JERUSALEM ENGINE by Danny Jacobs BA (Hon.) in English, Saint Mary's University, 2006 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In the Graduate Academic Unit of English Supervisor: Mark Anthony Jarman, MFA English Examining Board: Tony Tremblay, PhD English David Creelman, PhD English Tony Myatt, PhD Economics This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK April, 2008 © Danny Jacobs, 2008 Library and Archives Bibliothgque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l'6dition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-63695-4 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-63695-4 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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M Canada To Riverview 11 ABSTRACT The nine stories in Jerusalem Engine investigate a Maritime present that is bewildering for its characters—a place where regional tradition is quickly being supplanted by a postmodern and global landscape. The call centre, an untapped literary resource in contemporary Atlantic Canadian writing, is an industry concentrated with technology and wired for worldwide communication—a postmodern space where characters experience the sublime through an introduction to technological systems. It is an environment representative of the liminal cultural landscape of current small town Atlantic Canada. The movement from natural resource economies such as mills and mines to business outsourcing ventures like call centres has important cultural ramifications in Atlantic Canada. Jerusalem Engine investigates these problematic issues through the unique lens of a contemporary Maritime suburbia and the postmodern space of the call centre, rather than through the usual Atlantic Canadian literary paradigm of the rural town. iii Table of Contents Dedication ii Abstract iii Table of Contents iv Introduction 2 Works Cited and Consulted 22 Panorama 28 No Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension 40 Greens 54 Too Much Give Under the Skin 70 Off-Call Codes 79 Old Medicines 95 The Anatomy of the Ear 105 Strata 118 Jerusalem Engine 126 CV iv are the days of miracle and wonder, this is the long distance call. —Paul Simon 2 Introduction In his study of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson defines three major moments in capitalism, all coinciding with fundamental breaks in what he calls "the evolution of machinery under capital" (Postmodernism 35). According to Jameson, we are now in the Third Machine Age, an age defined not by material and visible representation but by the intangible, by machines "of reproduction rather than of production" (37). Such machines like the computer are representative of a bewildering "world system of a present-day multinational capitalism" (37), a postmodern world system we are not quite able to cognitively map. Jameson points out that The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third age of capital itself. (38) Although my stories are not stylistically postmodern, it is important to mention Jameson in the context of my short story collection Jerusalem Engine—a collection of stories that explore the advent of call centres in the fictional New Brunswick town of St. Agnes. The call centre, after all, is rife with the technology of Jameson's postmodernity (networks, fax machines, and computers). Joseph Francese, in Narrating Postmodern Time and Space, argues that such a socio-economic shift in contemporary society reorients our perception of place: "the subject of postmodernity is stripped of a traditional sense of place by postindustrial capitalism's ability to 3 quickly relocate people and investments" (2). Such a "traditional sense of place" is slowly being eroded in the "booming" town of St. Agnes in Jerusalem Engine. In their inability to fully understand this cultural and economic change in the Maritimes, arguably a postmodern one, many of the characters in the stories react with confusion, anxiety, and even awed fascination. The adverse reaction to the call centre the characters of St. Agnes experience can be likened to their experience of what Joseph Tabbi calls the postmodern sublime. For Tabbi, contemporary society and many characters in postmodern literature experience the sublime through their introduction to modern technology and its bewildering nature: "Its crisscrossing networks of computers, transportation systems, and communications media, successors to the omnipotent 'nature' of nineteenth- century romanticism, have come to represent a magnitude that at once attracts and repels the imagination" (16). As a result of the exposure to technology, particularly the "crisscrossing networks of computers" and "communications media," the subject experiences an anxiety of representation, an inability to fully articulate such a space of wires and networks linguistically: either the imagination wishes to be inundated in the network, and thus risks experiencing a loss of identity or "anxiety of incorporation," or it desires to oppose or replace the sublime appearance with a linguistic construction of its own, to "possess" verbally the object of its anxieties. (Tabbi 17) Both passive and active imaginative reactions to the postmodern sublime are present in the stories of Jerusalem Engine. Luke, a character who appears in both "No 4 Sharp Turns on Kalmore Extension" and "Off-Call Codes," tries to make sense of the call centre through his extemporaneous philosophizing. A cocaine-addicted yet intelligent young adult, Luke attempts to simultaneously situate himself in his surroundings and resist them through his tongue-in-cheek hypothesizing about the call centre and his fellow worker's place in it. In "No Sharp Turns," Luke says to his friend Craig during a shift, "When do we draw the line between our workstations and our bodies? We have become the scripts we read on the screen. Our words the text. The Word becomes pixel." Although Craig, the narrator of the story, states this was Luke's typical brand of "jumpy nonsense," the passage illustrates Luke's desire to "possess" verbally (to use Tabbi's phrasing) the confounding space around him. In "Off-Call Codes," the reader is told that Luke "had the possibility of university in the future" and "wasn't afraid to slack off—he could leave anytime." Although Luke attempts to joke about his place in the call centre and seems a likely candidate to quit his job at Wavetech, he eventually dies of a drug overdose. His death highlights his inability to totally distance himself from the perplexing nature of the call centre. Luke's wordy diatribes and criticisms of Wavetech only serve to underline his failure to situate himself in such a space, a technological network that "remains separate, unfamiliar, other than the semiotic system" ( Tabbi 17). Like other characters in the collection, when faced with the "excess signified" (Tabbi 17) of the technological object (in the case of this collection—the call centre itself), Luke seeks out other excesses such as drugs and/or alcohol to escape an environment that both confuses and paralyzes him. While Luke attempts to imaginatively "replace the sublime appearance" (Tabbi 17) of the call centre with his hackneyed intellectualizing, other characters 5 react openly to the call centre with complete bafflement. Mae Roche, an eighty-five- year-old new to the call centre, is a kind of old-world performer, a half-senile vaudevillian who claims to have dated the history's tallest man and come from a family with deep connections to historical curiosities: "My grandmother was high society in London. A born performer, like me. She knew Joseph Merrick as an older man. Treated him for his constant bronchitis. Course you may know him as John Merrick—the elephant man" ("Off-Call Codes"). Mae's stories are questionable, but her perspective on the call centre is uniquely perceptive: This place. You think I'm strange. This place is far harder to understand. How long's it been here? People walk around like it's always been here. A maze of walls and machines. No depth to anything. Just screens, networks. No place for people. I could imagine the four headed goat, the lobster boy, the Cardiff Giant; could never imagine a place like this.