PRESENTATION!!! Hurrah!

TECHNOLOGY AND DISTANCE IN JENNIFER EGAN’S THE KEEP AND JERZY KOSINSKI’S BEING THERE

Relevant Theory/Criticism:

Jean Baudrillard:Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible

Mark William Roche: We increasingly fear empty time, time without the television running, without a Walkman on our heads, without a computer game in our hands, because we can no longer know how to make use of it

Roche on Heidegger:  Humanity encounters in this age its own products, not its essence, and it responds to this inner emptiness with the creation of newer and newer gadgets

Gregor Goethals, The TV Ritual: In a society that has tended to de-emphasize the sacramental, it may be that ritualization of even the most nonsacred events is a response to a ritually deprived population

TV, more than any other medium gives models to the American people–models for life as it is, or should, or can be lived

Sven Birkerts: It is not television that is conforming to modern life so much as it is modern life that is taking on the hues of the medium

Textual References:

The Keep: description of Danny as “a lot of black clothes covering up a lot of white skin Danny made even whiter with Johnson’s baby powder.  Straight dyed-black hair an inch past his neck…He looked clearest to himself standin buck naked in front of the mirror so he could see the dregs of the many IDs he had tried on”

Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny…Being in one place and thinking about another place could make him feel at home

 

Being There: “By changing the channel, he could change himself”

Self-identification with TV: “the figure on the TV screen looked like his own reflection in a mirror” 

Chance’s relation to sex: “on television he had never seen the unnaturally enlarged hidden parts of men and women, or these freakish embraces”

 

Conclusion:  Technology creates a simulataneous bridging of great distances and creation of interpersonal, physical distance as a result of the dependency on devices such as the television and the cellphone for connections to others.  Both Egan and Kosinski’s novels characterize the impact of technology on the identity of the self, with the prevalence of technology acting as a barrier to forming deep relationships between humans even while linking the characters to hundreds, if not millions of other inhabitants of Earth through television and global telecommunications technology.

Ray, you Copy Cat!

So, seeing as both Ray and Danny are injured within the span of 30 pages, I think there’s a clear connection being made here.  Earlier on, Ray insisted that he was none of the characters in his story, and implied that he heard the tale from someone else.  If this is really the case, and Ray is writing about the imaginary world it seems strange that the two protagonists would become seriously injured at the same time.  I though it was exceptionally odd that Danny falls out of the window first chronologically, followed by Ray’s surprising shanking by Tom-Tom.  It almost seemed to me (in the creepy PoMo gothic horror sort of way) that Danny’s injury caused Ray’s.  (Secret Window moment, anyone?)

I also noticed that Danny pays an awful lot of attention to the stolen hunting knife he has put very close to his heart  (171), just as Ray spends a lot of time remarking on the shank used by Tom-Tom: “It was one of those nasty shanks, she says, which I know means a Christmas tree.  Christmas trees have prongs angled along the sides so when you pull one out it brings a good chunk of your guts out with it”  (181).  The focus on weapons and their proximity to the body seems to be a recurring theme with both Danny and Ray.  Is one inspiration for the other?  By that, I mean, does Ray focus more upon his own wounding after writing about Danny’s fascination with a knife, or does Ray write about Danny’s fascination with the blade because of his injury?

Another cross-textual connection was Danny’s fear of being trapped in the small town in the middle of who knows where with only one way out in the form of a once daily train (Parole/release).  Then, on 179, Mick explains: “Howard’s doing me the favor…If I violate my parole, he has to deal with bringing me back and notifying the board”  (179), echoing Danny’s realization that “Except it had always been–he was trapped here.  He was Howard’s prisoner.”  The use of prison imagery and prisoner/parolee relationships must stem directly from Ray’s prison experience.  For a further doppelganger-type connection, check this out:

Mick turned to him.  You looked in a mirror lately?

Not if I can help it.  (174)

Mirrors, being the classic symbols of doubling that they are, might imply that Ray is looking at himself through Danny in this section.  So the final question is, is the process of writing reflective of one’s self, or is it just a way of reimagining oneself?

I’ve spent some time in the think tank

Lately, I’ve been doing a whole lot of thinking on my research topic: Technology and its impact on the contemporary novel.  The Keep is a pretty obvious choice for this one, seeing as it forced me to really consider the role of technology in both the novel and society.  The more I thought about it, the more connections I drew with personal experience and my reading history because let’s face it; almost everyone has a cell phone and Internet access.  In other words, unless you’re down with the idea of a commune in the woods somewhere, technology is pretty much inescapable.  As a result, it exerts an influence (probably more profound than we even realize) on everyone’s lives.  Consider what your life would be like without any of the products you’ve ordered online or without any of the lightning fast knowledge you’ve gained via Google and Wikipedia, let alone the rest of the web.  Scary, right?

 

As I contemplated the role of technology and gadgetry in other novels I’ve read, Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves pop into mind.  Although they are both very different books (besides the 700+ page difference in length) both Kosinski and Danielewski incorporate the idea of technology into the form and content of the novel.  Being There is the story of a man who has grown up isolated in a house and for all purposes, does not exist as a member of society.  He does nothing but watch TV and garden and has no birth certificate, driver’s license, or any real interaction with the outside world except for his television.  Eventually, he ends up being integrated into the real world and becomes popular for his insular world view and proceeds to be filmed on TV, giving him an unreal sense of being one of those magical beings whom he has always watched.  It’s a pretty interesting book and it’s just a little over 100 pages, so it’s a really quick read.  House of Leaves is an out of control post-modern mega-text that incorporates at least four frames of reference, hundreds of outside sources both real and imagined, and enough metafictional elements to make Jennifer Egan puke.  While not focused directly on technology as a theme, Danielewski’s play with typeset, the orientation of text on the page, and the inclusion of visuals and obscenely long appendices and lists places it firmly in the 21^st century. 

 

What all three of these novels have in common is a departure from the standard form and content of say, a narrative along the lines of Madame Bovary.  Personally, I’m much more interested in contemporary literature because I want to see the result of modern minds at work, as strange and pointless as it can often end up being.  I think my big question is whether the inclusion/imitation of technological mediums for narrative will carry over into the novel successfully, forcing the form to evolve, or if the Internet and movies are slowly putting the novel out to pasture.  Who knows?  I hope it’s the first option, but only time and a lot of silly (also mostly dead, mostly post-modern) French literary critics will tell.   

Death Death Death!

So, if anyone else is at all like me, you were probably surprised when Mick shot Danny in the head, connecting him to Ray and making the larger story an extension of the inner narrative at the Keep. It’s kind of tough for me to break it down because there are so many things going on at once, and so many narrative shifts and breaks with reality and chronology. When Mick/Ray says, “But I don’t have a list. I liked Danny. He reminded me of me” (220) I though it was important for two (maybe even three [1 per sentence?]) reasons. First off, both Danny and Ray had made several lists throughout the text as an attempt to keep track of things, make sure facts were clear, and from my standpoint, to pop the reader out of the text and make them think about what they were reading by breaking up the form. Because there’s no list here, I wonder if Ray is trying to focus my attention on what’s happening in the story, or if he really just has no outside commentary on the death. The one exception is the breaking up of this section into the various “Phases” of feelings following the escape from the torture chamber. I connected this with the multi-step process of grief, and figured that it was an accurate description of how people cope with a traumatic situation (with the exception of blowing someone’s head off).
That Mick liked Danny seems to imply that he was either suffering from a major loss of control, worried about Howard’s safety more than his own, or possibly that Egan is flirting with the notion that crime, especially violent crime, can often not be explained by ordinary means or motivations. With the death of Danny comes a death of Mick, seeing as he has to give up his second chance and return to prison, forfeiting his effort of the past two months. I also wonder if the line “I liked Danny,” is an apologetic note to Holly, hoping that she’ll understand this event and try not to see Ray as a terrible person for what he had done.
Thirdly, the sentence “He reminded me of me,” touches on the idea of doubling and self-identification that I’ve already talked about. When in the strange death Phase [10], Danny tells Ray: “We’re twins. There’s no separating us…I hope you like to write,” (221) I felt that a connection was made between the author and the characters and the way that investment in a fictional being can affect a real life. Clearly, Danny and Mick are both characters who reflect aspects of Ray through their fictionalization, and because Ray spent so much time on Danny shows the effect that both he and his death imposed on Ray’s life. As Davis would probably say, sometimes the voices of dead are stronger than the living.

Problems KEEPing Track of Identity

While reading Native Speaker, we spent a lot of time as a class discussing Henry’s lack of identity and lack of cohesion when trying to come up with a complete picture of himself.  It seemed as though Henry could only explain his current situation by explaining all of his past selves.  In The Keep, both Danny and Howard seem to be suffering from a Park-ian (can I do that, or is it too soon to create adjectives from characters in Native Speaker?) lack of wholeness in their lives.  Danny reflects on his sense of self being shattered when he entered college at NYU: “because ‘self-exploration’ is always dangerous for that nice outline you thought was you.  And Danny’s outline turned out to be fainter than most people’s”  (34).  I think that this sensation is part of the college experience, or at least it has been for me, but that Danny is still thinking back on it as being dangerous 15 years after the fact says a lot about his desire to understand if there is any substance to his life.

 

Danny’s transformation of clothing and lifestyles is also a testament to his lack of wholeness.  It’s also interesting that the observation comes not from the narrator or Danny’s mind, but rather from Nora’s point of view: “Straight dyed-black hair an inch past his neck.  A pewter hoop in one ear with a ruby stuck in it.  Today (not always), mud-colored lipstick.  That was Danny’s style, one of many he’d had over the years”  (27).  First off, Danny is a much odder-looking character than I pictured on page 1.  Secondly, I think Egan overdoes how little Danny understands of himself, although his disbelief in Howard’s transformation is very important.  That Howard could realize his flaws and capitalize on only the good from his childhood (as far as I’ve seen so far) makes him an excellent foil to Danny.

 

Speaking of foil, it’s time to wrap this all up.  With the dual narration of the book, AuthoràRay and RayàDanny, I think The Keep is fascinating in its ability to tell two stories concurrently and effectively.  Along with Howard and Danny’s changing personalities, I think that Danny’s spotting of the young woman in the castle’s keep touches on a continuing theme of transformation of the self.  Maybe that’s what this book is really about, after all. 

For the Politics Junkies

I’ve got to admit that as interested as I usually am in politics, I didn’t spend a lot of energy looking at the actual political angle of Kwang because the themes of race and language were so much more compellingly written about. Now that I can step out of the immediate experience of reading Native Speaker, it is a little easier to look at the big picture of plot, synthesizing all the tidbits of stories Henry gives us and making some sense out of the larger puzzle of the novel.

I’m trying to decide if Lee is making more of a statement about America or about immigrants. By portraying Kwang as overly ambitious and as flawed as any “perfect” politician. I though especially important was the conversation between Henry and Jack that acts as both a debriefing on the Kwang assignment and a commentary on the role of immigrants in the United States. Jack, including himself along with Park and other immigrants, says, “What you and I want is a little bit of the good life. If we work hard, and do not question the rules too much, we can get a piece of what they have” (288) echoing the sentiments of Henry’s father and many other immigrants who see themselves as only capable of achieving acceptance and comfort through long years of hard, selfless work.

Later on, Henry contributes to the discussion: “when someone like Kwang attempts anything larger, there’s instant suspicion” (288) giving the sense that any foreigner, no matter how well assimilated they are is a target for the status quo should he or she be bold enough to question the order of things. I thought the image of the newscast of the accident and its surrounding turmoil was particularly shocking in its treatment of Kwang: “They run old footage of John Kwang from various points during his career, almost a retrospective as though he has died” (328). I can easily envision this sort of report on a local news channel, as I am sure you can. This is the moment where it is absolutely clear that Kwang is done. Local opinion is against him, and there is no hope of finding him on the side of the law.

It was also important that Henry imagines his mother’s opinion of Kwang: “She would have called John Kwang a fool long before any scandal ever arose…What did he want from this country? Didn’t he know that he could only get so far with his face so different and broad? He should have had ambition for only his little family” (333). Lee seems to be saying that there is little hope for the ambitious immigrant, especially those of color. Although it is not a message of hope and I certainly hope it isn’t the case (see Presidential election ’08) Lee makes a strong argument against the racist sentiments floating around in both the field of politics and mainstream American opinion.

Bilingualism

In the last section of Native Speaker I found myself paying attention to Henry’s treatment of his bilingualism and his apparent fear of the Korean in himself and the use of the language by others.  In Henry’s typical fashion, he is extremely, maybe even unhealthily aware of his handling of the language as well as the way in which the others characters use their native tongue.  

On 273, when Kwang addresses Henry by his Korean name, Park Byong-ho shih, his response is: “I stop.  I always freeze for a second when hearing my Korean name.”  Clearly, Henry is apprehensive about his Korean identity, and his fear of his given name would seem to imply that he is incredibly uncomfortable about admitting his Korean upbringing among others.  This fear is even more clear when Henry discusses the experience of visiting Korean dry cleaners:  ”When I step into a Korean dry cleaner, or a candy shop, I always feel like an audience member asked to stand up and sing with the diva, that I know every pitch and note but can no longer call them forth” (267).  I know this feeling really well.  More than once someone has asked me to come on stage at a bar an wanted me to sing or play guitar for a song or two.  Honestly, it sucks.  You know that you can do it, but without the time to mentally prepare yourself (depending on the amount of liquid courage involved) I generally find myself trapped in a strange limbo between the crowd and the act.  So when Henry is forced to speak Korean to other Koreans in America, I can see why he would feel strange, even with a firm grasp on the language.

It would also help to bring in the authority of Nigerian-born author Chinua Achebe (who now teaches just south of here at Bard College) in an article by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, titled “The Language of African Literature.”   Thiong’o quotes Achebe: “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience.  But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings” (436).  Although Africa is not Asia, I think Henry’s problem is his disagreement with Achebe’s statement of connecting language with his ancestral culture.  He is out of synch with his roots, rebelling (along with his father) in order to be more acceptable to American society, or at least what the Park’s perceived American society to be.

With the prevalence of silence in Henry’s life, and then his insistence that Mitt not learn Korean so that he could “grow up with a singular sense of the world, a life univocal, which might have offered him the authority and confidence that his broad half-yellow face could not” (267).  The only place where Henry really has power over language is when he limits Mitt’s, and unfortunately, Mitt’s singular view of the world is never allowed to blossom.  Bilingualism is definitely a touchy subject for Henry, but I think the split of thinking and speaking in two tongues, the imposed language being more comfortable than the traditional, sets up Henry’s split(s) from himself on the most basic level.

Silencing the Speaker

What really stuck out to me (which I pointed out in class briefly yesterday) is the amount of silence in Native Speaker.  So much is said through nothing at all that the cold stares and non-existent conversations of Henry and his family, and later Henry and Lelia define the novel in many ways.  

One of the really stunning examples of this is the death of Henry’s mother, who is always called either “mother” or “spouse,” and is characterized so slimly, like Ajuhma, that more is told about her by her silence and lack of emotion than if she were to be given lots of dialogue.  That Henry’s father refuses to say anything about his spouse’s illness, and when he does, he ends up lying about it sets the stage for Henry’s silence and manipulative nature later on: “I have trouble remembering the details of her illness because she and my father kept it from me until they couldn’t hide it any longer…for me it was more a disappearance than a death”  (77).  

The lack of any real dialogue about Henry’s mother or her death reminds me of the similarly obscured death of Mitt, which is foreshadowed, and hinted at, but never fully explained.  Apparently, the lack of explanation isn’t only true for the reader, Henry and Lelia also refuse to discuss their son’s death.  Lelia calls Henry out on his silence in an argument following their separation: “You haven’t said his name more than four or five times since it happened.  You haven’t said his name tonight.  Maybe you’ve talked all this time with Jack about him, maybe you says his name in your sleep, but we’ve never really talked about it, we haven’t really come right out together and said it, really named what happened for what it was”  (129).  Clearly, Lelia is in a lot of pain here, and though expressed in a different way, so is Henry.  Just as the novel is structured, Henry cannot bring up the issues that really matter without skirting around them on tangents and inventing multiple selves to share the burden of the truth.  With this argument, the question of truth comes up–what did really happen with Mitt?  Who is Henry? 

The problem is, it seems that we the reader, and Henry the narrator do not actually know the events of his life.  Mirroring a statement made after we’re told about Mitt’s death, “I’ve read the dying feel no pain but sense everything that goes on around them. They view the scene from a brief distance…but we are the living on the ground, and what we know is narrow and broken”  (106).  It would seem that Henry, from this viewpoint on life and death, at least, is not really sure if he’s dead or alive.  If we consider the lack of openly stated emotions for the majority of the novel, it makes sense that Henry is dead in a sense, at least socially.

Descent into Dionysian Madness with Carlevale

Although I saw the similarities between Dionysus and Myra (most likely popping up as a result of the various mentions of the god himself, in addition to allusions to other Greek mythical beings) I completely forgot about the relation between Dionysus and theatre until I read Carlevale’s article “The Dionysian Revival in American Fiction of the Sixties.”  Carlevale discusses the magic of transformation and make-believe, exhibited so well by those in Hollywood, and more specifically, those students at Buck Loner’s school that Myra witnesses as they try to assume different identities, both on the screen and off.  Carlevale writes “The magic that enables the actors to change identities enables the audience to do so as well. ‘It is easy for these young people,’ Myra observes of her students at the Academy in particular and of American young people generally, ‘to be anything since they are so plainly nothing, and know it’” (387).  

The play with identity obsesses Carlevale just as much as it captivates Myra’s attention in the novel, and brought my attention back to the Greek communal/religious festivals in which plays would be put on in honor of the god Dionysus.  Worshipped for wine just as much as his inspiration to the arts, the loss of inhibitions represented by Dionysus are incredibly important for both the time period of the 1960s as well as Myra’s ability to change her identity not just once but three times within the course of the novel, all the while commenting upon the identities of others.  By inhabiting Hollywood and being surrounded by actors and actresses who all seem to be searching for themselves by way of disguise, Vidal allows himself to comment on sexuality, American culture, and the need for personal identity in one fell swoop.  

With the Hollywood and the Academy in mind, Dionysus and his power of transformation through sex, art, alcohol and drugs becomes a symbol for the period of cultural change crystallized in Myra Breckinridge.  Carlevale made all of this come together for me, linking Hollywood’s necessary emptiness of identity through the assumption of new forms with the also necessarily ambiguous identity of Myra/Myron in order to create a novel that discusses American culture through the lens of outdated Greek ritual.  If I had to sum it up in one sentence: Carlevale found something culturally applicable in Dionysus that many other writers in the 1960s latched onto, including Vidal with Myra Breckinridge.

Like a Greek God(dess)

Though Myra Breckinridge is splattered with religious imagery and its side effects (circumcision/Puritanism & sex, etc), I found it exceptionally fascinating how many references to different gods and goddesses were brought up during the rape and destruction of Rusty’s masculinity. 

In one passage, Myra writes: “I approached him, dildo in front of me like the god Priapus personified,”  (183) referring to the Greco-Roman god of fertility, gardening, fruit plants, and more importantly for Myra, male genitalia.  I did some research on Priapus and found out that he began mainly as a joke of a god, having few truly dedicated followers, but became immensely popular as time passed, giving the Roman Catholic church a lot of trouble from pagan followers in the early days of Christianity.  

Most depictions of Priapus emphasize his massive member, drawing a clear connection to Myra’s frighteningly large dildo (although it’s important to note that this rubber representation of male sexuality was borrowed from a man under the pretense of using it for artistic reasons, and was not actually Myra’s to use sexually).  

As fitting as the god of long schlong is, I found it fascinating that Myra remarks, “I delved and spanned that innocent flesh. Oh, it was a holy moment. I was one with the Bacchae”  (184).  For some quick history, the Bacchae are the female followers of the god Dionysus (god of wine, ritual madness/ecstasy/generally partying hard and having a good time) who would get so ecstatic celebrating with Dionysus that they were lose their minds, become sexually aroused, and generally tear animals and humans to pieces in their madness.  So for Myra to see herself as holy and see herself as one of the Bacchae, she is insinuating that this act is a ritual both sexual and cannibalistic as she destroys Rusty both sexually and physically.  

Earlier on, I though the inclusion of “holy” throughout the text as well as frequent blasphemous references to Christianity were simply included to shock and offend the audience of the 60s (which I’m sure still happened).  After finishing Myra, however, I see the union of sex, power, and ritual as a very religious sort of experience for Myra.  She is fulfilling her deepest fantasies, which can only be a feeling of ecstasy, and the mythic way she describes herself and her sex acts with Rusty is symptomatic of the grand vision Myra is realizing.  

Is Myra Breckinridge a religious text?  In many ways, the mythologies of stardom/the American dream/television/sex as the ultimate culmination of human experience represents the cultural shift of American minds from a focus on religion to a focus on sex and entertainment.  

Clearly, in a country where “In God We Trust” is written on the money used to buy both entertainment and sex, it’s hard to avoid the discussion of religion when critiquing our society in any way, and Vidal had to be very aware of this when writing Myra Breckinridge.