘veterans’ to teenage interlocutors, and indeed it (literally) appropriates their narrative reconstructions, takes over their nostalgic voices, and becomes another veteran of the time. (Mattessich 221)

8 The major historical and (post)utopian moments in Vineland occur in the sixties, but are examined through the contemporary frame of the eighties. The geographical location is the U.S.A., which is central to the historical, cultural and technological effects of the story. More precisely, the story takes place mostly in California. As Judith Chambers acknowledges: “It is not surprising that Pynchon chooses California, the state where strange is the norm … the new America” (Chambers 190). Pynchon depicts northern California as magical: “crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region” (314), “Vineland the Good” (322), “beautiful country” with “mass migration of freaks … from L.A. north is spilling over into Vineland” (305). While further south, “as the fog now began to lift to reveal not the borderlands of the eternal after all, but only quotidian California again” (94), the author delineates “movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world” (267). California is postmodern America.

9 The mythical Vineland is depicted as a place where utopian and post-utopian clash, where just like the Vikings might have felt viewing America’s shore, early Spanish and Russian emigrants (Sasha’s Old Leftist Families) had a sense of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past the capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees—carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have known about but did not share. (317)

10 This land appears as a safe harbor, a sanctuary through the centuries for those who have traveled a long way, and also as a hiding place of “another intention,” a retreat from society (in contemporary society—from consumerism): secretive “territories of the spirit” (317). With their arrival, each new “species,” “tribe,” or generation pushes aside the old, crossing the “invisible boundary,” and implementing their own ideologies, which gives this space utopian and post-utopian characteristics at the same time. The primeval utopia that “woge, creatures like humans but smaller” (186) inhabited was ‘invaded’ when the Indians came, so that before the influx, the woge withdrew. Some went away physically, forever, eastward, over the mountains, or nestled all together in giant redwood boats, singing unison chants of dispossession and exile … Other woge who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better times. (186)

11 Yurok and Tolowa Indians were “exiled” when Spanish and Russian settlers arrived, and “virtually erased from memory” (Harris 204). Each generation wrote a new and changed history of the old. Hippies thought that woge went “beneath the ocean” to see “how humans did with the world,” and if humans did something “bad … would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us” (187).

12 Apart from these mythical accounts of the novel—the safe heavenly harbor that Vinland presented for the Scandinavians after crossing the Atlantic, and for each new group that arrived—it is important to evaluate the historical circumstances which serve as a background this fictive world is cradled in.

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13 In Vineland, the initial uprising of the hippy movement at the College of the Surf in California mirrors the reality of this time of change and pervasive belief in the power of action, when, it was held, governments could provide the conditions for economic growth and protect the vulnerable. Groups and individuals, it was believed, could act to fulfill their own dreams and to pursue their talents. The spirit of activism helped to distance the era of the 1960s from the apparent placidity of the Eisenhower era.

14 For many, Dwight David Eisenhower, elected to the White House in 1952 and re-elected in 1956, had become the personification of a benign father figure who, it seemed, had persisted but not led. His management was sometimes criticized although the economy (with occasional slowdowns) was good. By the turn of the decade, a thirst for action was beginning to manifest itself. The sixties were inventive, turbulent, spirited, and identified with action and motion. People wanted some sense of control over their destinies, just like Frenesi, one of the main characters in Vineland, felt she had had before Prairie was born. Here again an old American trait was asserting itself; people were seeking empowerment and the desire to be masters of their own fate.

15 President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was youthful and projected an image of vigor, but his administration has sometimes been accused of raising expectations that could not be fulfilled. The liberal Democrats that peopled the administration for the greater part of the 1960s had no wish to generate a pervasive bureaucracy, but believed that government could make a difference. The average age of his cabinet (forty-seven) was ten years younger than that of Eisenhower. What attracted many Americans to Kennedy was his identification with service rather than business, his non-ideological commitment to the public domain, and his charm that dispelled any notion that his interests were purely self-serving.

16 The prosperity of the 1960s made possible the “War on Poverty,” the mission to the moon and the arms race, the expansion of higher education, and the war in Vietnam, as it also perversely encouraged the outbreak of rioting by the poor in the cities. Universities rather than factories were at the cutting edge of this new frontier. The proportion of industrial workers was declining, while the number of white-collar workers was rising fast, and the suburbs were growing in influence.

17 After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson committed himself to deliver the promises his predecessor outlined. He believed in victory over poverty and racism at home and in defeating communism abroad. But by the middle of the decade his optimism was straining credibility. Ghetto riots and the Vietnam quagmire were to prove fatal to the politics of hope. The war was devouring resources, and its escalation during 1965 strained Johnson’s relationships with many reform allies. An anti-war sentiment was mounting. The optimism of the early 1960s was replaced by darker emotions, starting with the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, then the murder in 1965 of Malcolm X (the African American radical), followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. As black violence flared, women, Native Americans, homosexuals, students, and others marched to demand their rights. Vietnam in particular became the focus of massive dissent. The demonstrations of various sorts escalated in the second half of the 1960s. Turbulences continued until the end of the decade with the crime rate rising.

18 With these historical facts in mind it is easier or more appropriate to interpret the sixties that Pynchon’s protagonists inhabited—“preterite” characters dealing with their own desires for order and their complicities in power, human weaknesses, and

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ideologies. David Dickson notes that: “The heritage of Frenesi’s family is portrayed as a continuity of engagement in American class struggles throughout the twentieth century” (164-165). The stories of Frenesi’s parents, Sasha and Hubbell Gates, both activists in the McCarthy years, offer some of the history of that era. As Frenesi acknowledges: her parents liked to proceed backward, into events of the past, in particular the fifties, the anticommunist terror in Hollywood then, the conspiracy of silence up to the present day. Friends of Hub’s had sold out friends of Sasha’s, and vice versa, and both personally had suffered at the hands of the same son of a bitch more than once. (81)

19 Pynchon is here referring to the late 1940s and early 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy began his witch hunt, producing blacklists and claiming to have the names of 205 Communist Party members who held high positions in the State Department. The leading anticommunist figure, McCarthy, inflicted fear among civilians. Pynchon uses fictive characters to depict those times.

20 In order to encompass a period span from the fifties to eighties with insight into the historical background and ideological striving of each decade, the novel is best examined with a certain chronology. Although Vineland is postmodern and highly non- linear, this analysis demands re-ordering events in a certain sequence which will, for this purpose, be following characters through their revolutionary decades.

21 Raised in the family of authentic radicals, the daughter of Eula Becker and Jess Traverse, Sasha is a courageous woman who recognizes and fights the power conglomerates that have claimed her husband and daughter. She criticizes the patriarchal system that induces repression and explains that the real world consequences of this system occur too often without correction: The injustices she had seen in the streets and fields, so many, too many times gone unanswered—she began to see them more directly, not as world history of anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and petty, one by one against other living humans. Maybe we all had to submit to History, she figured, maybe not—but refusing to take shit from some named and specified source—well, it might be a different story. (80)

22 While her thoughts articulate the necessary caution that must be prescribed against the “named and specified source” of oppression, she is aware that no one is free of contagion, specifically if looking at her own family. Identifying a “source” of injustice will not be as easy as it may once have been. In the celluloid, post-WWII world to which Sasha refers, the forces of evil are so subtle, seductive, and widespread that they are harder to isolate and name. Still, as Peter Brigg notes: “Vineland’s central subject is the ongoing persecution by Right Wing America (the FBI, the Presidencies and their links with the Mafia, the zaibatsus, and corporate America) of dopers, musicians, and radicals” (96), which explains ideological clashes.

23 Sasha plays the role of a blacklist Hollywood script reader during the McCarthyist 1950s, and she “has a history of union activism in Hollywood, in the unions that Ronald Reagan, as president of the Screen Actors’ Guild, helped to suppress” (Madsen 131). Therefore, she “understands the simulacral modality of order in a postwar dispensation” (Mattessich 223), and how laden with contradiction it is: To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a

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continuation of the picture business as it had always been carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them come out looking better and others worse. “History in this town,” Sasha muttered, “is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and it comes about in the same way—as soon as there’s one version of a story, suddenly it’s anybody’s pigeon … By now the Hollywood fifties is this way-over-length, multitude-of-hands rewrite—except there is no sound, of course, nobody talks. It’s a silent movie.” (81)

24 The narrator here identifies Hollywood’s social power of “rewriting” and simulating history, and thus occupying the political field. Ideologically saturated, cinematography influences the reality of contemporary space-time, but it also projects the real: “a reminder of the infectious patriotism that can be drummed up by a good witch hunt” (Thoreen 222). Sasha, a longtime political activist, acknowledges the movies were “silent,” for a silent generation of students populated the nation's campuses, while their professors shrank from teaching anything that might be construed as controversial. It seems that everybody turned mute. As it showed later, it was only a silence before the “tornado” of the sixties started, metaphorically presented as Frenesi watches the storm, the Event. Just when she thought they were nestled safe in the center of America—here were sounds in the air they couldn’t have imagined, roars too deep … With no warning, everything would pulse hugely with light. (215)

25 Sasha’s husband Hub Gates once fought the system alongside his wife—they were the revolutionaries of the New (or Old) Left. But now he is one of the many who lack this ability to maintain a relentless resistance to power. It is Sasha who identifies his flaw: he “never had a political cell in his system,” and was more often lost in “the usual sailor-on-liberty thoughts” (80). He betrayed his friends by joining a government- sponsored trade union during the Red Scare in Hollywood, and he abandoned his family. Hub himself admits his decline: “I let the world slip away … sold off my only real fortune—my precious anger—for a lot of god-damn shadows” (291).

26 Sasha’s daughter, Frenesi, is raised on movies and subdued to repeated distortions of history in her “real” life. She is the sixties revolutionary turned snitch, that crystallizes as a victim, both genetically and socially, perfectly encoded to collaborate with the oppressor. But Pynchon does not absolve her of responsibility. She views the world through the screen and the camera, either watching movies, or shooting documentaries during confrontations in the sixties. Distanced from the real (which is why she is not afraid of getting hurt during the assault on the College of the Surf), she is removed to celluloid detachment: as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. If the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. (237)

27 Achieving distance, she is “safe,” her deeds apparently inconsequential. At one point she perceives Weed, her lover, just as “a character in the movie … but even sex was mediated for her now—she did not enter in” (237).

28 As a student at Berkeley, Frenesi’s inability to overcome a desire for “make-believe” instigates her political activities, as well as her betrayal of fellow activists at the College of the Surf. She evokes for the novel a more general dynamic of counterculture: evasion and refusal of “history.” Frenesi’s “make believe—her dangerous vice—that she was on

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her own, with no legal history, no politics, only an average California chick, invisible” (236), demonstrates that politics is for her also an escape from politics. Her escape with Brock Vond (who manipulates her into causing the death of Weed Atman) in turn delivers her to the political structures of social control (Vond, knowing her complicity in the murder, uses the information to keep her working for the FBI). Here Pynchon narrates Frenesi’s confusion, with the “evil” forces slowly subsuming her in the FBI plots and alienating her from her friend DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) and her mother.

29 Frenesi’s slow metamorphosis from activist to snitch, catalyzed by a sexual attraction for Brock Vond, becomes more and more impossible for her to repress. She is a passive medium through which Brock destroys the hippy movement and damages Weed. He soon influences even her filming, “he was not only seeing the outtakes, but also making suggestions about what to shoot to begin with” (209). This is made explicit in the scene right after they “made love,” with Brock saying: “You’re the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that’s all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places” (214). Even when she is out of his reach, Brock gets to her “mentally,” intruding upon her mind. For example, after Prairie was born, she conjures him up as if invoking a deity: “With his own private horrors further unfolded into an ideology of the mortal and uncontinued self, Brock came to visit, and strangely to comfort, in the half-lit hallways of the night” (286-87).

30 Zoyd, Frenesi’s first husband and Prairie’s father, lives on an income of social security for feigning insanity. His world is that of drug fantasies and obsession with Frenesi, which does not make him very responsible: a hippie, pot-smoking, small time rock and roll playing, long haired freak of the 60s … Zoyd is part of a government funded program designed to keep the memory of the 60s alive as a memory of insanity, and the opening scene of the novel is a comic conflation of representations of the 60s in the age of Reagan: A hippie wearing a dress, wielding a chain saw, performing a self-and property-destroying act which is broadcast live on television. (Berger 3)

31 His unrestrained fancy is visible through his views of the world: “the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time” when, he assured himself: “the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and death, all must have been off on some other planet” (38). He refuses to come to terms with reality until he is emotionally forced to grapple with fatherhood. During an illness, Prairie, age four, looks at Zoyd with “dull, hot eyes, snot crusted on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked,” and she asks: “Dad? Am I ever gonna get bett-or?” (321) Just then Zoyd “had his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth” (321). It marks the end of his “abstract” existence. He is initiated to the material world. All becomes inept when faced with the flesh and blood reality of his daughter: “no time for these hardened criminal drug dealers I used to hang out with, I’m totally reformed” (303).

32 Frenesi and Zoyd are perfect examples of how the hippy generation lived and thought: experimenting sexually, cherishing an interest in eastern mysticism, spreading love, using marijuana and psychedelic drugs, which makes Vineland: “a lysergic-acid [LSD] Icelandic saga” (Leonard 67), and thinking utopian thoughts of how they were completely “liberated.” As Pynchon nicely positions Frenesi’s thoughts: “She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible” (287). Just like Frenesi and Zoyd, the counter-culture cultivated

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specific attitudes of conduct and artistic expressions (such as long hair, rock music, drug use) that gradually spread through America and the world: millions of young people “seeking a nonmaterialistic, peace-loving society in which they could be their natural and individual selves” (Rielly 87). In 1967 thousands of young people poured into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the “Summer of Love.” The area was soon known as “Hashbury,” populated by mostly younger Americans. Attending rock concerts and other happenings of their interest, the “flower children” tried to create alternative lifestyles that were experimental and communal. The hippies thought they were the instigators of the new revolution (which in a way they were), assaulting conventional bourgeois values and rejecting the older generation’s form of behavior and puritan codes. Many respectable Americans thought of them as abusers of American culture and the American political order.

33 It is not surprising that after experimenting with communal living, free love, and alternate types of spirituality, Frenesi perceives her newborn child as: “Looking to control her … robbing her of milk and sleep, acknowledging her only as a host” (286). Prairie was “painfully” real (as Zoyd realized too). She was not one of the films Frenesi was watching or making, the baby was there and needed nourishment. Feeling as if “[n]ow Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all” (287); Frenesi escapes again.

34 Her shattered psyche and confusion surface once more when she rejoices during “the Nixon Repression,” declaring: “finally—here’s my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution,” when she was free “to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to- be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them” (71-72). She is simply nauseated with any responsibility, including the hippy movement that demands dedication. Frenesi is “at home” populating “no longer the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless perimeter” (293).

35 DL, Frenesi’s best friend, is the character Pynchon sets as a foil against the idealistic Frenesi. She is a “lived solid woman … tall and fair … athletic, even warriorlike” (99), aware that “her body belonged to herself” (128). DL is a sharp contrast to Frenesi’s lack of self-control and her dreams “of a mysterious people’s oneness” (117). She grapples with her failings more realistically than Frenesi and Zoyd do, and deals with problems as if they were material and therefore solves them, while Zoyd mostly fantasizes and Frenesi is too irresponsible, surrendering “to a life scripted by government institutions” (Ostrander 131).

36 Vineland also marks counterculture’s escape from technocratic society. Popular with hippies and other members of the counterculture during the 1960s were so called “soft drugs.” The proliferation of marijuana among students increased. Pynchon describes: Like loaves and fishes, the hand-rolled cigarettes soon began to multiply, curls of smoke to become visible, all from the same bag of what drug-agency reports were to call ‘extremely potent’ Vietnamese buds, perhaps, it was later suggested, brought in by somebody’s brother in the service, since it sure wasn’t surfer product. (206)

37 Alluding to Jesus Christ and how he fed his followers, the author presents the hippy movement as a pseudo-religious ideology.

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38 But the post-utopian avatar is lurking in this movement at all times. The characters in Vineland struggle against a “fragmentary world of ideological collapse” (Ostrander 129). The hippies’ project and similar systems of resistance fail easily destabilized and appropriated by the institutions of control: “the Nixon Repression and the Reagan era undermining and eviscerating” hippies’ utopian ideologies, and dismantling them from within “by specific deals and particular betrayals” (Coale 164;166). Weed’s death signals the collapse of the movement at the College of the Surf.

39 The oppressors, as always, are presented as opponents of common folk—exploiters of people’s energies. In the wake of the Vietnam-era, America is overrun with “forces attempting to betray, co-opt, and use that energy: the film and television industries that drug viewers with mass fantasies (much like the movies in Gravity’s Rainbow) … the government agencies that seize marijuana and attempt to control every other innocent pleasure” (Strehle 235). The Nixonian Reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people’s miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal become routine, government procedures for it so simple and greased that no one, Frenesi was finding out, no matter how honorable their lives so far, could be considered safely above it, wherever “above” was supposed to be, with money from the CIA, FBI, and others circulating everywhere, leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. (239)

40 In Frenesi’s opinion, President Nixon ended the “people’s miracle,” establishing his political success largely by appealing to those primarily older Americans who longed for a return to the way things had been, even as the world was irrevocably changing. This quote also demonstrates how confused Frenesi is, now accusing Nixon of separating “an army of loving friends,” while previously asserting that Nixon for her and Flash brought the “golden age” (71).

41 Most of the evil and oppression in the novel is depicted as inflicted by the U.S. government: “it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians and then lie about it” (248). Whether it is “the infamous federal-state Campaign Against Marijuana Production,” or the “Political Re-Education Program, or PREP” (268), the Drug Enforcement Agency branch of the justice department —“invaders and oppressors” (49)—is being held responsible and behind it all; which is understandable since the novel deals mostly with the hippy generation. As Deborah Madsen notes: “Postmodern America is a world dominated by the enemy within. Federal agencies, which ostensibly protect, issue instead a sinister threat to those who question the power of the State” (Madsen 128).

42 DEA agent Brock Vond is the main villain in Vineland, who organizes the persecution of radicals in the late sixties and of drug addicts in the eighties. Brock saw all around him in those days … people his age surrendering to dangerous gusts of amusement, even deciding never to return to regular jobs and lives. Colleagues grew their hair long and ran off with adolescents of the same sex to work on psychedelic-mushroom ranches of faraway coasts. (278-79)

43 Indeed, students, artists, radical intellectuals and others dropped out of mainstream society and joined the hippy movement. This was a time of “a utopian moment in which America’s rebellious sons and daughters strove for authenticity and sought to perfect the world with moral and political ideals that envisioned an almost apocalyptic change” (Moser 39).

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44 During his morning inspection of the “PREP” (268), Brock examines the faces of the sixties radicals, concluding they were “children longing for discipline,” “the sort of mild herd creatures who belonged, who’d feel, let’s face it, much more comfortable, behind fences” (269). He hopes he could reform them so they can take their restorative function within society, just like “the people themselves” did, he thought, with “Nixon’s election in ’68” (273). Brock exerts a sadistic control over most characters in the novel, running a military operation designed to rid the nation of drugs and determined to destroy each season’s marijuana crop, controlling Frenesi and intervening with the life of Zoyd and Prairie. There are stronger forces behind him, and repeated references to the Nixon and Reagan presidencies who manipulate the agency, but he does stand as the main tool of oppression in Vineland. Still, we have to look behind the scenes of the novel and into the history because that was the reality in which Pynchon lived and wrote.

45 The main political figure in the late sixties until the mid-seventies was Richard Nixon, who had a long political career in Washington, starting in 1952 as Eisenhower’s vice president and serving two terms. In 1960 he lost as the Republican presidential candidate (Kennedy won), and finally in 1968 was elected the President of the United States and reelected in 1972. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, in 1974, Nixon resigned. Various historical analyses say that his victory in 1968 owed more to disenchantment with the Johnson administration than it did to his own personal appeal. Nixon’s decision to pin his hopes on the “silent white,” the law-abiding taxpayers who had not been shouting, rioting and demonstrating, turned out to be productive. He was not only against the Johnson administration but positioned himself against the various protest movements of the New Left, appealing to the “forgotten, orderly Americans.” His credo was that white workers need not have been racist to wonder just what the society was offering them, and to question why their tax dollars should go to ghetto rioters and disorderly students. His victory, it has been said, “was a victory for ‘the unyoung, the unblack, and the unpoor’” (Heale 101). He encouraged conservative impulses, turning his back on the sixties. When massive anti-war demonstrations were organized, due to the extension of the war into Cambodia, federal troops were called in and some demonstrators were killed. His campaigns against black radicals and rebellious students touched the sentiments of the “silent majority” (recalling “loud minority” and the “good folks” from Gravity’s Rainbow (755), the outstanding, hardworking citizens versus the harmonica players). The political and cultural conservatism of the Nixon administration was to ease the way for the rise of the New Right, which peaked when Reagan was elected. The Watergate issue unraveled fatally from 1972 to 1974, bringing down the Nixon presidency.

46 Most of the historians agree that with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, “the United States took a major shift rightwards for the first time since 1920s” (Gosse 8). Even during Nixon’s presidency, which paved the way for the ascendance of conservative Republicans, liberal government steadily expanded because of continuous pressure from grassroots social movements and the inclinations of those in power raised on the premises of the New Deal. Reagan, a charismatic orator, promised to restore America as a dominant world power, promoted moral order based explicitly on the heterosexual, patriarchal family, and swore to limit the federal government’s role as a re-distributor of wealth and regulator of business. Indeed, he did lower taxes and regulations upon the wealthiest in America, so that the rich got richer, but “the working classes and poor

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got a lot poorer” (Gosse 13). Reagan allegedly once said a hippie was someone who “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah” (Cannon 148). This is how it is depicted in Vineland: “it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it—dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world” (265). David Thoreen acknowledges: “Pynchon’s focus on the threat to those freedoms that escalated during the Reagan presidency is a natural extension of his interest in (and dramatization of) imperialism (V.) and the concentration of power (Gravity’s Rainbow)” (218). No wonder the old hippies were dissatisfied, having lost their dreams but not gaining anything in return, getting both poorer and being forgotten: “a romantic lost tribe with a failed cause, likely to remain unfound in earthly form but perhaps available the way Jesus was to those who ‘found’ him” (207-208).

47 Unlike her parents, who were unable to cope with reality and the change in the eighties, Prairie turned out quite good, considering that her mother abandoned her when she was still a baby, and as the narrator states, she lived with “a dope fiend father” (57), “vile-minded” (60), absorbed in his sexual fantasies in front of the TV. Although inheriting some traits from her parents, for example, a fascination with the transcendent, Prairie is also rooted in the real. When watching the replay of the assault of government troops on the College of the Surf, Prairie shouts: “She could get herself killed,” (248) because her mother held the camera, shooting the film, and never pulling back. Unlike Frenesi, who cannot sustain the illusion of hovering above reality, Prairie is realistic, aware of the danger Frenesi was in during the assault.

48 The fleeting reality, the history that Prairie tries to make sense of, is “located” within the multilayered spheres of the old and the new, from labor conflicts in the thirties to Reagan’s politics of the eighties. In an overlap of history, media, oral narration and technology, Prairie learns of the inexperienced, the forever gone space-time of the sixties in America. Her quest for her mother is revealed largely through photographs, computer data, historical documents, DL’s narration and especially through cinematography. To recapture the mother she never knew and the lost world of the sixties that was her mother’s milieu, she must rely on various media: first, that of a computer (on which she reviews her mother’s file, including photographs), and second, film, though belonging as she does to a TV-oriented generation, she would have preferred a videotape. Her quest succeeds and her knowledge expands. The effects of history on her family, once illuminated, become somehow united with the public history—therefore more meaningful—blending the pastoral myth of union with history.

49 As the 1960s background is replaced by a 1980s setting, the hippy ideology is largely displaced by a cult of technology, its most blatant manifestation being obsessive television viewing. The power of TV is demonstrated as deadening people who have given up action and movement and who remain passive, staying at home, substituting television for experience. The most extreme example of its twenty-four hour public is the Thanatoid community of “living dead,” who spend most of their time in front of the “Tube.” Their world is described “colder than you ever want to find out about” (31), their population “growing steeply” ever “since the end of the war in Vietnam” (320).

50 But the eighties are also presented as the time of family values and in tune with the politics, which is symbolically depicted at the reunion in Vineland. Even Frenesi, who has not been there since high school, is manipulated into coming by Brock Vond, and she takes her second husband and son along. Everyone gathers at the annual Becker- Traverse family reunion. Brock arrives at night by helicopter, a military-style raid, to

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kidnap Prairie, who would give him renewed control over all the others. Prairie rejects him, breaking the magic spell he has had over her mother. Then he is pulled up: Suddenly, some white male far away must have wakened from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over. The message had just been relayed by radio … Reagan had officially ended the “exercise” known as Rex 84 … Brock, his authorizations withdrawn, now being winched back up, protesting all the way. (376)

51 The plot, in a way, follows real space-time reality with its allusions to authentic historical events. Here Pynchon draws attention to a military exercise known as the Readiness Exercise 1984, or Rex 84.

52 In April 1984, President Reagan signed Presidential Directive 54, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to conduct a simulation of a “state of domestic national emergency” as a result of a U.S. military operation in Central America (Helms 60). The first reports about Rex 84 appeared in the Miami Herald on July 5, 1987. According to the Herald, the plan the Rex 84 group produced called for the detention of up to 400,000 undocumented immigrants in internment centers at military bases around the country. These would eventually become known as the “Rex 84 camps.” If necessary, U.S. military forces, including the National Guard, would be deployed for domestic law enforcement, and state and local military commanders could assume control of state and local governments if so directed by the president. Rex 84 also included plans for suspension of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution (which was probably the worst part) for the duration of the national emergency (Thoreen 219). Jeff Baker underlines Vineland’s portrayal of a Reagan-era fascism not only accepted but embraced by an overwhelming majority of Americans, the lamentable failure of America to live up to its promise as a new beginning that might have been untainted by the “death structures” of trade and politics. (176)

53 In Vineland, Brock dies by accident, rushing back in a stolen helicopter. The “oppressed” are free from the “oppressors” for a while. His death opens up a new territory for the dope-smoking, irreverent, creative, humble, and hope-filled preterite. As Pynchon ironically states, the hippy movement with its pseudo-religious ideology was long gone, yet the dream remained, together with “a romantic lost tribe with a failed cause” (207). Though the eighties were much different than the sixties, the people had un unbroken community and a vigorous vitality which made their alliances maybe even stronger than in the sixties, and it seems there were less snitches with communism fading away.

54 The faith in divine justice lies at the heart of the union of Eula and Jess, and the annual return to celebrate their community, reuniting the “tribe” just like the “Yurok and Tolowa people,” who inhabited these “territories of the spirit” (317) before them, and “woge” (186), the not quite human, before the first humans arrived. Taking place every year, the Becker-Traverse reunion gives hope: Thanatoids awake and make eye-contact, Prairie meets her mother, and the communards are bonding, playing cards, and discussing politics. In the mythical town of Vineland, Prairie’s quest is finally over. Her mother is finally forced into the world of the physical and the imperfect: “a woman about forty, who had been a girl in a movie, and behind its cameras and lights, heavier than Prairie expected, sun damage in her face here and there, hair much shorter” (367).

55 During the reunion various stories are heard:

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Other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began, some shouted, some accompanied by spirit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia—Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again, beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath. (371-72)

56 The “secret” that “nobody wanted to turn over” might be guilt of the whole generation, maybe connected to the already mentioned “reality” of each new group pushing aside, “dispossessing and exiling” the previous tribe. But it may also “hide” everybody’s individual culpability, “which must be uncovered and faced if we are to go forward doing the world’s work, redeeming those slivers of truth that provide hope rather than despair” (Chambers 200).

57 The novel gives hope with its ending. Prairie, just like her name suggests (a treeless grassy plain), seeks an open space to sleep in and gets to “a small clearing … enjoying the solitude” (375), “the small meadow shimmered in the starlight” (384). Although one of her first “teachers” was television, a medium she prefers to use—intoxicating her to a degree—her open mind and ability to learn leave an optimistic tone with the reader. Feeling at home both at plastic malls, the kingdom of artificiality and in nature, the perfect habitat of her ancestors, she is capable of dealing with the reality of her space- time. Rejecting self-indulgence and the naiveté of her parents, and refuting the heritage of their hippie indoctrination, she has realized she must “earn what you eat, secure what you shit, been doin’ it for years” (109). With courage and intelligence, she refuses fake ingenuousness and irresponsibility that the hippy movement prescribed, opting to work for a living, aware that nostalgia would not feed her. But this does not mean she gave up her connection to nature and her spiritual self: “with fog still in the hollows, deer and cows grazing together in the meadow,” she awakes “to a warm and persistent tongue all over her face” (385). Prairie’s dog Desmond, who escaped when Vond’s forces occupied the house, finds her and wakes her up, “smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home” (385). Prairie is home too (unlike her parents), she is ready to face the world she lives in.

58 Vineland territory and Vineland, the novel, are both utopian and post-utopian at the same time, which is why they represent the sixties so well. It is a crossroads which generation after generation of humans and non-humans (woge) have inhabited, with layers of history that overlap, intersect, and accumulate. Among the cracks of these historical insurgencies lie the ideological battles: those between non-humans and humans, Indians and the whites, the Left and the McCarthyists, hippies and the Nixon administration, and various marginal groups—largely mementoes of the hippy generation and the Reaganite politics (Velcic 123). Vineland/Vineland is a mythical place where the historical and ideological clashes of the sixties (and the eighties) in the U.S. are represented.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ABSTRACTS

This paper delineates a revolutionary period in postmodern America: the sixties from the vantage point of the eighties as presented in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. It brings controversial aspects of U.S. history and culture into view: the blacklist period in the 1950s, the rise of counterculture and the hippie movement, and the politics of the eighties. With their arrival, each new generation pushes aside the old and implements their own ideologies, which gives this space (Vineland and the U.S. in general) utopian and post-utopian characteristics at the same time. It is a crossroads which generation after generation has inhabited, with layers of history that overlap, underlying the ideological battles between woge and humans, Indians and the whites, the Left and the Right, hippies and the Nixon administration, various marginal groups (mostly reminders of the hippy generation) and the Reaganite politics.

INDEX

Keywords: eighties, history, ideology, post-utopia, sixties, utopia, Vineland

AUTHORS

LOVORKA GRUIC GRMUSA University of Rijeka, Croatia

European journal of American studies, 5-3 | 2010