Hardcore UFOs

This past week I released an album I’ve been working on for the last two and a half years. It was inspired by the music I listened to as a kid growing up in Redford, Michigan.

It’s available for streaming here at Bandcamp, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music.

https://dannyvanzandt.bandcamp.com/

Abstract

In 2016, 25 years after the publishing of Hans Belting’s ‘Likeness & Presence’, Roland Betancourt published a reassessment of the influential text’s effects on the discipline of art history. In his critique, Betancourt makes the argument that Belting’s text served as a reification of the very modernist paradigms that it had sought to distance itself from, which he claims “evidence a faith in the transcendental signifier”. In this essay I will explore this meta-art historical conversation and seek to contend that Betancourt is too subject to the very same pitfalls of the ‘transcendental signifier’[1] as Belting, as no text is exempt from the Derridean deconstruction that he proudly brandishes.

  In the early nineties, there was a major shift in the field of cultural analysis from the study of ‘art history’ to the broader study of what would be defined as ‘visual culture’. The specific linguistic change of both terms (‘art’ –> ‘visual’, ‘history’ –>’culture’) reflected not only an interdisciplinary conflation of the fields of art history, film theory, media studies, and cultural studies (it is important to note that this refers specifically to ‘cultural studies’ as it is understood in Europe and not the United States) around the turn of the century in the age of new media, but also a much more significant ethnographic turn in how ideas of ‘art’ and ‘history’ were to be understood in the postmodern world of decentered space and time. The change from ‘art’ to ‘visual’ signified both the idea that we structure and make meaning out the unstructured world of visual stimuli around us the same whether the object of our vision is deemed to be within the parameters of ‘art’ or not, as well as a critique of the invention of art proper, after the Middle Ages. Visual Culture’s dismantling of the conventional paradigm of ‘art’ found scholars asking exactly what might be the difference between art object and advertisement, in this contemporary age so saturated with images. And after postmodernism’s dismissal of the grand narrative, the idea of a singular ‘history’ seemed problematic, and was substituted with the more transparent in regards to authorial construction term of ‘culture’. The modern constructions of ‘art’ and ‘art history’ that had been taken for granted by generations as natural and not cultural were finally being put under the microscope, and it was into this climate that Hans Belting’s Bild und Kult (Likeness & Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art) was released.

Written in 1990 and translated into English in 1994, Bild und Kult ventured into areas of visual culture during the Middle Ages that were considered outside of the dominant historical canon, and in doing so sought to subvert the accepted binaries of what had been considered art/non-art. Roland Betancourt’s Medieval Art after Duchamp: Hans Belitng’s ‘Likeness & Presence’ at 25 reassesses the effects of Belting’s work on the field of art history/visual culture and suggests that rather than dismantling these accepted binaries, by attempting to subvert them Belting has instead further fortified them and the art history status quo. Betancourt describes his work’s primary goal as being:

“to consider the by-products, effects, and consequences of Belting’s intervention on the history of medieval art through a close reading of his work’s emergent logics, implications, and unquestioned givens. By reading Belting closely, it may be argued that his unintended effects on the field resulted because, philosophically, Art—proper and with a capital A—was ultimately treated as a normative and fundamentally transcendental concept incapable of direct intervention.”[2]

           The invention of a fixed, proper noun ‘Art’ has called for scholars to find “an ontologically defined concept of art in the post-Renaissance world”. Various scholars have offered different notions as to when exactly this tenuous definition of art arose. In The Gothic Idol, Michael Camille suggests that “art emerged when a discipline of formal study builds up around the image and art becomes ‘art for art’s sake’, that is when looking supplants using.” In a 1995 special edition of Gesta that was dedicated almost entirely to assessing Bild und Kult, editor Henry Maguire defined art proper as “a nineteenth century invention oriented around individual achievement, monetary value, and detachment from everyday life.” It appears the consensus on just when this capital A “art” was invented is as slippery as the very term they are trying to pin down. We have this collapsing of context where the same singular term, “art”, is being used across multiple contexts to describe multiple concepts, a flattening and distortion of reality quite similar to that of real three-dimensional space in two-dimensional linear perspective. And Betancourt first takes aim at Belting for his own lack of precisely defining what it is being signified by his use of the signifier ‘art’ throughout Bild und Kult. In his foreword to the English translation, Belting does take aim at this definition, writing:

“Art, as it is studied by the discipline of Art History today, existed in the Middle Ages no less than it did afterwards. After the Middle Ages, however, art took on a different meaning and became acknowledged for its own sake—art as invented by a famous artist and defined by a proper theory. While the images from olden times were destroyed by iconoclasts in the Reformation period, images of a new kind began to fill the art collections which were just then being formed. The era of art, which is rooted in these events, lasts until this present day. From the very beginning it has been characterized by a particular kind of historiography which, although called the history of art, in fact deals with the history of artists.”[3]

Betancourt writes that in the aforementioned ’95 issue of Gesta dedicated to Bild und Kult, Charles Barber successfully countered Belting’s claim that the Middle Ages didn’t have “‘Art’, understood as a site for the formal and semiotic mediation of presence and absence, and moreover, that such art could function as a cult-bearing image.” Barber references the writings of Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople as an example of medieval perception of the icon as a work of art, citing that Nikephoros saw “no longer an image that can be considered as the one it re-presents.” This idea of ‘re-presentation’ becomes a central tenet of Betancourt’s critique of Belting and his supposed accidental refortification of the division between the art image and the cult image. In Belting’s historical narrative, art proper begins with the Protestant Reformation after the Middle Ages, when the image becomes defined and understood as an object of reflection and as an aesthetic experience of mediated meaning. That is to say that the art image is an image that is understood as a representation of its referent, its medium acting as the locus between presence and absence. Conversely however, for Belting the cult image is one that is understood not as a representation of its referent, but as a re-presentation of it, what Erhart Kastner referred to as the “ancient antithesis between representing and being present, between holding the place of someone and being that someone”. With the Reformation’s understanding that the image is a representation directly mediated by the artist came the birth of what Belting slyly referred to as ‘the history of artists.”

Betancourt also critiques Belting’s mishandling of ‘Art’ as either “teleologically specific” (something Belting himself criticizes in his foreword to Bild und Kult: “the mantle of competence displayed by each academic discipline is thus insufficient to cover this field. Images belong to all of them, and to none exclusively”[4]) or “fully transcendental”, treating ‘Art’ as a term with fixed meaning across different spatial and temporal contexts. Belting takes for granted that ‘Art’ in the early nineteen-nineties is still understood in the same way as it was during its supposed conception during the Reformation, with its emphasis on aesthetic beauty, sui generis nature, and artist-as-genius. However, as mentioned, the early nineties’ broadening of the study of ‘art’ to all of ‘visual culture’ stands in conflict with this sentiment. Betancourt writes of how Bild und Kult could have been “an unnecessary project” due to this inherent self-conflict, referring to Belting’s sound assertion that “art history therefore simply declared everything to be art in order to bring everything within its domain, thereby effacing the very difference that might have thrown light on our subject”[5], and then his subsequent renouncement of it as “a symptom of the discipline’s myopic presentism.”  This ‘myopic presentism’ appears to be a pattern underpinning a lot of the problems within the discipline of Art history. In the same way that linear perspective constructs the world around a subject who falsely appears to be at the center of all space, history often seems to suffer from the notion that it is being constructed by an author at the center of time. In this way, Betancourt’s critique also recalls Eva Hoffman’s dichotomy of ‘fixed’ and ‘portable’ (i.e. in flux)[6], as he is specifically in search of Belting’s “unquestioned givens”, which is really just another way of phrasing Hoffman’s “fixed” or Barthes’ “transcendental signifier.”

From the post-structuralist perspective, this type of meta-art historical analysis seems to reveal art history as a constantly shifting structure of binaries (fine art/applied art; art image/cult image, art/advertisement, etc.) that is also constantly trying to define itself—almost akin to a camera trying to take a picture of itself in terms of subject/object relationship. In this way, it suffers from its lacking of a transcendental signifier—a fixed point from which all other terms are structured relative to. Betancourt served as conference co-chair on Yale’s “Byzantium/Modernism Symposium” and in his introduction he seeks to clarify the grammatical choice of a slash in the conference’s title, quoting Barthes: “the slash is the index of the paradigm”, and then clarifying, “for Barthes of course the paradigm refers to the structuralist binary, the intervallic space that separates the signifiers into the discreet parts that allows for signification.”[7] But of course as we’ve seen these signifiers are in a state of constant flux, too slippery to get any definitive grip on, and so in turn their respective ‘signified’s are too condemned to a permanent state of relativity. As Hito Steyerl puts it, “We cannot assume any stable ground on which to base metaphysical claims…the consequence must be a permanent, or at least intermittent state of free fall for subjects and objects alike.” [8] In this slippery epistemological landscape where the pluralist ‘a history’ replaces the faux-objective ‘the history’ it seems to me there should be a shared understanding that everyone who constructs a historical narrative is sort of equally in the wrong, compromised by our shared set of constantly shifting signifiers. But instead it seems with each critical assessment of past critiques I find historians like Betancourt hypocritically critiquing Betling for the very same flaws that hinder their own writings, i.e. the lack of fixed meaning in language. The very critics who have dismissed the teleological narratives of modernism have continued in the very tradition of reactionary manifestos in the name of progress. Now of course Betancourt’s article isn’t written with the same pontificating tone of those early twentieth century manifestos, but it does share a similar sense of authorial infallibility that begs the question: does Betancourt assume that he too doesn’t have “emergent logics, implications, and unquestioned givens” to be unpacked and critiqued? Just as he pokes fun at the premise that Belting’s work could have been ‘an unnecessary project’, his too could have been unnecessary had it stopped at the caveat that language is structural and the Author is dead—there is no eye in the sky, we’re all on the ground here.

I don’t want to leave off on this sentiment that “everything is relative and therefore critiques are futile” as it seems to me that this is one of the major columns of postmodernism that we are trying to move past (see here that I too fall prey to using the language of teleological progress like ‘move past’). I suppose my main goal with this essay would be to stress the point that these texts should not be viewed as part of any linear historical narrative where scholars are constantly correcting the past and improving on it, as that is the very problem of art history’s ‘myopic presentism’. Rather I believe that these texts should be understand as in conversation with one another in a logic akin to database form as opposed to narrative.[9] By replacing the narrative model with the database no singular text is given priority over any other, as we all equally lack objective access to the ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ of things. And of course this lack of knowing, the subjective nature of the human condition, is where the magic of art lies, in the incomplete circle of the gestalt, the unsolved mystery, the uncracked code. It may seem obvious and cliché, but here we are asking ourselves “what’s water?”[10]

Works Cited

Barber, Charles “From Image Into Art: Art After Byzantine Iconoclasm” in “The History of Medieval Art Without ‘Art’? ed. Henry Maguire, special issue Gesta 34 (1995)

Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. Chicago: U of Chicago, (1994). Print.

Betancourt, Rola. “Byzantium/Modernism: Introduction.” Byzantium/Modernism Symposium. Yale University. 20 Apr. 2012. Lecture.

Betancourt, Roland. “Medieval Art After Duchamp: Hans Belting’s ‘Likeness & Presence’ at 25." Gesta Spring (2016): n. pag. Web.

Camille, Michael. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image Making in Medieval Art. Cambridge University Press (1989)

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. (1976)

Hoffman, E. R., “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century.” Art History 24: 17–50. (2001)

Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form” Millennium Film Journal No. 34 (Fall 1999)

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, (2002). Print.

Steyerl, Hito. "In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective." E-flux 24 (2011): n. pag. Web.

Wallace, D.F. “This is Water: Kenyon College 2005 Commencement Speech” Kenyon College. May 21, 2005.

[1] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

[2] Roland Betancourt,  Medieval Art After Duchamp: Likeness and Presence at 25

[3] Hans Belting, Bild und Kult

[4] Q.v. note 3

[5] Q.v. note 3

[6] Eva Hoffman, Pathways of Portability

[7] Roland Betancourt, Byzantium/Modernism Symposium

[8] Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective

[9] Lev Manovich, Database as Symbolic Form

This essay will attempt to read the coded urban landscape of Renaissance-era Florence through the critical lens of French Marxist Henri Lefebvre’s theory of ‘le droit a la ville’ (“the right to the city”), as a means of understanding the inherently political production of civic and public space. Lefebvre’s book “La Production de l’Espace” (“The Production of Space”), investigated the gap between the concrete “real space” of everyday life, and the abstract “mental space” of philosophy, as well as making the proposition that all space is social space and the product of cultural hegemony. The Florentine urban landscape underwent significant redevelopment during the fifteenth century, and this architectural and civic reconstruction of space can serve as a keyhole into the construction of Florentine identities, and furthermore their contouring socio-economic structures. This paper will specifically investigate how the Medici family used both the production of urban space as well as the ideology of civic humanism as physical and mental tools of hegemonic control.  

    The Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s town hall, has been renamed four different times, in itself a strong testament to the semiotic power of architecture and space. Built in 1299, the originally titled ‘Palazzo della Signoria’ overlooks the Piazza della Signoria, Florence’s political hub. In May of 1540, Cosimo I de’ Medici decided to move his residence from the Medici Palazzo to the Palazzo della Signoria, a direct signifier of his domain over Florence, where he would keep his dominion until in 1549 when Cosimo I’s wife, Eleonora di Toledo, would purchase the Palazzo Pitti from a descendent of the fifteenth century Florentine banker and friend of Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici, Luca Pitti. Upon purchasing it, Cosimo and Eleonora had Giorgio Vasari design and construct additions that more than doubled the place. He then proceeded to rename the Palazzo della Signoria, his former residence, the “Palazzo Vecchio”, Italian for “the old palace.” Then later in 1560, fourteen years after razing the area between the River Arno and the Palazzo della Signoria, Cosimo I would have the Galleria degli Uffizi built, also by Vasari, in the name of civic humanism, serving as the office space of the Florentine magistrate, while dually housing the prestigious Medici art collection on its piano nobile. And in 1565, continuing in his patronage of Giorgio Vasari, he would have him construct an almost kilometer long corridor connecting his residence at the Palazzo Pitti up north across the Arno via the Ponte Vecchio, over through the Uffizi, to his old residence at the Palazzo Vecchio, forming a proverbial constellation of architectural signifiers. Residents and businesses were both forced to vacate in order to make space for the construction of what was to be known as the Vasari Corridor. The Corridor served as a spatial signifier of a social order controlled by the Medici Dynasty. The illustration below details how the serpentine hall winds its way spatially across the heart of the city tearing through former homes and businesses so as to provide Cosimo with the privacy of travel he desired, while also tracing back temporally through multiple centuries of Florentine architecture. Historic buildings and public institutions became but various pit stops on Cosimo’s private skywalk.

[1]

Illustration of the Vasari Corridor

           Architecture and the urban space with which it occupies acts as a point of convergence for culture, politics, and social life. It is the concrete signifier of its respective culture’s abstract ideologies and circumscribing systems, and in turn it too becomes an arm of said systems. Cities and buildings are the hieroglyphic signs of the cultures and social orders of which they are products of. As Sharon T. Strocchia writes in Theaters of Everyday Life, “the question of what persons or groups controlled the public stages of the city figured prominently in the discourse of power throughout the republic and into the grand-ducal period. The competing uses to which urban spaces were put made streets, alleyways, and squares important arenas in which to display and negotiate power relationships among individuals, families, factions, corporate groups, and public authority (Strocchia, 61).” In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre deconstructs urban space through the Marxist approach of historical materialism, interrogating the social relations of production and seeking to expose the hegemonic control inherent in all public space. Where Marx sought to expose the social relations concealed in commodities, Lefebvre reveals how “the space of a social order is hidden within the order of space” and makes the argument that because spatial realities are directly representational of social realities, it follows then that all space is social space. By revealing space as “the substrate of mendacious signs and meanings”, Lefebvre politicizes the illusively neutral or default appearing physical space as complicit in the hegemonic social order within which it was produced. And out of this politicization of space came Lefebvre’s slogan “the right to the city”, which contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey defines as “more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization”[2]—if the city shapes everyone’s life and identity equally, everyone in turn should have an equal right to shape the city. The question becomes: what ideologies were producing the civic space that in turn produced the identities of Florentine citizens, and furthermore, to what degree was the production of civic space in fifteenth century Florence democratically controlled?

           However, when looking at Florence through Lefebvre’s lens it is also pertinent we keep in mind the predetermined biases of his system’s logic, primarily its tendency like all systems to flatten the world to a neutral, homogenous object for analysis, without any nuance for historical and cultural variations. That is to say Lefebvre’s system is designed to treat the socio-economic landscape of twentieth century France in the exact same way as twenty-first century America, and fifteenth and sixteenth century Florence. It is a ‘one size fits all’ microscope for analyzing urban space. So while it is a helpful tool for understanding how the urban space of Renaissance-era Florence operates as a tool of control, it is also an inherently imperfect projection of theory onto history. Patricia Emison writes: “to impose the issues of today on the past is to reverse the proper flow, it is our studies of an alien place and time which ought to offer insights about the potential for change in our status quo (Emison, 344).” Though it is in my opinion that to suggest any sense of “proper flow” is to assert one point in time as the proper fixed point from which to view history, as opposed to viewing both the object of analysis, Renaissance-era Florence, as in a shared conversation with its mutual subject of analysis, Lefebvre’s critical system and the point in history in which it is situated, in which neither takes priority over the other.

Central to the idea of civic space’s symbiotic relationship to the mental space of its paternal culture, in the context of Quattrocento Florence, is German-American art historian Hans Baron’s concept of civic humanism, also known as ‘classical republicanism’. Civic humanism was an ideological product of Florence’s conflict with the monarchical Milanese, propagated by the humanist historian Leonardo Bruni, which claimed that Florence’s form of government was inherently better than Milan’s simply due to its derivation from Roman and Greek antiquity. It was an ideology that espoused living the vita activa politica, and suggested that knowledge and philosophy were only useful if they were of direct public service.[3] In 1955 Hans Baron published his book The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism & Tyranny, in which he depicted a Florence whose citizens were encouraged “to achieve cultural greatness through devotion to ideas of patriotism, popular government, and public service.” He claims that in the face of the powerful Milanese, Florentines were forced to reflect and reaffirm the values of republican democracy that they were fighting for. But Baron’s theory of civic humanism as a unifying ideology for a republic of engaged citizens was met with immediate critique by scholars such as John Najemy who argued that civic humanism was rather “a new civic myth” by which Florentine humanists like Leonardo Bruni framed the former ideas of guild republicanism into a new ethos that prized virtuous service to the common good, more specifically, the common good as defined by patrician statesmen. Najemy claims the communal era of guild republicanism was supplanted by the new oligarchic republicanism toted by Bruni and the other Florentine humanists, a philosophy of “dutiful passivity” whereby the citizens who were once granted public office by the established rights of their class, now only received office for ‘personal virtue’. Other scholars have taken this reappraisal a step further and suggested that civic humanism was “used to justify and legitimate Medici power”[4], a critique of Baron’s initial assessment which found civic humanism in direct opposition to the Medici dynasty.

           Civic humanism became the ideological rock upon which Cosimo il Vecchio would further Medici control of the Florentine urban space. Italian humanists like Bruni and Vespasiano da Bisticci, both friends of Cosimo[5], commended his architectural patronage as a form of public service. In his biography of him, Vespasiano praised Cosimo for spending nearly 200,000 gold florins on redevelopment, as it provided jobs and boosted the economy.[6] His contributions to the Florentine civic space included his patronage of Brunelleschi for the rebuilding of the chapel and sacristy of San Lorenzo, as well as funding both a convent and founding the first public library in Florence at San Marco. In 1441 the friars of San Marco, in accordance with the sixteen trustees of Niccolo Niccoli’s manuscript collection of which the library was comprised, finalized their plan to begin constructing the library, which would be both entirely funded and upkept by Cosimo. Only the sixteen trustees were allowed to remove documents (as this is the twilight of the pre-Gutenberg era) from the library or allow access to others.[7] While actual access to the library was in reality oligarchic, the academic products and accomplishments brought via its information were to be shared collectively as Florentine accomplishments, another myth of civic humanism perpetuated by the ruling class.

Sharon T. Strocchia writes in “Theaters of Everyday Life” how Florentine civic space was specifically manipulated as a tool of power by the ruling class as early as the fourteenth century and up through the sixteenth, stating that:

“although Piazza della Signoria and the cathedral square could be experienced by all classes through the encounters and exchanges of everyday life, in general these spaces were off-limits to the enactment of private, domestic rites. In other words, the commune protected its central, significant spaces as one of its instruments of authority. Similarly, only the commune had sufficient authority to undertake the kind of massive interventions that dramatically resized the city’s signature footprint…the spatial order of the city at any moment was thus the result of a complex calculus that held in tension the competing claims of community and hierarchy, politics and aesthetics, practical functions and ritual needs. (Strocchia, 61).”

It’s a sentiment that echoes Lefebvre’s notion of architecture as “the substrate of mendacious signs”. To suggest metaphorically that the urban space of Renaissance-era Florence could be read as a tex, vis-à-vis Lefebvre’s spatial semiotics, is to imply the Medici family as one of, if not the, primary ‘author’, spanning across multiple centuries. From Cosimo il Vecchio’s patronage of the Duomo, Palazzo Medici (seen by many as the archetypal Florentine Palazzo), and Florence’s first ‘public’ library in the fifteenth century up through Cosimo I’s construction of the Vasari Corridor in the sixteenth century, it appears the urban space of Florence was treated as a tabula rasa by the Medici, for which to build their empire on. While proponents of civic humanism may argue the Medici family’s patronage spurred on the Florentine economy and provided jobs for many, it is evident that this is simply a myth used to disguise a furthering of the hierarchical model that treats the right to the city as not something to be collectively shared, but to be bought.

        Works Cited

Bisticci, Vespasiano da The Life of Cosimo I de Medici

Harey, David “The Right to the City." New Left Review, Sept. & oct. 2008. https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city.

Ianziti, Gary. "Leonardo Bruni, the Medici, and the Florentine Histories." Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 1 (2008): 1-22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30139665.

Jurdjevic, Mark. "Civic Humanism & the Rise of the Medici." Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1999). Accessed April 4, 2017.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. N.p.: Wiley, 1992. Print.

Najemy, John "Civic humanism and Florentine politics,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. J. Hankins (Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 81-2 and 103-4.

Strocchia, Sharon T. “Theater of Everyday Life.” Edited by Roger J. Crum. In Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Terry-Fritsch, Allie “Florentine Convent as Practiced Place: Cosimo de’ Medici, Fra Angelico, and the Public Library at San Marco”. In Medieval Encounters. 2012.

“Tours in Florence | Tuscany Tours | Florence and Tuscany Experience.” Florence Vasari Corridor tour | Uffizi Gallery tour in Florence. Accessed April 18, 2017. http://www.florencetown.com/103-vasari-corridor-uffizi-tour.html.

[1] www.florencetown.com

[2] David Harvey, The Right to the City

[3] Field

[4] Mark Jurdevic, Civic Humanism and the Rise of the Medici

[5] Gary Ianziti, Leonardo Bruni, the Medici, and the Florentine Histories

[6] Vespasiano da Bisticci The Life of Cosimo I de Medici

The first time I ever heard the name Jack Kerouac I was fifteen years old and my dad was cracking a joke about my friend James Thiede who wanted to take a bus to California: “you guys want to be Jack Kerouac now huh?” I had never heard the name but man somehow right after hearing that I did want to be Jack Kerouac. Or at least know who he was. The name alone–the rhyme, the funny French vowels in the surname, it just sounds endearing. So I checked out On the Road from the Redford library. It turns out it was the perfect time in my life to come across him, I was going into my junior year of high school that fall which meant that my friends had licenses for the first time (I didn’t get mine until I was seventeen), which then in turn meant everyone was able to really start partaking in the activities high schoolers tend to partake in at night. Just by nature of having cars suddenly the world seemed so open to adventure. In retrospect many of these “adventures” have certainly been romanticized by nostalgia, after all driving around from parking lot to parking lot smoking pot after football games and drinking your parents’ weird liqueurs while listening to Built to Spill in the back of a minivan isn’t exactly Treasure Island, but reading Jack Kerouac made it all feel the more fantastic (in the most literal “of fantasy” sense). Reading Jack Kerouac that fall was the first time in my life my eyes were really opened to how fiction can make the mundane magical, how with just the slightest bit of imaginative perspective the everyday world could be transformed into the sublime. I was sixteen reading this book about this guy riding around with friends getting high and drunk “in the American night” looking for something to give life meaning and purpose and here I was doing the same thing for the first time. And for the first time in my life I saw fiction not as just entertainment or a window into some other world but also as some weird sort of funhouse mirror that could reflect life and refract it back upon itself in ways that made it seem more beautiful, more full of purpose. Reading Jack Kerouac meant that suddenly eating cheeseburgers in the glow of a diner at night could be beatific, and that drinking beer in an apartment while listening to records with friends could have the potential for religious experience.

Of course a lot of this is me being sixteen and having the sort of dopey, romantic feelings sixteen-year-olds have, but those are exactly the sort of feelings Kerouac plays too, he finds what Springsteen referred to as the “waltz between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy.” His perspective was so childlike and wondrous that he saw his life not only as adventure and material for fiction but also as part of this big intertextual tapestry of American history and literature. He sees Steinbeck characters in the faces of lunch cart cooks, sees the rolling land of America as the result of Paul Bunyan’s axe and other folk mythologies. The American landscape is one giant Thomas Hart Benton mural through Kerouac’s eyes. And so when reading Kerouac, I began to do the same as him- projecting the history of American fiction onto my reality- seeing Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx in the faces of friends I was having my own nocturnal American adventures with.

I know for a lot of people it’s the bebop rhythm of his writing (“glug a slug from the jug”) or the spontaneous prose approach he had borrowed from the modernists and placed in a jazz improvisation context– writing full sized novels in weeks at a time holed up in bathrooms on Benzedrine—but for me it’s less about the form and process and more about his mood and tone. It’s that aforementioned childlike wonder that really gets me with Kerouac, the romance he finds in simple scenes like eating beans and hot dogs over a fire while hopping trains in The Dharma Bums, or finding redemption from his downward spiral into alcoholism through something as kind of simple and naïve as looking at the stars in his backyard at the end of Big Sur (“on soft spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars, something good will come from all things yet, and it will be golden and eternal just like that”). Perhaps the best example is the famous closing passage of On the Road. After following an over three-hundred-page journey that spans several years of traveling coast to coast across America all through his eyes he tracks the camera back to a bird’s eye view of America, and in one giant paragraph-sized sentence he paints the entire country going to bed:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight… the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”

He’s also at his best when his writing appeals directly to the senses. Short of Hemingway I don’t think I’ve read anyone who’s better at writing about food, from the apple pie in On the Road (“it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer”) to the breakfast he cooks for himself in The Railroad Earth:

“and make raisin toast by sitting it on a little wire I’d specially bent to place over the hotplate, the toast crackled up, there, I spread margarine on the still red hot toast and it too would crackle and sink in the golden, among burnt raisins and this was my toast. Then two eggs gently slowly fried in soft margarine in my little skidrow frying pan about half as thick as a dime in fact less, a little piece of tiny tin you could bring on a camp trip—the eggs slowly fluffed in there and swelled from butter steams and I threw garlic salt on them and when they were ready the yellow of them had been slightly filmed with a cooked white at the top from the tin cover I’d put over the frying pan, so now they were ready, and out they came, I spread them out on top of my already prepared potatoes which had been boiled in small pieces and then mixed with the bacon I’d already fried in small pieces, kind of raggedly mashed bacon potatoes, with eggs on top steaming, and on the side lettuce, with peanut nearby on side.”

This is the stuff that I love. It’s so simple. The guy devotes an entire page long paragraph to the breakfast he cooks for himself. That appetite too. You read that and suddenly you’re hungry, he’s great at that type of thing. If Kerouac writes about bowling, suddenly you want to go bowling.

Now I also should say there’s also a lot to Kerouac’s oeuvre that hasn’t exactly held up for me in the last seven years since I first read him, and specifically a lot of what I don’t like is directly connected to what I love so much. There are times for me when his childlike wonder and optimism can drift into the proto-hippy abstract a little too much, times when I wish Jack would kind of see the world through more of a rational, adult point of view. There are also times when this rose-tinted POV and childlike appetite for adventure can cast a shadow on his ethics, such as the myriad number of scenes throughout On the Road when you just want to grab Jack by the collar and beat it into his head that Neal Cassady isn’t a good guy. He has three different wives with children all across the country and here he is still behaving like he’s a kid, manically running back and forth across the country answering to nobody and living solely in search of “kicks”. Not to mention the different times both he and Jack discuss wanting to have sex with high school girls. That stuff pretty obviously can’t be reconciled. And as much as I’d like to section off the Jack Kerouac that I love and admire from the Jack Kerouac that makes me want to gag and regret ever mentioning that he’s a literary hero of mine, that’s just not possible. Those parts are connected.

But while it can be disheartening to see your heroes pale when you revisit them later on, the more critical approach that comes with rereading someone you loved in your youth as an adult I think can actually deepen the meaning of the work and your connection to it. When I first read Kerouac there was an authority that came with it. This was serious literature. The context of mystery and coolness that surrounded the book in my mind when I first found it that summer in high school meant that no matter what was written inside I was going to think it the greatest writing ever. But as I keep rereading it over the years I come at it each time with a more critical eye and I begin to pay attention to the authority of context that comes with reading writers that have been canonized. I start to notice that the Neal Cassady that I thought was so cool as a kid is actually a shitty father who cheats on his wives as well as a child predator. Now I start questioning if the Beats are just some hedonistic, self-righteous hipsters. After all this Neal Cassady is their proclaimed “Hero” and Jack and Allen are both very enchanted by his ethos and show no real signs of critique towards him. But then I remember that they were both also very religious. And quite pious too. Jack claims in the Dharma Bums that he was celibate for a year as part of his Buddhism. The sex, drugs & rock and roll jazz lifestyle they lived wasn’t solely for pure bodily pleasure, it was supposed to be part of a search for experience. “Truth”. I don’t know these days I feel about all of that. It becomes this big chess game of sincerity and authenticity that I don’t like getting into. “Were they doing this because they sincerely believed it or were they doing this to be cool?” I worry a lot about whether or not I identify with the Beats or not. When I imagine the Beat Generation that’s been portrayed to me over the years through pop culture I see a café filled goatees and berets and people snapping to spoken word poetry over congas. That feels really ridiculous to me. When I think about the real life antecedent for an image like this, like Ginsberg’s famous reading of “Howl” for the first time at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, and Kerouac’s recollection of this night that supposedly spearheaded the “San Francisco Renaissance”, how they passed around jugs of wine and started yelling things like “go!” and “yeah man you’ve got it!” like it’s a jazz club, I’ve got to be honest I kind of roll my eyes.” And I don’t like that I’ve become cynical like that. I hate that it turns into this game of “I really and truly and authentically like and “get” the Beats, you’re just posturing to be cool.” Because that’s how I got into them. I got into the Beats specifically because of this context of supposed cool that I saw around them when my dad first cracked that Kerouac joke and sent me down the rabbit hole that’s led me to right here, right now.

           In his first book The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, the American historian and Detroit native Thomas J. Sugrue details how the urban crisis that has plagued Detroit for decades now is the product of strategically designed and executed urban planning and housing policies, such as mortgage underwriting and redlining. As part of the New Deal, in 1934 the Federal Housing Administration was created as part of the National Housing Act, with the purpose of insuring and underwriting housing loans made by banks and private lenders. During the 1930’s the Federal Housing Administration began implementing mortgage underwriting standards which greatly discriminated against the minority neighborhoods of cities across the nation. In the period of economic boom after the Second World War the FHA’s public policy issued government backed mortgages that deliberately built both the white middle class as well as the suburban sprawl that spatially segregated them from the minorities in the ghettos. According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy’s 2013 Research and Policy Brief, during this period between 1945 and 1960 only two percent of all federally insured home loans went to African Americans. While redlining, the process of institutionalized spatial segregation of race and class, was eventually made illegal by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, its effects have lasted over generations and can be seen still today in the urban crisis in Detroit, a plight not shared whatsoever by the city’s tangential suburbs. This division of wealth and quality of living between Detroit and the suburbs is only further exacerbated then through the policy of funding public education through property tax revenue.

Detroit journalist and former congressional policy provider Eli Day sums this up quite simply: “there’s nothing mysterious at play here—the ghetto is a deliberate creation of public policy.”

           The city around you has been authored. The sidewalks you walk each and every day have been strategically designed to determine your path. The highways separating the city’s downtown from its bordering neighborhoods were engineered no different from moats around a castle to protect the city’s high value property from the areas of lower income that surround it. After the second World War with the rise of automobiles and suburbs, urban planners like Robert Moses were suggesting highways as not only a connection between the city and the suburbs but also as erasers of urban plight (a collective term for the African American neighborhoods that were unable to receive federally insured mortgage loans).In Robert Caro’s profile of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, he states “to build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons — more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods.” All around you the space that you inhabit has been produced/constructed/authored- there is nothing natural or ‘matter-of-fact’ about it. Everything from the very layout of the city streets to the skyscrapers, luxurious high rise apartments, and city housing projects are all products of political, social, and economic relations. They are no accident. They are the physical constructions and concrete representations of the abstract ideologies that inform our supposedly democratic society. Day in and day out as you engage with the urban space around you you are reading the language that our democracy has been written in. The city is a hieroglyphic text, packed with these generations of meaning as to just how our community functions. But who exactly has authored this city and who is its desired audience?

       This essay will seek to make the claim that not only is the city a cultural and socio-economic construction, but that it is one not all that different from texts/art objects in regards to how we make meaning out of it. With both the city and text meaning is constantly in flux, being shaped and shared simultaneously by both the author (the city planner and ruling class), as well as by its readers (the citizens). The general premise will be to analyze the various literary theory approaches for analyzing and making meaning out of texts, and then to apply that methodology onto how we make meaning out of everyday life in urban space. Throughout this essay when I use the term ‘text’ I will be referring not specifically to just the written word, but instead using the term as a metonym for representation as a whole, and similarly when I use the word ‘city’ throughout it will be used metonymically for civic space as a whole. It follows then that this comparing and contrasting of city and text will act as a model for comparing the whole of public space to representation in general, and exploring how exactly we as citizens and audience shape the meaning of city and text respectively, and how city and text in turn shape us.

          The exploration of how urban/contemporary civic space shapes us and how we in turn shape it is what has come to be referred to as ‘critical urban theory.’ Peter Marcuse, the professor emeritus of urban planning who taught at UCLA and Columbia defines the ultimate purpose of critical urban theory as “implementing the demand for a Right to the City.’ This phrase ‘the right to the city’ was popularized by Henri Lefebvre in 1968 in his book of the same name, Le Droit à la Ville. David Harvey, largely seen as the leading contemporary thinker on the subject, describes ‘the right to the city’ as:

“far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”

In this way of “making” and “remaking” ourselves by “making and remaking our cities” Lefebvre creates a model of citizen/civic space that strikes me as no different from the dichotomy of audience and art object, in which meaning is democratically negotiated in a shared discourse between the two. I will proceed to make the assertion that all members of an audience automatically become critics when they choose to actively engage (the mere difference between seeing and looking, hearing and listening) themselves with the work at hand in terms of making meaning, and that in the same way all citizens are critics through their active engagement in the civic space. After all, whether intended or not, every action is a political action.

         In his new book Better Living Through Criticism, the film critic A.O. Scott explores the often perceived as contentious relationship between artist and critic. In a world where these two figures have for ages appeared pitted against one another, Scott attempts to prove that they are rather simply two different sides of the same coin of cultural discourse, and even further that the critic is themselves an artist, and the artist themselves a critic. His primary point is that culture is a shared ‘thing’ (for lack of a better word) that is constantly in flux, being shaped in equal proportions by both the artist and the critic. To apply literary theory terminology, the artist creates a ‘text’ that fits into the larger con-text of culture. The critic evaluates not just the text, but also how it fits into this larger and pre-existing context of culture, imbuing the work with meaning every bit as much as the artist does. As I’ve stated I would argue further (to the disagreement of some, including A.O. Scott) that there is no distinction between audience and critic, as every reader/listener/viewer of art partakes in these same acts of fitting art into the larger context of culture, as well as making meaning out of art for themselves.

           This idea of the audience/critic as the maker of meaning has been a hotly debated point of inquiry for the last half decade or so in the world of literary theory, splintering critics into various different schools of thought e.g. “New Criticism”, “Post-Structuralism”, “Reader-Response criticism”, “Psycho-analytic theory”, etc. In the French literary critic Roland Barthes’ highly influential post-structuralist essay La Mort de l'auteur (The Death of the Author), he combats the traditional notion of author as authority and giver of ultimate meaning to the texts they write. Throughout history traditional literary criticism had made a point of placing great emphasis on analyzing the biographical context of the author, and historical context of the writing, as a means of making meaning out of texts. These ideas served as the very foundations of schools of criticism like psycho-analytic theory and New Historicism that saw the text’s meaning as being directly attached to the life of the author who wrote it. While unlike these two schools of thought the school of New Criticism believed whole-heartedly in the divorce of author from meaning, it also however championed the belief in a singular meaning of literature, which it saw as directly imbedded in the text itself. But in The Death of the Author Barthes challenges all of these ideologies, pointing out that not only is the state of the author’s mind and intentions for the text unknowable, but that language itself by its very nature doesn’t allow for any singular form of meaning, rendering the very idea of ‘ultimate intended meaning’ null and void. The essay became a touching stone for reader-response theory which finds the reader as an active subject that completes the text’s meaning through their reading and interpretation of it. That is to say that meaning is constructed between both author and reader, and only by way of the activation of the reader. Literature is after all at its most reduced state a form of communication, requiring both speaker and listener.

           In the face of the critique that analyzing something as abstract, impractical, and perhaps frivolous as text (and even further ‘fiction’ as the title alludes to) as a model for understanding and shaping our democratic society, which is an argument usually rooted strictly in political theory, statistics, and historical evidence, I would make the argument that we are only able to understand the world around us through these devices of metaphor and fiction. We learn and make meaning out of the world by way of methods of comparison like metaphor, the building block of fiction. And fiction is itself just a gigantic metaphor for reality—a symbolic world which we use as a tool for understanding the real world we inhabit every day.

            As a means of explaining how we understand the world only through representation I feel the need to reference and provide a quick summary of Lacan’s Three Orders: 1. The Real 2. The Imaginary 3. The Symbolic. The central premise of Lacan’s theory is that we never have direct access to the Real, that our experiences and relationship to reality is always mediated by language and other modes of representation, which make up the Symbolic Order. To this degree Lacan asserts that we are always trapped within the Symbolic Order, and that it is merely a part of the human condition that cannot be escaped. Because reality is subjective, we each interpret it differently and process it through our imaginaries, what he refers to as the Imaginary Order. This “imaginary” and subjective conception of reality is then structured and presented through the symbolic order- which is to say that just in the same way we each interpret reality differently, we also rather obviously interpret language and representation in general differently. And because of this entrapment in the Symbolic Order we must to a degree accept that when we deal with the “real world” around us we are never dealing with actual reality, but always with mere representations of reality of the Symbolic Order. This is exactly what gives fiction and narrative their importance and power- fiction doesn’t hide behind the illusion of being ‘real’ but presents itself directly as of the Symbolic Order, and in doing so invites us to shape its meaning, unlike ‘reality’ or nonfiction which hides behind the false premise that it is static and unmalleable.  

          This is precisely why I believe the analysis of civic space to be akin to the analysis of text/representation/fiction. Both in fiction and in space we are dealing with the dichotomy of the abstract/concrete. Where fiction seems abstract in its subjectivity, it also presents itself as the concrete linguistic representation of abstract ideas. There is always this back and forth between the supposedly concrete ‘real space’, and the abstract ‘mental space’ that interprets the real space. This is the heart of Lacan’s theory of the Three Orders. We are always under the illusion that there is an objectivity that we are either interpreting or representing subjectively with our mental faculties. In Lefebvre’s the Production of Space he attempts to “reconcile” this gap “between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live)”. But while we all have a collective understanding that what he refers to as ‘real space’ refers to the concrete, physical space around us (‘the Other’) as opposed to the mental space within us (‘the Self’), it should be made known that this ‘real space’ is not of the Real Order but is still trapped within the Symbolic Order of representation. So when we discuss ‘real space’ we are still dealing with issues of representation, which I’ve chosen to refer to throughout this essay as ‘text’. This is the groundwork for understanding the city as text, and approaching “the fictional city” through the lens of literary theory.

           Lefebvre’s idea of produced space was a major influence on the Situationist International and their theory of psychogeography. Guy Debord defined psychogeography as:

“the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals…a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”

The primary method used by the Situationists for exploring urban space in new ways was the dérive, “an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, on which the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct the travelers, with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience.” The dérive serves as both a means for breaking up the monotony of everyday life in a capitalist urban space as well as understanding how, and to what effect, urban space has been constructed. Through its methodology of freely reading the urban space and renegotiating its constructed meaning, the dérive acts as a reader-response approach to interpreting the authored space. Psychogeography, like reader-response criticism, is based on the central tenet of ‘mapping’ your own meaning onto the space/text. 

           Traditional literary theory’s theology of authorial intent, which stood in binary opposition to reader-response criticism by asserting that the psychology of the reader had no effect on the meaning of the text, has its supposed logic deconstructed here when we use this analogy. Through methods like the dérive we are able to see that space doesn’t have one singular meaning laid out by the urban planner. More importantly though the dérive opens our eyes to the policing of how civic space is read, that there are governing laws set in place to assure that the urban space is read as its authors intended it to be. Private property in the urban space asserts its dominance on how we make meaning of the city through the basic tenet of capitalist society which states that money allows access to freedom. Urban planning isn’t the product of an egalitarian democracy, it is the result of a capitalist oligarchy. And to Barthes’ dismay the city’s Author isn’t dead, but instead always present in the form of law enforcement policing how we shape and interpret the public space.

            This linkage between Lefebvre and the Situationists is furthered even more by their shared ideas on the triangulation of commodification, culture, and space. While Lefebvre’s The Production of Space sought to display how space, like commodities, is the product of political and social relations, the Situationists applied the same principle to culture, reflected in their motto: “culture is the commodity that sells all the others.” In the contemporary capitalist spectacle, civic space is almost entirely saturated by advertising, public space is branded space, and the city is the representation of a commodified culture. In “La Societe du Spectacle” (The Society of the Spectacle) Debord critiques the consumer culture, mass media and advertising, and commodity fetishism, which result in the alienation of classes reflected in the alienated spaces of the redlined map. Space and culture are always shaping one another—space is the representation of culture, and culture is the representation of the specific space from which it is derived. But in the neoliberal city both culture and space are dominated by the singular power of the commodity interest.

Exposition

           This essay will explore the connections between four topics from the nineteen-sixties that have all been collected under the umbrella term of postmodernism: 1. the French post-structuralist theory of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes etc., 2. the American postmodern authors Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, John Barth, and Paul Auster, 3. the American visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, and 4. the uncertainty surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy, as a means of historically contextualizing the movement. Postmodernism has become a rather ambiguous term due to its overwhelming size and scope, and while many introductions to the movement begin by asserting its plurality and slipperiness in regards to being defined, with this essay I will attempt to weave together a relatively cohesive narrative out of the movement’s many branches. This attempt to connect the dots into a form of grand narrative will quickly prove itself as meta to the point of self-critique, but this problem appears inevitable with the subject matter at hand.

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives.” – Jean-Francois Lyotard

1. Connecting the Dots: Constructing Narrative in the Age of Uncertainty

The American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation, begins with a quote from protagonist Allie Parker regarding the narrative form- “this is my story, or part of it. I don’t expect it to explain all that much, but what’s a story anyway, except one of those connect the dots drawings that in the end forms a picture of something. That’s really all this is.” A rather self-aware narrator Allie is, one who knows the difference between the reality of life and the narrative form we use to represent it. When life hits us with its seemingly infinite and random array of stimuli we have one natural response- to connect the dots and project some sort of order on the world. To quote Stanford mathematics professor Keith Devlin’s study on the myth of the Golden Ratio in art, “we’re creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning.” We humans are a species that is very uncomfortable with the random and the arbitrary, and nothing comforts us quite like trying to apply our sense of reason onto everything around us. Life’s just one big mystery novel and we’re all detectives with over-sized magnifying glasses.

And because of this the mystery novel itself became a common point of reference for postmodern authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, etc., largely due to its ease of opportunity for metafictional play in regards to narrative, a running theme in postmodern fiction. After all, reading itself is a form of detective work- a case of sorting out the plot’s clues from the information of lesser necessity, and then connecting those dots to form a coherent narrative. So with these stories we have narratives about narratives, mysteries within mysteries, and reading about reading. The most famous example of this form being Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, a landmark of postmodern fiction published in 1965. In Crying of Lot 49 we find protagonist Oedipa Maas thrust into a world full of possible conspiracy in which signs all around her may be connecting and alluding to some form of underground system of conspiracy, or on the other hand, it’s also just as possible that Oedipa is just simply paranoid and reading too much into these signs around her. Therefore, the metafiction comes into play as the reader is met with the very same conflict of reading the signs he or she is presented with and being forced to construct meaning and distinguish hard evidence from mere coincidence.

Take for example the protagonist’s name, “Oedipa”, an all too obvious allusion to the mythical Greek king Oedipus. For a half century now critics have argued over possible meanings to be taken from such an allusion, however the prevailing understanding is that it is simply a red herring, a name purposely chosen by Pynchon to tease at meaning while really only revealing the inherently arbitrary nature of language. It is nothing but a coincidence in the reader’s mystery of making order out of the fragmented fictional world he or she is presented with. Of further example to the metafictional nature of the book is the following excerpt from the novel’s beginning:

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

Here is the prototypical example of Oedipa being presented with a vast array of visual information and attempting to make order out of it, struggling to find a pattern and deduce some form of meaning from it. It’s the same experience that not only the reader is confronted with while reading the novel that itself contains the passage, but also that the human in the age of postmodernity is presented with: the ‘reality’ that we are all living in is fragmented and saturated by a “hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” the “intent to communicate.” But perhaps the most revealing line in regards to this postmodern condition of making meaning out of our fragmented reality comes when Oedipa states her desire to construct a “constellation” out of the signs she continually come across, for constellations themselves serve as the prototypical example of man connecting the dots and imposing patterns on the world dating all the way back to 3000 BC (1.) They are two-dimensional cultural products of a three-dimensional natural universe, a projection of order onto a reality that seems to have none. Oedipa’s duty becomes that of bringing the world into “pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her”, even at one point writing down in her notepad what could be the ultimate question of the postmodern condition, “shall I project a world?”,

It’s important to note that The Crying of Lot 49, a book rich with conspiracy and paranoia, came out less than two years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the point in time I would argue as the historical genesis of the postmodern era. To enter the Kennedy conspiracy is to enter a seemingly infinite wormhole of possible clues, another example of a mystery where drawing the line between hard evidence and coincidence proves a murkier venture than one would expect. With the assassination of President Kennedy, we as a nation entered the age of uncertainty, an age saturated by paranoia. The American postmodern novelist Don DeLillo said,

“I think it’s true that none of my novels could have been written in the world that existed before the assassination. In my fiction there tends to be a sense of danger everywhere, of something unraveling. When Kennedy was shot something changed forever in America, something opened up, a sense of randomness, deep ambiguity. We lost the narrative thread. There was no coherent reality we could analyze or study, so we became a little paranoid.”

This sense of uncertainty taking place in America in the sixties connects directly with what was happening in the realm of theoretical discourse over in France at the same time. New theories in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and more were developing, and as Frederic Jameson pointed out in his 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” they were becoming increasingly harder and harder to distinguish from one another. One of the primary tenets that connected the new theoretical developments in these various fields was a turning away from Western reason as a form of stable ground for building claims upon. Between Jacques Derrida’s theory of ‘deconstruction’, Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”, and Foucault’s critique of history as a singular narrative presented as absolute truth, there was a moving away from the belief that we live in a world of coherent reality that can be defined by a singular narrative and presented as absolutely true. Every narrative has an author behind it framing the story, cropping the ‘necessary’ information from the ‘unnecessary’, and connecting those random dots into said coherent narrative. Prior to the Kennedy assassination these ideas regarding narratives seemed to be restricted to a literary theory context, and though they were certainly applicable to reality, they had never felt as potent, and of as ‘life or death’ importance.

           There seemed to be no direct access to the ‘true reality’ of what happened in Dealey Plaza that day. Fifty years later people are still debating what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dealey Plaza. Whether it was the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Book Depository, or perhaps a second gunman involved on the grassy knoll, or even the infamous “umbrella man”, there is no single objective answer that we have decided to agree upon as a nation. “We lost the narrative thread. There was no coherent reality…” The dominant historical narrative the public was presented with, the Warren Report, was rather obviously constructed by a certainly non-neutral author, and as such played directly into Foucault’s idea of history as not being the objective truth it is often presented as, but rather a projection of a cropped narrative onto reality, often from a position of power. And if you do choose to disregard the Warren Report you then are faced with the infinite choice of conspiracy theories to pick from as to who committed the assassination, each narrative comprised of possible clues full of “deep ambiguity”, “outward patterns (with) a hieroglyphic sense of meaning.” Was it evidence or mere coincidence that the majority of eye witness conveniently died under suspicious circumstances?

          The assassination suggested that anything was possible, a tenet of postmodernism that was certainly problematic by its opening up of such inquiries as Holocaust denial and incredulity towards basic scientific laws like gravity. Richard Dawkins, the ethologist and evolutionary biologist, critiques postmodernism for this very collapsing of historical reality and scientific evidence, claiming: “Science works, planes fly, magic carpets and broomsticks don’t. Gravity isn’t a version of the truth it is the truth, anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a fifth floor window.” But while there is no doubt that postmodernism’s rampant relativism and devouring skepticism should be taken with a grain of salt, it does not mean that the entire school of thought should be dismissed as Dawkins suggests

2. A World Inside the World: The Space Between the Image and the Real

           Of importance to the delineation of postmodernism as not just an artistic or philosophical movement, but also a historical era and condition, was the proliferation of mass media through television. With television came a cultural obsession with images, and a furthering of our slippery grasp on their separation from reality. In The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon wrote of television, “It comes into your dreams you know. Filthy machine.” A great deal of artwork in the sixties dealt with this perceptual blurring of the lines between image and reality. Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg both painted not images of the world around them, but rather images of images, choosing to screen-print images taken from print media as opposed to painting subjects directly drawn from reality. Whether intended or not it was a comment on our lack of direct access to reality as well as our inability often to distinguish reality from representations of reality. Ceci ne pas une pipe. Reality had become fragmented and distorted through representation to the point where the human condition had become what PoMo author John Barth referred to as being, “lost in the funhouse.”

In Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation he explored the relationship of images and reality in the postmodern world, arguing that reality and simulations of reality have not only blurred but collapsed into one another to the point in which we are all living in hyperreality. He asserts that reality and meaning have been replaced by images, symbols and signs, tying directly into Lacan’s theory of the Three Orders which suggests that we have no actual access to “the Real” but rather our relationship with reality is always mediated by what he calls “the Symbolic Order.” Baudrillard writes, “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” Lacan suggests that it is language which separates us from direct access with the world, as Lawrence Weschler famously wrote, “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” And Baudrillard’s statement that “the simulacrum is the truth which conceals that there is none” draws directly from Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, his take down of logocentrism (language as the true representation of reality) laid out in his book Of Grammatology, which commented on Ferdinand de Saussure’s school of linguistics known as “structuralism.” Through deconstruction Derrida sought to show that language has no point of origin, it is a simulation of reality that holds no real rooting in reality.

             The primary tenet of Saussure’s structuralism was the arbitrary nature of the sign- words have no real connection to the reality they represent, rather they gain their meaning from their position within the system (structure) of language. For Derrida however, the flaw of structuralism lied in its reliance on “a transcendental signifier”- a symbol of constant, universal meaning that acts as a point of origin for which all other signs meanings are built off of. But because there is no point of origin for language (if you look up a word in the dictionary you are only confronted with more words which lead to more words ad infinitum) language is a system that references nothing outside of itself. Signs only infinitely refer to further signs, never actually accessing the real. Works of art such as Jasper John’s False Start and Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs used these theories of semiotics as subject matter, poking fun at the space between language and reality.

               Further connecting to this idea of the slippery relationship between images and reality was Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, which suggests that our identity is entirely constructed by images. He posits that our earliest formation of identity is a result of seeing ourselves in the mirror and identifying with an image of ourselves. The mirror stage induces apperception for the first time- the ability to see ourselves as objects to be viewed from outside ourselves. However, what we see in the mirror is not actually who we are, but rather a flat, two dimensional image of us.

               With Rauschenberg and Warhol’s meta “images of images” we get visual examples of this mediation of our relationship with reality. Both artists also famously chose to work with images of John F. Kennedy as subject matter in their works. It should be noted that President Kennedy was the first president in this era of images, and what a first president to have in this new era. He was remarkably photogenic; it is widely believed he was elected because of his televised debate with Richard Nixon. Though most Americans never once saw John F. Kennedy in real life, almost all encountered images of him daily. As Don DeLillo noted in Libra his semi-fictional recounting of the Kennedy, “he looked even better in real life”, implying inherently that there is a “not real life” that exists in the world of photographs and images. “There is a world inside the world” Oswald says throughout the novel, a motif repeated over and over like the tolling of an iron bell. But is there a world of images inside the world of reality? Are photographs reality or fiction? Roland Barthes theory of ‘the myth of photographic truth’ explored this notion, asserting that though we perceive photographs as unmediated copies of the real world they certainly are not. There is always an artist’s hand between the image and the world it represents, a hand cropping out certain information in favor of presenting other visual info, paralleling Foucault’s theory of the presentation of history as an unmediated narrative of reality. But there is no such thing as an unmediated copy of reality, and every narrative is authored from a singular perspective.

3. The Master Narrative: The Deconstruction of the Episteme

            While Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ stated that there is no singular “theological meaning” imbued in a text by its author, the negative space that idea then leaves us with is that the reader is just as much the architect of a text’s meaning as the author. We, like Oedipa Maas, are readers of the world, constructing meaning out of the text-ure of the world that our nerve endings are constantly being met with. The collaged works of Robert Rauschenberg feed off this notion, offering the viewer with various fragmented imagery, like Retroactive 1’s screen-printed images of Kennedy, NASA related space activity, medical photographs of the human form, etc., and forcing the audience to find patterns and assert a sense of order onto the world of the canvas.

             Also present in these works by Rauschenberg, through their reaching for subject matter into fields as diverse as medical science, universal exploration, and historical figures, is a sense of a totality of world knowledge, a form also explored by Thomas Pynchon in his mammoth novel Gravity’s Rainbow, often considered the postmodern equivalent to Joyce’s modernist tome Ulysses. Where Ulysses sought to replicate the mode of thought of a single mind through stream-of-consciousness prose, Gravity’s Rainbow appeared to suggest a sense of encyclopedic knowledge of the world, through its third person removed narrator’s knowledge of languages as various as French, German, Spanish, Latin, etc. as well as its ability to jump back and forth between voices all across the spectrum from the highbrow language of the academia to the lowbrow vernaculars of various American subcultures. Pynchon’s narrator also has at its disposal a seemingly all-encompassing knowledge of math, science, literature, and technology made evident through its endless stream of references. This concept of the ‘encyclopedic novel’ was formulated by literary theorist Edward Mendelson in two essays from 1976 entitled “Encyclopedic Narrative”, and “Gravity’s Encyclopedia”. In short Mendelson defines the encyclopedic novel as an “attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge” and that “because they are the products of an epic in which the world’s knowledge is larger than any one person can encompass, they necessarily make extensive use of synecdoche.” The narrator of the encyclopedic novel exemplifies the omniscient point of view of traditional narration pushed to its furthest extreme as another method of drawing the reader’s eye to the gap between narrative and life, representation and reality. From a post-structuralist perspective the encyclopedic novel serves to critique the very illusion of encylopedism which attempts to present the sum of all human knowledge. It is a detournement of the grand narrative, the fictional counterpart to the nonfiction of Foucault’s The Order of Things in which he developed his theories of epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief. What grounds knowledge in truth, and furthermore what justifies certain narratives of knowledge over others? The encyclopedic novel is the deconstruction of master knowledge systems that suggest a god’s-eye-view of the world. As Jean-Francois Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “an incredulity toward metanarratives.”

4. We Are What We Pretend to Be: The Construction of Identity in the Age of    Postmodernism

            So if the author is dead, as well as the concept of an authentic and true knowledge of the world, and the individual is trapped in a perpetual sense of limbo between image and reality, then where does said individual’s conception of identity stand? It follows then that in this postmodern age of decenterized subject there is no real singular, authentic sense of identity, and that identity is a construct in just the same as the reality that forms its context. Central to this idea was Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, which although initially presented by her in a gender theory context, was also written about by aforementioned thinkers such as Jacques Derrida in regards to ideas of identity in philosophy and literature. In broad terms the theory of performativity states that there is no authentic and static conception of identity which dictates a person’s actions (i.e. “that’s not like him”), but rather that it is the inverse, and that identity is in a constant state of flux, always being shaped and constructed by our actions.

             Of perhaps most importance to our understanding of the construction of identity is Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage”. At a point between the first 6 to 18 months in a child’s life the infant will recognize itself in the mirror for the first time. While the infant could obviously see itself in the mirror prior to this, until this moment the image of itself was not of any coherence, but instead just an array of unstructured visual information. In “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Jameson borrows this idea from Lacan of seeing the world as unstructured by language and applies it to the postmodern condition. Jameson asserts the age of postmodernity to be one of schizophrenic perception, defining schizophrenia as “the failure of the infant to accede fully into the realm of speech and language”. During the mirror stage the infant first recognizes itself as an object outside of itself, in turn forming its conception of identity around not its real self, but rather the image of itself that it sees in the mirror- identity too is “lost in the funhouse”, trapped within Lacan’s Symbolic Order and Baudrillard’s simulacra.

            This idea of the decenterized subject contrasts the modernist conception of the artist, in which there was a tendency to label certain artists as “real” and “authentic”, and others as “phony” or “inauthentic”. While modernism broke away from Enlightenment era ideas of objective reality, emphasizing the individual’s sense of inward, subjective reality, it also tended to place a great level of emphasis on the artist as an enlightened individual that is more “true” and “real” perhaps than other people. Abstract Expressionist painters like Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, etc. were framed as being these authentic geniuses making “real” and “honest” art. Moving away from this were artists like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons who broke the idea of the authentic individual by living out their own identities as roles to be played. The term persona is derived from Latin in which it directly translates to the word “mask”, and artists like Koons and Warhol used their identities in the image mediated world of celebrity as tools to suggest that might not have any actual, “true” or “real” identity- that behind their masks were only masks covering an infinite regression of masks with no Derrida-esque point of origin- images of images.

            Many postmodern authors dealt directly with this premise of identity as construction. Many PoMo authors used metafictional tropes such as making the reader aware of the author acting not as the “authentic” author, but rather as a constructed role being played by the author in writing the novel, and other tricks like placing the author within the novel as a fictional character. Paul Auster uses both of these tools in his New York Trilogy, a metafictional mystery novel composed of three short stories: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. In City of Glass, the first of three stories, the main character Daniel Quinn, like the real life Auster, is a mystery novelist. Auster describes Quinn as “a triad of selves” as he writes under the pen name William Wilson, but also lives vicariously through the alias of the detective he writes about, Max Work. The narrative tricks are pushed even further over the edge when this fictional novelist gets a call one night from somebody looking for a detective by the name of Paul Auster. The three stories that compose the trilogy are presented as being disconnected, but in the final one, The Locked Room, the nameless narrator reveals at the end of the story that it is he who has written the three stories within the trilogy. With these drifts in an out of fiction and reality suggesting that the wall between the two is porous or collapsible, the New York Trilogy presents us with a literary model for Baudrillard’s simulacrum.

           Other authors employed this device of writing books with fictional protagonists of the authors themselves, including Bret Easton Ellis in his fictional memoir Lunar Park, and David Foster Wallace in his posthumously release unfinished novel The Pale King. Wallace began his career as a proudly self-proclaimed postmodernist, but would spend his later years avidly critiquing the various problems he saw within the movement, a subject I will directly discuss in this next and final section of the essay.

5. Towards a New Sincerity: Post-Postmodernism, Meta-Modernism & the New Sincerity Movement

           In the late eighties and early nineties David Foster Wallace was one of the remaining proponents of postmodern fiction, drawing influence from the likes of Pynchon and DeLillo, writing short stories like Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way and Little Expressionless Animals that seemed to function almost solely for deploying tricks such as fragmented narratives, metafictional tropes, and parodies of political and pop culture. But around the mid-nineties he began to develop a disdain for all the ironic posturing and author-as-construction tropes of postmodernism.  In 1993 he published his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction which for many cemented the ethos of the percolating “New Sincerity” movement. In it he discusses how television and advertising have raised a generation defaulted in a condition of irony, too cool and too smart for sincerity, afraid of being mocked for displaying sentimentality. A generation raised not only on the cozy predictability and comfort of happy endings in sitcoms, but also on the postmodern parodies of these narratives- television that mocks television.

And furthermore, advertisements that mock advertisements. Corporations had begun co-opting the very rebellious anti-capitalist imagery that stood in direct opposition to them- as Nato Thompson noted in his introductory essay for Mass MoCa’s “The Interventionists”, this is a time period in which Taco Bell is using the iconic image of Che Guevara to sell Americanized Mexican fast food. The Gap corporation was appropriating Jack Kerouac to sell denim. Thomas Frank wrote in his 1997 book Conquest of Cool: “the sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.” The images of “hipness” and “coolness” in the cultural and civil movements of the sixties, movements that were specifically anti-capitalist, were now being appropriated by multinational corporations to market products to the masses, an act known as recuperation, the very opposite of the Situationist’s detournement. Advertising agencies now release far more “rebellious” commercials that ironically mock the lameness of commercials, than sincere commercials. This is the contemporary condition of a generation raised on postmodernism. Everyone is in on the joke. Everyone is too cool for sincerity. In Lee Konstantinou’s article for Salon, “We Had to Get Beyond Irony: How David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and a New Generation of Believers Changed Fiction” he describes this condition: “at this moment, capitalism’s Cold War victory, individual irony, and philosophical antifoundationalism merged into a single discourse. Irony’s dominance could sometimes seem like the unavoidable cultural and philosophical consequence of our having arrived at history’s end.”

           In the face of this overwhelmingly ironic and too smart ethos Wallace sought to find a new tone for his writing, one that married head to heart, stating, “fiction’s about what it is to be a human being”. He writes in E Unibus Pluram:

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal”. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”

     After a brief ‘Notice’ and ‘Explanatory’ note, Mark Twain begins Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deliberately fogging up the line between fantasy and reality: “you don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly”. And so the confusion begins. Here we have the author, the real life Mark Twain, telling a fantasy narrated by the fictional character Huck Finn, who himself is telling a story that includes the character Mark Twain, an author who has previously written a book about Huck. Huck is aware that this Twain fellow has written a story that he claims blurs the line between the real and the fictional. A story within a story, a fantasy within a fantasy. It’s a metafictional trope that works as an intertextual reference to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which in the second part of the novel Cervantes calls the reader’s attention to a fictional author who has a published a false sequel to the first part of Don Quixote. Of course Quixote itself is the tale of a man so consumed with fiction that he attempts to act it out into reality, playing the fictional role of a hidalgo named “Don Quixote.” This connection would be merely a frivolous coincidence if not for the fact that in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain makes direct reference to Cervantes’ work in the third chapter. Tom Sawyer, a young boy who, like Quixote, is obsessed with the fantasy adventures of fictional characters, claims that if only Huck had read Don Quixote he would understand that the Sunday school he just saw was really Arab pirates and elephants. Tom loves these fantasies like Don Quixote so much that he often inhabits them, and throughout the novel it can be difficult to tell where fantasy ends and reality begins for him. The same could be said for the reader. After all, we are reading a story narrated by a protagonist, Huck, who throughout the novel is making up fictional stories and constantly playing different roles. And even he is aware that the story’s real puppeteer, Twain himself, told “some stretchers” . This paper will seek to explore Twain’s use of role playing in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a means of adding to the novel’s sense of fog and confusion between reality and fiction, as well as its sense of moral confusion.

           Firstly, it should be mentioned that all of this fantasy/reality confusion that is taking place between what’s going on inside and outside of the text would be a superfluous narrative gag if it weren’t also an expert deployment on Twain’s part of the novel’s form echoing its content. Adventures of Huckleberry is a story full of characters playing characters as a means to coerce you into giving them what they want. It’s a story about people living in constructed fantasies as a means of creating a social hierarchy in which they can be somebody’s boss or master. But perhaps most importantly, it is a story that looks to interrogate where the line is drawn between what’s real and natural and what’s constructed and fantasy, and where these societal fantasies draw their authority from. To do this Twain offers us an adventure that is split up between life on the river, and life on the sore. On the shore we find a world in which societal structures are never to be questioned. People kill one another’s families for reasons they don’t even quite understand. On the shore Tom and his Band of Robbers take people for ransom despite not knowing what the word even means. It’s just the way things are done. “Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?”

      Throughout the novel we see almost everyone in this cast of characters pretend to be someone they are not (characters playing characters), creating fantasy worlds as a means of getting whatever it is they want. The first case we come across is Tom’s Band of Robbers and the Sunday School in which Tom plays the role of fantasy master so he can live out the adventure stories he loves so much. He claims there are Arab Pirates, camels, and elephants camping down in Cave Hollow, but when Huck and the other members of the Band arrive they only find a Sunday school.  When Huck confronts Tom about the difference between his fantasy and the reality he is met with Tom claims it’s a classic case of magic as in Don Quixote. He hides the cracks in his fantasy behind other fantasies, the ones that aren’t to be questioned. “Don’t I tell you, it’s in the books?”

       The next case of role playing comes in the form of pap using presumably fake tears and sentimentality to coerce the new judge in town into believing he sincerely wanted to reform and live a better life. Pap is low down. In the societal hierarchy of the south he is the lowest down except for the slaves, but this proves to be clearly a case of constructed fantasy. In reality pap is obviously the most “low down” in society, as Twain displays to us in the scene with pap’s complaints about the mulatto professor that dressed in all white and is clearly above pap on any realistic social hierarchy. This is a classic example of Twain using irony at the expense of a character to show us how all of this “by the book” Southern thinking that is presupposed as axiom is really just a constructed fantasy built in order to allow people to feel empowered through titles like “boss” and “master.” This societal fantasy only draws its authority from the mass majority who blindly follow it without ever asking why exactly they do. As Col. Shepburn aptly puts it in Chapter 20, “the pitifulest thing that’s out there is a mob; that’s what an army is- a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass and from their officers”.

     The ultimate example comes in the final chapters of the novel. Hemingway famously quipped that the story should have ended with Huck’s decision to free Jim, but that misleadingly presumes that the novel is nothing but a bildungsroman. In actuality the final chapters serve as the novels true coup, with Twain pushing all of this fantasy role playing to its most ridiculous and malicious endpoint. In this final act Tom agrees to help Huck save Jim not letting on the fact that Jim is actually technically a free man already, and instead runs him through a ridiculous course of actions just to satiate his fetish for adventure. Every fantasy master needs a fantasy slave, and so Tom proceeds to make Jim do such absurd tasks as cry enough tears to grow a plant, live with rats and snakes, and even at one point he frees Jim to force him to help retrieve a grindstone. It’s a scene so absurd that the reader is forced to keep pounding his or her head asking “why?” Why do Huck and Jim follow Tom along blindly? Why does Tom himself follow these adventure novels so blindly? Why do Southerners follow the status quo that have been raised on without themselves asking “why?”

     The American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s first feature, Permanent Vacation, begins with a quote from protagonist Allie Parker regarding the narrative form- “this is my story, or part of it. I don’t expect it to explain all that much, but what’s a story anyway, except one of those connect the dots drawings that in the end forms a picture of something. That’s really all this is.” A rather self-aware narrator Allie is, one who knows the difference between the reality of life and the narrative form we use to represent it. When life hits us with its seemingly infinite and random array of stimuli we have one natural response- to connect the dots. To quote Stanford mathematics professor Keith Devlin’s study on the myth of the Golden Ratio in art, “we’re creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning.”. We humans are a species that is very uncomfortable with the random and the arbitrary, and nothing comforts us quite like trying to apply our sense of reason on to everything around us. Life’s one big mystery novel and we’re all just detectives with over sized magnifying glasses.

     And what form of mystery is more beguiling to us Americans than the good old conspiracy theory. Starting with the Kennedy assassination in ‘63 and the moon landing in ’69 we’ve become a nation of self employed journalists obsessed with seeking out clues and finding patterns and meaning. Fifty years later people are still debating what happened November 22, 1963 in Dealey Plaza. Whether it was the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Book Depository, or perhaps a second gunman involved on the grassy knoll, or even the infamous “umbrella man.” There is no single objective answer that we have decided to agree upon as a nation. And we all have a Slater type friend just itching to at any second unload his arsenal of knowledge regarding the fallacy of the moon landing- “but how could the flag be waving if there’s no wind in space, man?” Those seeds of uncertainty and paranoia planted within our society by those two events also happened to coincide nicely with much of the French philosophical theory of the time that was finding its way into the landscape of American Lit, birthing what would come to be known as “Postmodernism.”

      One of Postmodernism’s major tenets was its turning away from Western reason as a whole, that perhaps everything we thought we were certain wasn’t as absolute as we thought it was. Between theories like Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum it was starting to seem like the reality we thought we had such a tight grasp on was a bit slipperier than we thought. Maybe reason and the language we use to deploy it were more arbitrary than we wanted to believe. Maybe everything that seemed once so clear was actually very, very foggy. Of course the drug culture of the High Sixties fed right into this, as really every major question posed by the postmodernists would be pondered a thousand times over by red-eyed dorm room philosophers sitting in circles surrounded by cheap faux-Eastern tapestries- “do words even really mean anything, man?” It’s from this very culture that we get the PoMo writers like Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Don DeLillo (who wrote a reality and fiction blending novel about Kennedy’s assassination) Kurt Vonnegut, et al.

      I have never been a huge Adele fan, so I must say this is a bit weird for me. Personally I’ve always thought her monolithic commercial success to be one granted by her incredible ability to be as (somewhat endearingly) middle of the road as possible. There has never been, and I think I can safely say there never will be, a risky Adele song. The emotional narrative is always about as predictable as that of your standard rom-com and the arrangements are always baby-proofed-living-room-safe. They say Hollywood only makes big budget movies that they can market to the whole family these days, the guaranteed box office successes, and Adele is certainly the musical equivalent. 25 was guaranteed to sell better than any album this year before it was even released. It’s like a new Star Wars movie. And I have to say for me the lead single “Hello” was about as engaging a listen as audible cardboard. Yaaaaawn. But that second single…

      “When We Were Young” is the best thing Adele has done since “Chasing Pavements” and is without question the best song of her career thus far. The same could probably be said for co-writer Tobias Jesso Jr. and producer Ariel Rechtshaid. It is a career defining song, the platonic ideal of an Adele song. No it’s not risky, and yes it’s predictable, but these things don’t matter when a song is this beautiful. These are chord changes as old as time but with her delivering those words framed with that melody over them it’s like my ears have never heard them before, my heart has never felt them. And clichés are only clichés because they are true. This is a Perfect song. Every single thing about it, every corner, every note, every detail of the arrangement- Perfect. From the mood to the bridge to the very nuanced way her lyrics lay atop the aforementioned clichéd chord changes- Perfect.

     Let me get something out of the way due to the simple fact that this may seem like a harsh critique, I love Drake. He’s by far and away my favorite artist in contemporary music. I do not believe there is an artist who better represents my generation (“Millennials”) and all of our complications, and while this piece certainly meanders a bit, that is the overall idea here that I’m trying to circle in on- that we are generation largely defined by our addiction to self-branding, making images of ourselves, and constructing false and radically cropped and edited identities by way of social networks and the myth of photographic truth. We are a generation consumed with “self” and with that obsession comes what should be of no surprise to us, that we’re becoming deeply and maddeningly lonely. The Drake complex.

“She look like a star, but only on camera…”

      In the 1950’s a philosopher of language by the name of J.L. Austin founded the theory of performativity which states that language and speech are actions that are not only used to communicate, but also to construct an identity. The French postmodern theorists of the 1960’s would pick up and elaborate on this idea of “constructing one’s identity” and use it to display how contrary to the popularly held idea that our identity shapes our actions (e.g. “that’s unlike him to do that”), it is instead our actions and speech that shape and construct our identity. Central to our understanding of identity is Jacques Lacan’s theory of the “mirror phase” which posits that our earliest formation of our identity is a result of seeing ourselves in the mirror and identifying with an image of ourselves. The mirror phase induces apperception for the first time, the ability to see ourselves as objects to be viewed from outside ourselves. But what we see in the mirror is not actually who we are, but rather a flat, two dimensional image of us.

“Only see the truth when I’m staring in the mirror…”

       When Drake first found international success in 2009 with his mixtape So Far Gone mainstream hip hop was a vastly different landscape than it is today, one that has largely been shaped by him and his post- 808’s aesthetic with its emphasis on introspection, open displays of emotion, and melodic vocal cadences. But when he first arrived it was these very things that are so in vogue in contemporary hip hop that made him a bit of a walking joke. See the “Drake the type of nigga…” memes which center around the idea of him as emotional, “soft.” In a world saturated by machismo and male bravado Drake was the sensitive guy, the beta-male in a field entirely composed of alphas. His music even got the tag “emo-rap” during the thankfully short period of time in which it was employed. He was often made fun of for not being “real” in a context where being real most often means being black and coming from the streets, and here was Drake, a half Jewish Canadian child actor. So sides were chosen. If you didn’t like Drake you forwarded these claims that here was someone posturing as someone he wasn’t in a field where he didn’t belong- constructing a false image of who he was. In layman’s terms: being fake. On the other hand if you were a Drake fan you argued his “realness” was evident in the somewhat naked displays of emotion in his lyrics and that he was in no way posing as someone with gang relations or a criminal record. After all this is the guy who rapped, “I know showing emotions don’t ever mean I’m a pussy.” But this is also the guy who in the very same song said “I’m going trigger happy just to see my niggas happy,” and “I know the hustle so well, I know the hustle so well.” Sure, he’s referring to murdering people with the pen and hustling in the studio and not the streets, but surely he knows what he’s doing playing into these double entendres and it is rather evident that he’s using them to construct an image of him as rap’s prototypical tough male. Dropping a song titled “Started from the Bottom” didn’t help convince people he was being real, and so this question of “realness” is one that has continued to haunt Drake for the entirety of his career.

“Please do not speak to me like I’m that Drake from four years ago I’m at a higher place…”

      But when he dropped If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late it was rather obvious something had changed. This was no longer love song Drake. This was “text message from a centerfold- I don’t reply -let her know I read it though,” Drake. Gone was any form of “beta-male sensitivity” whatsoever and its place instead a mixtape that is essentially just one big seventy-minute long kegel exercise. This was a different animal entirely. His rapping had gotten more muscular, more athletic. His delivery was at its most confident, with almost every song featuring Drake’s big boy voice that he debuted in “Worst Behavior.” And his lyrics here were easily the most grossly narcissistic to date. This is a black hole of self in regards to lyrics. With it too came the new physical image that was hard to miss- Drake suddenly had the body of a professional athlete, and one he was by no means afraid to flaunt all over Instagram. “I swear sports and music are so synonymous, cause we wanna be them, and they wanna be us.” Suddenly Mr. Emo-Rap was now Mr. Jock Rap, the beta turned alpha. All he needed now was someone to bully in the lunch room.

       Did anyone else think the Drake/Meek Mill feud felt almost too perfect for Drake to be true? Don’t get me wrong I don’t actually think it was set up, but it just seemed like everything fell too easily into place for Drake almost as if it were out of a WWE storyline. It was like one big summer spectacle in honor of the new Drake, with Meek Mill playing the part of the sacrificial lamb. This was a guy who had put out a song with the hook “I got enemies, got a lot of enemies” but to be perfectly honest who did Drake really have as an enemy? Chris Brown? Tyga? Kendrick? None of those feuds were exactly capital B beefs. This was exactly what he needed to cement his new identity as Big Man On Campus. And in the end that’s really the only end game Drake has had for his music recently. Putting on display how no one is better than him.

     Now of course proving you’re the best has been part of hip hop for almost two decades now. It’s not the only genre referred to as “the game” for no reason. It’s a competitive sport. But with Drake something feels different, more calculated, more vindictive. As stated, this is the guy largely responsible for hip hop’s current state of emotional transparency, the guy who was not afraid to show his emotions and be an actual three dimensional human who feels sadness and regret, not a 2D action hero cutout like many of the rappers before him. The guy who rapped, “I wonder if any of them would survive in this era, when it’s recreation to pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations.” So when you are that guy, the one responsible for turning hip hop artists into these glass houses of “self”- and then by way of that approach become the genre’s vanguard- but then you suddenly turn into the very action hero alpha male you once stood as the binary opposite to, it just feels like all along you were building this glass house simply to show off the riches you’ve been cashing your emotions in for. That it’s just been one big very calculated chess move in the game of constructing a more perfect identity for yourself.

      “The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self, which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow you seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”

- David Foster Wallace  Infinite Jest

      In the early twentieth century a German mathematician by the name of Georg Cantor developed a diagonal proof which proved both that there are more real numbers than there are cardinal numbers- cardinal numbers being the whole numbers we use for counting (i.e. 1,2,3,4, etc.)- and that there are in turn an infinity of real numbers between any two cardinal numbers. Half a century later the linguist/cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky established his principle of “discrete infinity” in the field of linguistics which proved that language is both discrete and infinite, discrete in the sense that language is a limited set of distinct whole units like the cardinal numbers (there are no half words or quarter words), but also infinite in that these distinct units can be combined in an infinite number of ways. Where Cantor’s infinity exists in that you can divide the space between two cardinal numbers ad infinitum, Chomsky’s infinity exists due to the ability to multiply two finite sets with infinite results, a property seen in binary code. In both cases we find infinity within the limits of the finite.

      During an interview with Michael Silverblatt of the literary talk radio show “Bookworm” David Foster Wallace revealed that Infinite Jest was structured loosely like a Sierpinski gasket, also known as the Sierpinski triangle. The Sierpinski gasket is a fractal shaped like an equilateral triangle that is itself infinitely subdivided into further equilateral triangles. It is a finite, limited space that is divided infinitely into further finite, limited spaces. In essence it is a meta-shape. Wallace has claimed that he had a poster of a Sierpinski gasket hung in the room in which he wrote Infinite Jest, a book that deals very much with the ability to infinitely transcend finite limits, be it in mathematics, language, on the tennis court, or most importantly in the context of the human condition. The book’s structural resemblance to the Sierpinski gasket is for the most part rather obvious. It is a novel of many (and at times seemingly infinite) characters, some who are quite larger in the novel, and some who are much smaller, but all of which prove to be interconnected and to share similar circumstances.

      The novel thematically deals with the idea of a particularly American type of loneliness brought about by what Wallace refers to as our need to “give ourselves away to something” and takes place for the most part in two locations in Metro Boston, a tennis academy and a halfway house that are just down the road from one another. At the tennis academy we follow Hal Incandenza a young tennis and lexical prodigy with a secret addiction to marijuana, and at the halfway house we follow Don Gately, a former drug and alcohol addicted burglar who regularly attends Alcoholics Anonymous. Both characters share the connection of drug addiction, as well as the connection of devotion to a singular pursuit. In the case of Hal and his peers at the tennis academy, devotion to tennis, and in the case of Gately and his peers at the halfway house, a devotion to AA and living a life of sobriety. In both cases the characters face this same conflict of giving themselves away to something, be it addiction, tennis, or sobriety.

      Amongst these two central characters are a cast of other addicts including Hal’s brother Orin Incandenza, a sex-addicted professional football player, and his late father James Incandenza, an avant-garde filmmaker who founded the tennis academy and later committed suicide via putting his head in a microwave oven. James is the creator of the film “Infinite Jest” from which the novel gets its name (a reference to Hamlet, of which there are many parallels), a piece of entertainment so good that those that view it become so entranced that they no longer wish to eat or drink and therefore die in a passive state of spectating. “Choose your attachments carefully…you are completely and only what you would die for.”  Wallace makes clear throughout Infinite Jest that “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away to something,” and refers to these addictions and pursuits that we give ourselves away to as “the Cage”- they are limiting and render us lonely and finite.

     I’d like to preface this by saying I have never written about films before, and I do not know much, if anything, about movies, filmmaking, or the history of cinema. I am a complete and total dilettante. If some people are film buffs, I am a film fledgling. That was a bad play on words, but you get the point. However, I am very interested in movies and as of recently am trying to learn more about them, and I find I learn best through writing, so at its very core this is an entirely self-indulgent endeavor. Bear with me here.  

      Eraserhead is a movie about dreams, a theme that is for the most part a constant throughout David Lynch’s career in filmmaking, be it in Blue Velvet where “in dreams I walk with you” or in Twin Peaks where Federal Agent Dale Cooper solves the mystery of the murder of Laura Palmer by way of investigating his own dreams, blurring the lines between “the real” and “the surreal” to the point of no return.  And in his first full length picture, Eraserhead, dreams act as both the subject matter as well as more prominently the film’s chosen cinematic language. That is to say even in the scenes where you’re certain protagonist Henry Spencer (played by Jack Nance, a Lynch mainstay) isn’t dreaming at all, everything still appears dreamlike. There are inexplicable organic forms, paradigmatic substitutions of objects and characters (we’ll get more into this further later on) and sound designer Alan Splet’s equal parts industrial and ethereal score, all of which denote the qualities of something between a dream and a nightmare. So like most dreams Eraserhead generally eschews plot and narrative (the meat of most movies) in favor of mood. It is one of those dreaded “experiential” films, somewhat along the lines of Fellini’s later work like 8 ½, Satyricon, and Juliet of the Spirits (as aforementioned I know very little of film history, and so these may not be the best references but are the best I can make out of the movies that I’ve seen). There is no easy explanation of what happens in this movie. For a film Lynch himself proclaims as a “spiritual journey” it seems to me that we don’t really ever get from a point A to a point B. But that’s ok. Try explaining to someone what happened in your dream last night. Not the easiest.  

     This particular write-up is in no way intended to be a summary of the film, but I do feel that the opening scene of the movie is worthy of summarization as a means of exemplifying how Lynch’s dreamlike language functions. Eraserhead opens with the famous image of a double exposure of Henry’s head oriented horizontally atop a fuzzy background of moving noise reminiscent of that fizzing effect when Alka-Seltzer is dropped in water. Suddenly a “spermatozoon-like creature” (Wikipedia’s words, not mine) appears in Henry’s mouth and we cut to a character named “The Man in the Planet” (though this name is never mentioned in the film, nor is any sort of identification of who he is, once again thank you Wikipedia) who pulls a series of wooden levers that send the sperm plunging into a glowing, bubbling bath that is assumed to be Lynch’s representation of an egg cell, which in turn splashes and creates the previously mentioned Alka-Seltzer-dropped-in-water effect. We then cut to a frame of all black surrounding an opening of white light that the camera slowly moves towards and finally through, and in this moment we are re-experiencing the feeling of being born, leaving the darkness of the womb for the blinding light of the outside world. But the void like opening that we pass through appears to be just a hole in a sheet of fabric, with loose threads all along the perimeter, a visual that is echoed and perhaps explained later by the holes in Henry’s blanket. After all, every inexplicable image in our dreams has some real life concrete antecedent. And throughout Eraserhead we are given concrete and industrial materials like the bubbling bath and hole in fabric as visual cues and metaphors for organic forms like the respective egg cell and vaginal opening they seem to represent here. This is the language of Eraserhead. This is the language of dreams.  

     And in Eraserhead, like in dreams, nothing ever seems to make any sense. There are characters who remain unnamed and unexplained, like the previously mentioned “Man in the Planet”, or “The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall” who later in the movie sleeps with Henry, only to have the bed suddenly turn into the bubbling bath egg cell from opening scene and suck them in like quicksand. There’s also a scene in which Henry stares into the radiator in his room and sees within it a girl (aptly named “The Girl in the Radiator”) upon a stage who sings about heaven while stomping on more of the sperm like creatures from the opening scene, only herself later in the movie to turn into “The Man in the Planet” with no explanation whatsoever. Just like in dreams, one moment you’re here with one person, the next moment you’re there with another.  

    To give some theoretical grounding to all of this seemingly inexplicable imagery is French psychoanalyst and semiotician Jacques Lacan’s idea that dreams function in the same way that language does, that our subconscious mind is structured just like how language is structured. And now it’s time for a minor league lesson in linguistics. (This next part may seem completely unrelated and unnecessary but if you follow me here for a bit I promise it will lead somewhere.)The 19th century Swiss linguistics professor Ferdinand de Saussure is credited for founding the Structuralist school of linguistics, which stated that languages function as a structure and that each sign in a sign system (i.e. each word in a given language) receives its meaning from its place in said system. For example, the word “dog” does not have any actual connection to the animal it represents, and if you trace back the etymology of any given word it will eventually just lead back to some person who just made it up. We understand the word “dog” however, because we are familiar with the system it fits into— that is to say we know the English language. So if we are unfamiliar with what a word means we simply look it up in the dictionary, where we are only met with more words, it’s a never-ending chain (“there is nothing outside the text”- Jacques Derrida). It is exactly like in algebra. You can solve for a variable as long as you know what the rest of the variables in your given equation represent. Both math and language are sign systems, and the study of sign systems is referred to as semiotics. When we study what signs in our dreams signify we ourselves become semioticians.

      Saussure also displayed how figures of speech in language such as metaphor, simile, metonymy, and synecdoche work because of this idea of words as simply variables in the overall equation of language. These forms of symbolism like metaphor and simile achieve their effect of representation because of what is known as “paradigmatic substitution.” For example, if I want to talk about how “my dog loves to eat” I have more than just that one option of phrasing in the English language. Instead of saying “my dog loves to eat” I could instead substitute other words and say “my hound loves to grub” and still get across the same meaning. But what allows for interesting metaphors is how far we can stretch this concept of substituting words— i.e. instead of saying “my love is strong for you” I can say “my love burns for you”, and now suddenly “fire” is a metaphor for “my love”. This is what also allows for that weird thing in dreams where certain things stand in for other things. For example I often have dreams where I’m in my old high school but the building is a completely different building, yet I’m still 100% conscious of my surroundings as “My High School” despite my subconscious having substituted some other building entirely in place. It is almost like our subconscious is one giant rolling thesaurus of signs. Hence when in Eraserhead the bed that Henry is having sex with “The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall” in suddenly and with no explanation turns into the same bubbling bath that at the beginning of the movie that stood in itself as a substitution for the female reproductive egg. It’s a never-ending chain of symbols, much like how a dictionary is a never-ending chain of words.