Microsoft Word A. Stewart ma thesis Final doc
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resonance. In this way, the novel’s sites of historical encounter take on a kind of material being, coded into the landscape in much the same way that a switchback both shapes and is shaped by the terrain, moving travelers along risky vertical grades by increments that turn ever back upon themselves, engaging in a constant process of re-confrontation in which the past is no longer something that can be left behind.
Movement through Vineland County is “a long, intimidating drive upward through crowds of tall trees, perilous switchbacks, one-lane stretches hugging the mountainsides, pavement not always there—then a sunset so early [the driver] thought at first something must have happened, an eclipse, or worse” (223). In the last two words of this passage—“or worse”—lie the stakes that the switchback by turn encodes and exposes at the all-but-unsignable heart of this novel: that 1984 America dwells in the shadow of the bomb that hovers overhead at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow; that the rise of the techno-capitalist state has destabilized the ontological status of human being in a way that looms always at the periphery of experience—intimidating, erosive, eclipse- like, as the quoted passage above suggests—and cannot be erased by the strategically deployed discursive strategies of the controllers of history. Critics of Vineland have called its historical engagement sentimental, too drenched in popular culture, and short on the fearless poetics of V. and Gravity’s Rainbow. Stefan Mattessich writes, somewhat scathingly, that unlike Gravity’s Rainbow “it lacks the ambition to reconstitute its own discourse” (212), it is a novel “about preterite characters without being itself preterite” (231). However, as this thesis demonstrates, by approaching the novel through its switchbacks, what emerges is not a lack, but rather a radical discursive reconstituting in which the switchback spatializes a narrative strategy of resistance for the Pynchonian
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preterite. In the novel’s switchback narrativity, the spatial encoding of the erasures and contests of history are laid bare, not permitted the status of “an ever-accumulating history marching straight forward in plot and denouement,” as Edward Soja writes, “for too much is happening against the grain of time, too much is continually traversing the story- line laterally” (23). This lateral motion is not only mapped by the switchback narrative, it is exposed as already present, concealed but coded into the material constituents—the trees and rivers, roads and bridges—of the landscapes, cityscapes, and in-between zones of movement and transition that populate this novel.
As this project’s investment in spatio-material encoding suggests, I assume throughout the following pages that in Vineland, discursive and material structures are not obviously set up as the kind of fraught dialectic Bill Brown describes as “a human condition in which things inevitably seem too late—belated, in fact, because we want things to come before ideas, before theory, before the word, whereas they seem to persist in coming after: as the alternative to ideas, the limit of theory, victims of the word” (16).
rather by relations of entanglement in which the material world functions as the inscriber of its own kind of text. As much as it is the inscription of its human community on the landscape, Vineland County is also written by the North Coast/Klamath bioregion in which it is set, as in the case of a parking lot near the beginning of the novel which “had never been paved, and the local weather had been writing gullies across it for years” (9). The entanglements of spatio-material encoding here encompass the parking lot (a text that delineates a certain kind of space—a human and technological space—and use of that space), the municipal move not to pave the lot (a negation, whether political or
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economic, of the hegemony of the parking lot text), the local weather (the corrosive etchings of wind and rain and temperature their own forms of authorship), the dirt of the lot (a story of becoming-gullied, a counter-narrative to that of the tire’s tread). The entanglements of discursive and material beings here signal a historicity defined by a contest for narrative space as it is encoded within the materialized spaces of this novel.
At stake in this contest for narrative space is not only what discursive networks and strategies will be deployed over what ground, but who or what the authors of these narratives, the actors in this contest, will be. In her reading of literary islands, ecocritical theorist Jean Arnold emphasizes that not only do “architectonic geographical formations…lend their forms to the structure of ideas or meanings that unfold in literature” (26), but they also serve “as causal agent[s] of cultural beliefs and practices” (33). The possibility implied here—that nonhuman beings can be thought as “causal agent[s]”—is taken seriously in Vineland, where switchbacks and weather patterns (along with a supporting cast of evil corporations, sinister government agencies, and techno- capitalist cityscapes) take on agential roles, “personally aware, possessing a life and will” (VL 202). 1 The novel, then, may be approached as populated by both human and nonhuman actors entangled in contests over spatio-material authority. I use actors throughout this argument in the sense given by Bruno Latour as part of his deconstruction of the subject-object binary. He writes that “actors are defined above all as obstacles, scandals, as what suspends mastery, as what gets in the way of domination, as what interrupts the closure and the composition of the collective. To put it crudely, human and nonhuman actors appear first of all as troublemakers” (81). And I would add to this list of
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Throughout this document, parenthetical citations will abbreviate Vineland to VL, Gravity’s Rainbow to GR, and The Crying of Lot 49 to CL49. Yüklə 408,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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