Outside, America

Outside, America
Outside, America
The Temporal Turn in Contemporary
American Fiction
Hikaru Fujii
N E W Y OR K L ON DON N E W DE L H I SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
Hikaru Fujii, 2013
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EISBN: 978-1-4411-2252-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fujii, Hikaru.
Outside, America : the temporal turn in contemporary
American fiction / by Hikaru Fujii.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-6187-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. American fictionHistory
and criticism. 2. Space and time in literature. 3. Personal space in literature.
4. National characteristics, American, in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology)
in literature. 6. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title.
PS374.S73F85 2013
813.009353dc23
2012044418
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
vii
ix
Part One Vanishing Space
1Journey to the End of the Father:Paul Therouxs Battlefield of

Masculinity in The Mosquito Coast
2THE American Travelers Love And Solitude: The Atlas, or

William T. Vollmanns Pragmatics of the Double
21
3Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity in

Denis Johnsons Already Dead: A California Gothic
35
4Where the Tide Rises and Ebbs: Power, Becoming, and America in
Steve Ericksons Rubicon Beach
49
Part Two Time Will Tell
63
5A Man with a Green Memory: War, Cinema, and Freedom in

Stephen Wrights Meditations in Green
67
6Time and Again: The Outside and the Narrative Pragmatics in

Don DeLillos The Body Artist
83
7WWDD (What Would Disney Do)?: Cinematic Field and

Narrative Act in Richard Powerss Prisoners Dilemma
95
8Writing from a Different Now: Question of Ahistorical

Time in Contemporary Los Angeles Fiction
109
Conclusion
123
Works Cited
Index
131
139
Acknowledgments
This book is based on my doctoral dissertation, which I submitted to Hokkaido
University, Japan, in 2007. Since then, I have made sporadic attempts at editing it,
dropping half the chapters and writing new ones to replace them. All the chapters of
Outside, America have been previously published in academic journals, and I am deeply
grateful to the referees and editors for their instructive and encouraging comments.
As a Japanese scholar instructed almost exclusively in Japan, I owe my entire
academic achievement to the rich tradition of literary criticism in the country. It is one
of my greatest regrets to be unable to cite from all the inspiring ideas and perspectives
provided by Japanese scholars; I realize how my project seems small compared to their
achievements. The least I could do was to mention their names when needed.
Every word in this book owes its existence to a number of generous people who
have supported me throughout my decade-long scholarly journey through five
citiesSapporo, Tokyo, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Kyoto. First of all, I would like
to thank Eijun Senaha, my advisor in Sapporo, who introduced me to the world of
literary criticism when I was an undergraduate. He has always been, and will always
be, my invaluable mentor, both academically and personally. My study in the graduate
program in Hokkaido University would not have been possible without the members
of the Hokkaido American Literature Society, who have given me many opportunities
to present my ideas. My gratitude also goes to Motoyuki Shibata at the University of
Tokyo, who gave me generous encouragement as well as opportunities to translate
contemporary American novels. And many thanks to Ted Goossen and his family,
whose generosity and hospitality made my Toronto days unforgettable. Thanks to my
students and colleagues at Doshisha University in Kyoto.
My father in Osaka and my mother in Kobe, as well as my parents-in-law in Sapporo,
have always supported my study; I will always feel indebted to their trust. My deepest
gratitude goes to my wife, Mayuko, for being beside me from the first word to the last;
and to my daughter, Koume, who made us unafraid to carry on in this world.
Introduction
Toward the outside
The central inspiration for this book, Outside, America, is undeniably Deleuzian: it will
argue that, in contemporary American novels, the outside as a spatial idea reveals
its limits, and a shift of focus to its temporal dimension is found. Consequently, the
expansive idea of the outside space, which has provided the framework of American
imagination, is transformed into a nonnationalistic mode. Despite its simplicity, this
shift introduces a set of mutations in many aspects of conventional literary motifs and
styles.
The space outside has been a key idea in defining American character from the
very inception of the state, as Michael J. Shapiro argues, The democratic proclivities
that Tocqueville ascribed to America were enabled by a more open model of
space.1 A similar insight comes from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: liberty is
made sovereign and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open
and continuous process of expansion. The frontier is a frontier of liberty.2 This
preoccupation with the open nature of the land and American identity has framed
American literature from its early phase. The westward travel has thus become one
of the most significant motifs in American literature; in Ronald Primeaus words, the
need for defining a national identity sends many writers on the road in search of
their country.3 Typically seen in such narratives of the road, in which the myth of the
West functions as a driving force of writing, open space is where one can achieve the
sense of freedomSal Paradise in Jack Kerouacs On the Road leaves his home for the
West Coast to pursue this ideal.
This idea of outside space as an essential condition of American identity is critically
examined in contemporary fiction, partly due to its complicity with the violent
expansion and appropriation that marked the history of the continent. Indeed, the
majority identity, white male American, has been formed in relation to this notion of
mobilityfor example, Alexandra Ganser describes the spatial idea as the hegemonic
construction of gendered space4which entails a number of power relationships
Michael J. Shapiro, Bowling Blind: Post Liberal Civil Society and the Worlds of Neo-Tocquevillean
Social Theory, Theory & Event 1.1 (1997), para 2.
2
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), 169.
3
Ronald Primeau, Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green:
Bowling Green State UP, 1996), 15.
4
Alexandra Ganser, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Womens Road
Narratives, 19702000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 18.
1
Outside, America
between genders, races, and so on. The critique of the spatial concept of the outside,
therefore, involves more than perception of space; it is inseparable from the question
of the basis of American subjectivity.
Contemporary novels discussed in Outside, America push the spatial idea of the
outside to its limit, at which point the concept breaks down. Wherever the characters
travel, they cannot reach pure space of freedom; they find that their identity is not
so much a free entity as a product of power relationships. At the same time, those
narratives give a glimpse of a new question of time where space reveals its inability
to sustain the myth of the free individual. It is in this sense that the discussion of
this book keeps returning to the city on the lands edge, Los Angeles, because of its
singular location, both in American geography and imagination, as a place where the
westward movement of the American Dream encounters its limit.5 There is no more
outside space: this sense of impasse haunts Los Angeles as it appears in contemporary
fiction, in which the belief in the future is replaced by the premonition of personal
and social catastrophe. This condition also gives rise to a fundamental change of
view; with the exhaustion of the spatial notion of freedom, a preoccupation with
time emergesthe outside appears as a temporal dimension in contemporary
literary imaginings.
Of course, the concern with time in fiction is not new in itself: the place of fictional
narrative in the world has altered since the beginning of the twentieth century. Mark
Currie points out, and . . . fiction has been one of the places in which a new experience
of time has been rehearsed, developed and expressed.6 Yet the time of the outside as
it functions in the American framework in contemporary fiction offers a significant
critical perspective on narrative temporality and its relationship with the collective and
social dimensions.
Contemporary literary texts in Outside, America, in examining the American self,
find that the spatial outside goes hand in hand with a stable sense of time or historical
sense of time; the space ahead, waiting to be reached and appropriated, necessarily
produces a linear notion of time, in which the American character travels straight
toward his/her destination: hence the recurring image of a road stretching toward
the horizon. The critique of the self, therefore, must be accompanied by attempts at
activating different modes of time. The exploration of the outside, then, ceases to be a
journey to an external space where one can achieve a sense of freedom and wholeness.
Rather, it seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference by which current
This is why the city is frequently portrayed negatively in the genre of road narratives. Sal Paradise
avoids Los Angeles throughout Jack Kerouacs On the Road, for the city is perceived as a sort of
black hole for the traveler. Arriving at the city for the first time, Paradise sees the whole mad thing,
the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America (Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York:
Penguin, 1957), 83), stressing the citys location in relation to the American Dream. For the traveler
on the road, the city marks the end of his journey.
6
Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2007), 6.
5
Introduction
xi
subjectivity, both in its individual and collective aspects, is transformed. Elizabeth

Groszs thesis, the outside is the transmutability of the inside,7 best describes such a
view. Outside, America is an attempt to put this notion in action.
Pragmatics of time
Crucial in this interrogation of American identity from the perspective of time is the
idea that narrative is an act that practices a specific mode of temporality. Literary
works do not mean so much as they function8this Deleuzian insight also applies to
the question of time. In contrast to the linear or integrated narrative forms that follow
the logic of identity, fragmentary and repetitious styles are understood as pragmatic
constructions of different modes of temporality that would enable the exploration of
the outside of history and identity.
Frederic Jameson is right in describing postmodernism as an age that has forgotten
how to think historically.9 A crucial question in this condition is not making a choice
between flat denial and conservation of historical sense; instead, how to activate
a multiplicity of temporalities through narrative act in resisting the rule of a single
teleological model has become a vital concern of contemporary American writers.
Our narratives, Declan Sheerin argues, may be born from different breeds and
hybrids of larval selves.10 A key insight in this line of inquiry is offered by Elizabeth
Deeds Ermarth, who maintains that postmodern narrative language undermines
historical time and substitutes for it a new construction of temporality.11 While she
pays attention to readers time,12 the discussion of time in Outside, America tries to
focus on a specific mode of time in each literary text.
This view of literary texts as practices with specific temporal effects of the outside
is close to the pragmatic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, rather than
Paul Ricoeurs phenomenology based on the time of an individual consciousness.13
Instead of narrative identity . . . understood in the sense of oneself as self-same,14
narrative, seen as a practice, induces a break or a deviation from the given contours
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT
P, 2001), 66.
8
Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (New York: Routledge, 2003), 187.
9
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP,
1991), ix.
10
Declan Sheerin, Deleuze and Ricouer: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self (New York:
Continuum, 2009), 96.
11
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 14.
12
Ibid., 69.
13
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 244.
14
Ibid., 246.
7
xii
Outside, America
of the self. In a sense, this book tries to bring out a new possibility of Brian McHales
seminal thesis that the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological,15 for the
preoccupation with the outside as being time16 as potential mutation of current
subjectivity is inexorably ontological in nature. Therefore, the fundamental attitude
of the project is ethical: to avoid the logic of identity, namely the reproduction of the
current power-relationship, and to seek other possibilities in the outside.
Accordingly, Outside, America presupposes different uses of such postmodernist tools
as self-conscious metanarrative, insistence on textuality, principle of fragmentation, and
parodic repetition. It picks up these clichs in postmodernist literature to introduce
their new uses. As Jeffrey T. Nealon observes, it is a matter of attempting to extend,
broaden, or saturate certain effects within a given field, while trying to constrict, limit,
or downplay other effects.17 The fragmentary style in chapters 2 and 5, for instance,
does not suggest the mere absence of unity but calls for attention to how each fragment
operates and what kind of system, different from a unitary whole of a linear narrative
time, they constitute; the utilization of an existent form of narrative produces a new
effect in questioning the traditional mode of thinking. While Linda Hutcheon, in her
early attempt to define postmodernism, argues that it may at least show what needs
undoing first,18 the analysis of narrative temporality in this book will reveal that
contemporary literary texts take one step further to construct ahistorical modes of time.
The undertone of Ouside, America is, therefore, coherently positive and pragmatic. In a
way, these texts can be seen as anomalies of postmodernism: born out of its conditions,
they proceed further to the point where new effects are produced. The texts gathered
here occupy a threshold between the current literary mode and its potential future.
Map of the book

Although the word turn is used in its title, this book does not claim to be an
advocate of a radical shift of critical perspective, as linguistic, cultural turns did
(cognitive and affective ones are under way). The realization of the limits of space
and the exploration of temporality do not form a chronological, much less progressive,
development in literary imagination. Rather, those attempts only appear sporadically,
like random flashes, among contemporary fiction. Outside, America aims to serve as a
collection of those events to see what effects will be produced out of their connections.
To quote Grosz again, Texts, like concepts, do things, makes things, perform
connections, bring about new alignments.19 Far from a self-sufficient project, therefore,
this book is made up of temporary encounters and connections between literary texts.
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), 10.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 98.
17
Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2008), 95.
18
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), 23.
19
Grosz, Architecture, 58.
15
16
Introduction
xiii
The questions and motifs explored in one chapterfor instance, masculine identity,
the double, and cinematic worldwill be taken up again in others and given further
variations, which will eventually constitute a system always open to connections to
come. In a sense, the operation is similar to what Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari
call a map: The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable,
reversible, susceptible to constant modification.20
Outside, America is divided into two parts; the first part discusses how American
writers describe the limit of the spatial idea of the outside, while the second argues that
the dead end of space is replaced by temporal ideas. Though thematically divided, the
question of space and that of time cannot be separated completely; in many novels,
they appear entangled, presupposing each other. What distinguishes the two parts is
a focal point in each narrative: the novels discussed in the first part foreground the
relationship between the American subject and the concept of open space, with the
glimpse of a temporal motif lurking behind it, while those in the second pay more
attention to the question of time in their interrogation of current subjectivity.
Part One, Vanishing Space, begins with a brief look at Annie Proulxs Postcards,
focusing on the novels subversion of the myth of open space in road narratives while
tracing a mans journey, which turns from a straight westward movement into an
aimless wandering. Mainly set in the post-World War II American landscape, Proulxs
novel shows that the sociopolitical forces have seized every dimension of space, leaving
no outside to the lone traveler. Postcards completely overturns the imaginary topos of
the West as the space of freedom.
The following two chapters, dealing with traveling American men in Paul Therouxs
The Mosquito Coast and William T. Vollmanns The Atlas, take over this insight of
Proulx and interrogate the protagonists subjectivity formed in power relationships in
foreign landsthe movement beyond the border does not allow the idea of outside
space to survive. The characters travel to foreign lands in order to reach the space of
freedom, only to find that the relentless dynamics of power, especially those of gender,
are at work in every place.
The Mosquito Coast in Chapter 1 follows the journey of Allie Fox, a tyrannical father
who moves beyond the border with his family to establish his masculine subjectivity in
clear space in the late 1970s. His practices of masculinity exemplify that the fathers
gender identity is a product of power relationships; the outside space, the Honduran
jungle, is where the battle of subjectivization is fought. When his masculine identity
becomes untenable and eventually collapses, the novel offers a flash of a different
kind of outside, a temporal zone of the unknown, which is nevertheless sealed off in
another regime of masculinity in the coming decade.
William T. Vollmanns fragmentary work also questions the masculine identity, in
his case in the post-Cold War global context. The white male American traveler finds
that, everywhere he visits, power relationships inescapably establish his position as an
20
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum,
1987), 12.
xiv
Outside, America
intolerable American man who desperately struggles to find an ideal space of equality
and freedom. The travels to the outside places beyond the US border are eventually
confined into the self-conscious framework of the American experience, which leaves
no room for escapethe wanderer finds his doubles all over the world.
Denis Johnson in Chapter 3 also describes this American manhood at a dead
end, but his novel, Already Dead: A California Gothic, gives a glimpse of a temporal
mode of the outside. Referring to the Nietzschean philosophy, the novel pursues the
limit of the protagonists masculinity, namely a product of ressentiment, at the edge of
California. When the profound breakdown of his subjectivity takes place, a new mode
of self replaces the nihilistic identity, which involves a radical reconfiguration of the
past. The limits of space and subjectivity now witness a question of time.
Los Angeles in Steve Ericksons work serves in a similar fashion. In Chapter 4, the
city at the edge in his second novel, Rubicon Beach, is a site where the current self is
constantly eroded to become indefinite, and power relationships strives to confine it
in a knowable identity. This tug-of-war between escape and capture repeats itself over
time, constituting the matrix of American history. The outside of the given identity,
to which characters are attracted, reveals its aspect as an ahistorical mode of time.
These four chapters provide the foundation for Part Two, Time Will Tell, which will
take up the motifs and issues addressed in the previous part and explain how they will
undergo significant changes in the temporal dimension. In Operation Wandering Soul,
Richard Powers focuses on the temporal aspect of road narrativesthe traditional
attitude toward the space of freedom presupposes a linear mode of time that often
appears as progressing history. Set in a pediatric establishment in Los Angeles, Powerss
novel describes an impasse of such an idea of time and suggests that the outside lies
in an escape, not into open space, but into nonhistorical modes of time.
One of those temporalities is at work in Stephen Wrights Meditations in Green
discussed in Chapter 5. The novel focuses on the question of freedom in the theater of
the Vietnam War, which is constructed as a cinematic world of clichs, where soldiers
only play their determined roles. Seeking a way out of this frame, James Griffin, one of
the American soldiers, discovers the outside of this world in the in-between of time
that enables the constituted self to encounter its potential for mutation. The narrative,
made up of fragments of past and present arranged in a nonlinear order, practices a
temporality that defies the chronological time of identity.
Chapter 6 will take up Don DeLillos novella, The Body Artist, and explore a temporal
idea that alters the given view of the world and human identity. Using the motif of the
double in a repetitive style, the narrative activates a temporality of the outside in
which the body affirms its ever-changing condition in mutational time.
The idea of repetition and its temporal function is further exemplified in Chapter 7,
which analyzes Powerss Prisoners Dilemma, and provides a variation on the theme of
the cinematic world in the Cold War American landscape, where a communal effort
by characters to renarrate the past life of their father transforms their own subjectivity
in the big picture of the nation. Mobilizing the given identity of clichs in an attempt
to solve the Prisoners Dilemma, the metafictional repetition in the novel constitutes
an open mode of narrative time.
Introduction
xv
The last chapter of the book will revisit the City of Angels and argue that
contemporary Los Angeles fictionin particular, the texts by Sesshu Foster, Kate
Braverman, and Steve Erickson are discussed togethergrounds itself on the idea of
ahistorical time that characterizes the city to explore into the time of the outside, in
which a new mode of subjectivity and collectivity emerges.
Finally, the concluding part will review some of the motifs discussed in the book,
and conduct another connecting experiment: the temporal idea of the outside will be
linked to a new generation of those American writers who were born outside the US
border. This connection will reveal that the temporal aspect of narrative is also shared
in the new century, while the preoccupation with America or national identity is
dismissed. In other words, it will argue how fast American fiction is moving away from
the national paradigm.
Part One
Vanishing Space
Journey to the space outside, which goes hand in hand with the discovery of authentic
self, has occupied a crucial place in American imagination. As Alexandra Ganser
aptly argues that geographical mobility, tied to social ascent, has always had a high
symbolic value, shaping distinctly American idea(l) of freedom and national identity,1
the road as the promise of new self appears repeatedly in American literature, from
Walt Whitmans Song of the Open Road to Jack Kerouacs On the Road.2 This basic
idea of the westward movement as a quest for American identity also survives in
contemporary literature, typically in the motif of the road.
Contemporary writers, on the other hand, share a critical attitude toward the
traditional road motifs. Especially the 1990s saw a number of anti-road novels
that subverted the conventions of the genre.3 Among them, Annie Proulxs fist novel,
Postcards, stands out with its relentless interrogation of American road experience in
its central idea of space and freedom. The 1992 novel subverts the westward movement
of American self by describing the lifelong journey of Loyal Blood, a Vermont-born
farmer, who eventually turns into an aimless wanderer in the West. Through a broad
Alexandra Ganser, Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Womens Road
Narratives, 19702000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 15.
2
The narrator of Kerouacs novel tries to get away from his stagnant daily life in New York. The opening
passage of the novel mentions Sals recent divorce and his consequent feeling that everything was
dead (Kerouac, On the Road, 1). On his way to the West Coast, the hero considers he has entered
a new phase of lifeI was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my
youth and the West of my future (ibid., 15). The open space of the West appears as a promise of his
new life, free from the burden of his past. Still, the novel proceeds to overturn this initial attitude
toward the road: countless arrivals and departures in the narrative gradually lead to the narrators
disillusionment with the spatial outside. Exhausting the possibilities of the spatial unknown, Sal
Paradise is finally confronted with a sense of growing old that seizes Dean Moriarty, the road spirit
incarnated.
3
A skeptical attitude toward the road is seen in Stephen Wrights Going Native (1994), Paul Austers
The Music of Chance (1990), and Steve Ericksons Amnesiascope (1996), among others.
1
Outside, America
East-West survey of American life during the 20th century,4 Proulxs novel undermines
the promise of individual freedom in open space.
In 1944, a Vermont farmer kills his girlfriend, hides her body, and runs away from
his home. The opening lines of the novel depict the moment after the act of murder
that launches Loyal Bloods lifelong journey:
Even before he got up he knew he was on his way. Even in the midst of the
involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew. Knew she was dead, knew he was on his
way. . . . he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be
started over again. Even if he got away.5
Having impulsively killed Billy, Loyal realizes he cannot continue his life on the farm.
The typical road motif of starting over is replaced by the sudden feeling that the
route of his life veered away from the main line,6 and the violent act would haunt him
no matter how far he traveled.
After disposing off her body, Loyal returns to his house, where he tells his family
he is going away to start a new life with Billy and simply drives away from his farm.
Another reversal of the road narrative convention is seen here: the heros journey is
not an autonomous decision of the individual but an unhoped-for reaction to the
thoughtless act. While Billy used to insist that Im not getting caught. Im getting out
of here and Im going to be somebody,7 repeating the typical American faith in the
future that lies ahead, now the farmer finds himself on the run. There is no individual
choice in the novel; with the event that has already happened, the journey begins even
before Loyal understands the reason: Billy, always yapping about moving away, getting
out, making a new start, was staying on the farm. He, whod never thought beyond the
farm, never wanted anything but the farm, was on his way. Clenching the wheel.8 Thus
the reluctant traveler goes on the road in 1944.
The year 1944 is significant in the sociohistorical context of the state: World War
II and the highway planning. Theres a War on, in case you forget, Mink tells his
son; Farm work is essential work. Forget out west.9 The descriptions of the Blood
farm are consistently accompanied by references to the war. There is also a prospect
of job at wartime factories, once Loyal leaves Vermontthis is the promise of a new
life Billy dreamed of. Moreover, the same year saw the announcement of the plans for
Interregional Highways. According to David W. Jones, the 1944 plan was proposing
an extraordinarily ambitious agenda for future highway construction both within and
between U.S. metropolitan areas.10 When Loyal declares his departure, the route to
Wes Berry, Capitalism vs. Localism: Economies of Scale in Annie Proulxs Postcards and That Old
Ace in the Hole, in The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, ed. Alex
Hunt (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 171.
5
Annie Proulx, Postcards (New York: Scribner, 1992), 3.
6
Ibid., 12.
7
Ibid., 73.
8
Ibid., 12.
9
Ibid., 11.
10
David W. Jones, Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2008), 81.
4
Vanishing Space
the West is not so much a figment as a concrete possibility that the national project has
laid ground for.
The ex-farmer on the road thus drives westward, at first following Billys plan: Hed
drive west, but keep to the border. Those cities shed named, South Bend, Detroit,
Gary, Chicago, those were the places.11 These cities form a straight westward line from
Vermont, loyal to the promise of the road: West, that was the direction.12 However,
he gradually realizes the impossibility of shedding away his past self; glancing at the
farmlands stretching beside the road, or looking down at the plain from a window,
Loyal is reminded of his connection to the Vermont farm:
His blood, urine, feces and semen, the tears, strands of hair, vomit, flakes of skin,
his infant and childhood teeth, the clippings of finger and toenails, all the effluvia
of his body were in that soil, part of that place.13
Kent C. Ryden is right in stating that in Loyals remembering, the farm and he are one
and the same.14 This fact is further highlighted by the word effluvia, which refers to
Loyals bodily particles connected to the farmland. The use of the word demonstrates
that the self, connected to the soil and the past in its molecular level, cannot be entirely
free from the land; the essential components of Loyals subjectivity do not change even
after getting away from his home. While movement in the road narrative is essentially
an opportunity to rediscover oneself as a free individual, Loyal Blood, with his effluvia
bound to the earth, finds himself in an opposite condition: loyal to his blood.
The narrative follows Loyals cross-continental journey and describes the
sociopolitical forces in the post-World War II America, which denies his attempts
to reach free, open space. Loyal goes through and glimpses every kind of space in
the West, only to realize none of them provides him a possibility of freedomit has
already evaporated in the Cold War state. Four decades after he departs from Vermont,
the traveler is left with a sense of exhaustion and aging.
In 1951, after being robbed of all the money he has earned in factories, he begins to
work in a uranium mine called Mary Mugg. This downward movement logically follows
his inability to escape from the haunting land-farm-self connection: when the space
on the surface could not offer him any possibility of freedom, he goes underground.
This space in the West, however, does not lead to any sense of autonomy. As Michael A.
Amundson points out, the growing insecurity of the Cold War led the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) to launch a massive uranium hunt to find domestic sources for
atomic bombs15 after the legislation of the Atomic Energy Act in 1946, five years
before Loyal comes to the mine. The space beneath the ground is thoroughly seized by
the force of the state, now engaged in the Cold War.
Proulx, Postcards, 24.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 77.
Kent C. Ryden, The Corpse in the Stone Wall: Annie Proulxs Ironic New England, in The
Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, ed. Alex Hunt (Lanham, MD:
Lexington, 2009), 76.
15
Michael A. Amundson, Mining the Grand Canyon to Save It: The Orphan Lode Uranium Mine
and National Security, Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001): 324.

14

11
12
13
Outside, America
Loyals days in Mary Mugg end with an abrupt collapse of the mine. He gives up
mining and finds a new job as a fossil hunter in the West. But again, these open fields
are not an untouched space; on the contrary, they are connected to the archeologists
and paleontologists from museums and universities back east16 as the end-buyer of
his fossils. Loyal, the fossil hunter, becomes increasingly weary of this fact and finally
quits the job.
With the open ground and underground space devoid of the possibility of freedom,
Loyals eyes turn upward: he begins to work as assistant to an amateur astronomer in
New Mexico in 1966; this time, too, it becomes clear that outer space is not a free area.
I do not get time at a big telescope! the astronomer complains to Loyal. My amateur
status bars me from the big ones! (The academics stand in line for years to use them.)
. . . We are losing the sky, we have lost it.17 Even though he claims that Nothing is
impossible in space,18 the space is closed for amateurs like him; it was the late 1960s,
in the middle of the development of the Apollo Program that has appropriated outer
space as part of the national strategy. Space cannot be Loyals New Frontier.
Thus the possibility of freedom in every kind of space is exhausted; the promise of the
roada fresh start in a no-mans landis completely removed from the protagonists
meandering. Instead, the sense of being trapped and growing old begins to dominate
the whole text: He had it straight now; there were special roads and paths across the
country that he could travel, but many more roads were closed to him. Permanently
closed. . . . His hair had gone mostly white. Damn near sixty years old.19 Postcards
thoroughly overturns the promise of the road.The end of the narrative finds Loyal in
Minneapolis in the late 1980s, living as one of the panhandlers on the streets. Worn
out, worn down, used up. Thats all, folks.20
Proulxs novel sets the keynote of the first part of Outside, Americathe simple
affirmation of travelers who take to the road for the freedom to explore or redefine
themselves21 is no longer tenable, for the seemingly open space turns out to be a
site where social, political, and economic forces are entangled.22 A number of power
relationships have already seized the space of the road, from which the traveler himself
cannot be free. Far from an innocent individual seeking autonomy, he is tied to his own
identity as the product of the given conditions. Thus the dead end of the road calls for
the critical examination of the travelers subjectivity.
Proulx, Postcards, 147.

Ibid., 1701.
Ibid., 171.
Ibid., 229.
Ibid., 298.
Ronald Primeau, Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green,
OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1996), 15.
22
I borrowed this idea from Keita Hatookas discussion of open space.

18

19

20

21

16
17
Journey to the End of the Father: Paul Therouxs

Battlefield of Masculinity in The Mosquito Coast
The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, a little like having to wear an ill-fitting
coat for ones entire life.1 In this statement, Paul Theroux joins the most explicit critics
of masculinity among contemporary American writers. The Mosquito Coast, his 1981
novel, is a full-blown expression of this critical attitude, delineating the portrait of
Allie Fox, a despotic father who struggles to achieve his ideal of traditional manhood
by escaping with his family from the United States to Honduras, thus keeping alive the
national myth of the road beyond the border. Critics agree that the novel ironically
adopts the American mythology of the sovereign individual embodied by Allie.2
However, the novels description of his anachronistic pursuit to be a self-made man
and its eventual breakdown aims at pointing to the conditions of masculinity in the
period of transition from the late 1970s to the Reagan era, during which the familys
entire journey takes place. In other words, the task of The Mosquito Coast is to resist the
masculine view of the spatial outside, instead providing a diagnosis of contemporary
American manhood.
Through its detailed description of the fathers ascent to the throne of the self-made
man, the novel discloses the fundamental mechanism of American manliness: it is
a series of practices that capture and subject the male characters, making them
Paul Theroux, The Male Myth, in About Men: Reflections on the Male Experience, ed. Edward Klein
and Don Erickson (New York: Poseidon, 1987), 217.
2
Samuel Coale argues that Allie reflects the great American faith in an ultimate self (Paul Theroux,
121). Other critics follow a similar path: in Steven R. Luebkes words, the novel is a tragic fable about
the strengths and weaknesses of American individualism (Self s Dark Circle, 230); Hans Bertens
agrees with him on this point, noting that Allie closely echoes such nineteenth-century prophets
of self-reliance and authenticity as Emerson and Thoreau (The Convention of New Beginning,
393). Though these critics tend to identify Allie with the spiritual and ideological character of the
Emersonian individual, the novel also emphasizes the more practical aspect of masculinity, namely
its Franklinian features. Allies ideal, with its preference for wilderness and utilitarian self-sufficiency,
is an amalgam of these two elements.
1
Outside, America
coherent individuals as the end-product.3 The nuclear family sets the boundary of
the exercise of the practices, and within this sphere, the process of masculinity takes
hold of the bodies of Allie and his two sons. The body as the battlefield where the
process of subjectivization is imposed and taken on is the main principle of the novel.
In Pierre Bourdieus words, Inscribed in the things of the world, the masculine
order also inscribes itself in bodies through the tacit injunctions.4 However, in spite
of his elaborate program of action, the fathers actual practices generate unexpected
consequences: the force of resistance is provoked in his children, and collisions with
outer organizations undermine Allies kingdom. Thus he falls from his sovereignty, and
eventually loses the minimum requirement of his masculinity, his body. The fathers
journey outside the US border does not provide him the possibility of a free, masculine
self. Having witnessed this relentless rise and fall of the self-made man in Honduras,
Charlie Fox, the 14-year-old son, is ready to return to his homeland at the end of the
novel. Despite this seemingly positive closure, it is suggested that another regime of
masculinity awaits Charlie with indirect means of subjectivization in the post-Vietnam
period. Describing the fathers archaic practices of masculinity in Honduras, the novel
indicates another face of the present, a new strategy of subjectivization: while the
appraisal of the traditional value of man is foregrounded in the system of language,
the direct means of capturing the body are replaced by the prevalence of the masculine
body-images. A different strategy of masculinity awaits the surviving sons, leaving
no pure room for freedomthis is the ultimate destination toward which the entire
narrative of The Mosquito Coast leads.
The rise: Thy father, Thy king

Through the narration of Charlie, the novel reveals the pragmatics of masculinity:
rather than a mere ideology, the fathers struggle to establish himself as an
anachronistically traditional self-made man is, as described in the novel, a process
of concrete practices, both discursive and bodily. Allies ideal is not an impossible
illusion; it comes into being only after certain procedures of subjectivization are
carried out, and his immigration to Honduras with his family is nothing other than
the fulfillment of the necessary conditions for his sovereign status as the masculine
subject. The story of the familys exodus begins in Massachusetts, on an asparagus
In the novel, the Oedipal character of the familythe triangle of father, mother, and son, which is
permeated with the Law of the Fatheris not a pregiven structure that decides the subjectivity of
Allie and Charlie in advance. Rather, the Law, or the fathers dominant position, is maintained by
an aggregate of his actual utterances and practices. It is a matter of sustaining a power relationship
within the family through a set of procedures for identification, codification, narration, and
induction (Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies, 59) rather than the predetermined Oedipal structure.
Allies rise consists of making this relation unquestionable. Instead of posing the full-fledged
subject, the novel depicts the subjectivization, the process of masculine practices that yields the
self-made man as an effect.
4
Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (London: Polity, 2001), 24.
3
Journey to the End of the Father
farm where the father starts to prepare for the move, not to the West but to a foreign
country. The novels first half, from the beginning of the familys departure to the
settlement in Honduras, focuses on showing the fathers effort to reject American
subjectivity in the late 1970s and become the traditional, self-made man. Allies
program proceeds in three main phases: his initial assertion of the transcendental
image of the self-sufficient man in New England; its application to bodies and its
surroundings in the jungle of Honduras; and the ultimate emergence of the masculine
and sovereign subject as the end-of-chain product, as is indicated by the construction
of the icehouse in the new community.
From the beginning of the novel, Allie appears as a man of words, a nonstop talker
whose utterances determine his disposition.5 On the asparagus farm, he repeatedly
insists on his autonomy, exclaiming, Im the last man!6 thus drawing a dividing line
between himself and the outer worldas a discursive practice, his words function as
a division and a rejection7 differentiating him from others and defining him as a
self-sufficient man, who only lacks the space of freedom. Employed as an inventor on
a farm owned by Tiny Polski, Allie nevertheless tries to maintain his independence. It
was impossible, Charlie says, to think of Polski, or anyone else, as Fathers boss. Father
did not take orders. . . . He owns people, Father said. But he doesnt own me.8 The
father dismisses the owners management of the farm as dishonest business, something
that exploits his talent as well as the market, and prepares himself for a departure to an
empty place with nothing but his brains and his toolbox.9 With the myth of the West
having already exhausted itself, he chooses Honduras as his outside.
As a follower of traditional individualism, Allie vehemently rejects the current mode
of American self situated in its relations with outer forces. Preparing to emigrate, Allie
continually criticizes the external reality of the United States, especially its economic
situation as he witnesses it. Immigrants from Central America as the labor force of the
farm, products from Asian countries in every store, and the American currency in the
throes of inflationall things Allie considers the phenomena of nationwide corruption,
saying, Thats America. . . . Its a disgrace. Breaks my heart.10 The current state, which,
[i]n the course of the 1970s in particular . . . made a transition from dominance to
interdependence,11 is unacceptable to Allie. This dependence on a network of relations
with external factors rankles this man who aspires to an autonomous existence. Get
Although he repeatedly emphasizes the neutrality of his speech by saying, Im just thinking out
loud (The Mosquito Coast, 203), Allies utterances are, in effect, speech-acts that interfere with
reality: his words form part of the dramaturgy of the real (Michel Foucault, Lives of Infamous
Men, 160). In the novel, his statements themselves operate on the utterer himself, driving him in a
particular direction toward the revival of the traditional self-made man.
6
Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 14.
7
Foucault, The Discourse on Language, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216.
8
9
Ibid., 24 (Italics added).
10
Ibid., 40.
11
Claudia Wrmann, Reconstruction of Economic Strength?: The (Foreign) Economic Policy of the
Reagan Administration, in The Reagan Administration: A Reconstruction of American Strength? ed.
Helga Haftendorn and Jakob Schissler (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 55.
5
Outside, America
out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel . . . and lets talk self-sufficiency!12
he declares to his wife.
These utterances resonate with the conservative movement of the period, namely
the New Right, which gave rise to the revival of an old American mythology about
the self-made man13 in the late 1970s. In this sense, Allies insistence on the nations
economic independence and the defense of traditional values is not new. The patriarch
of the Foxes does not create his criticism of the present but simply repeats the
reemerging discourse as his own personal statements: as he comments on his talent
as an inventor, it is just magnifying what already exists.14 However, even though he
shares with the New Right antipathy toward the weakened country and inclination to
traditional values, Allies response to the problem greatly differs from that of the political
movement, in that he decides to abandon living in the United States altogether. No
one loves this country more than I do, Father said. And thats why Im going. Because I
cant bear to watch.15 Allies words impel him toward the establishment, in an archaic
way, of the strictly traditional subjectivity of masculine character: [L]anguage is the
site, and the instrument, of subjectivation/subjection.16
Although his words form a system of the self-sufficient man, the late 1970s, as he
witnesses them, lack a corresponding reality reflecting his utterances. He seeks in his
exodus to establish a system of light,17 namely a concrete environment that functions
together with his words, so that the visible and the articulable will constitute a seamless
reality. On arriving at Jeronimo in the Honduran jungle, Allie describes the plan of the
family-territory that he tries to bring into visible existence:
I see a house here, he said. Kind of a barn there, with a workshopa real
blacksmiths shop, with a forge. Over there, the outhouse and plant. Slash and burn
the whole area and weve got four or five acres of good growing land . . . and once
weve got control of the water we can grow rice and do some serious hydraulics.18
Allies program for an ideal community begins with these words, anticipating their
realization. To bring this design into existence requires more than endless talking.
Charlie likens the primary effort of settlement to a battle: Soon, most of Jeronimo
was slashed and burned. It looked as though a battle had been fought thereblack
land, black stumps, steam and smoke issuing from cracks in the earth.19 This violent
destruction of the indigenous vegetation prepares the open ground where Allie can
work. The father then employs his body to the extreme, working without sleeping and
refusing to eat in his familys presence. After we got to Jeronimo he claimed that he
Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 1982), 328.
14
15
Ibid., 73.
16
Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, The Force of Language (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 169.
17
Deleuze, Foucault, 32.
18
19
Ibid., 149.
12
13
could go without sleep. He was awake when we went to bed, and he was at work when
we got up in the morning.20 The activity of the fathers body is thoroughly devoted to the
structuring of the space in the community. His body is completely utilized and molded
in the shape of a laboring man, which becomes the standard in the community.21
Organization, therefore, is the main principle with which Allie is obsessed in his
construction of the community. The space of Jeronimo is divided into plots that are
assigned to each member of the familyone plot for each kid, who had to keep his
portion weeded.22 As a consequence of his bodily effort, an ordered space is developed,
and the family is constantly under his surveillance in this space. Thus Allie builds a
panoptic space in which the family members are put to work to perfect the fathers plan.
It was Fathers policy that no one should be idle.23 A network of relations is formed,
in which the father becomes ubiquitous and dominating. Others are urged to submit
to the standard embodied by himthe formula of this organization is to impose a
particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity.24 This practice of organization
has a double effect: it at once constitutes the meaningful and organized sphere inside,
and the jungle outside as its negative other, a meaningless chaos. As Charlie repeatedly
recounts the clamor of the jungle in the night, the outer territory, as opposed to the
ordered community, is regarded as threatening disorder. Beyond our tents and our
little fire, he recollects, the jungle was black. The blackness screeched, it gruntedit
had risen up and wrapped us in its noise and in its sweet-sour folds.25 The fear of the
unknown and dark space conversely establishes the predictable and secure internal
territory or the system of visibility, where the father executes his plan of community.26
We were organized, Father said.27
Alongside the division of space, Allies strategies also include the manipulation of
time, which ensures the self-made mans identity. The Iron Age comes to Jeronimo,
Father said. A month ago, it was the Stone Age. . . . Were moving right along. Itll be
1832 in a few days! By the way, people, Im planning to skip the twentieth century
altogether.28 By rejecting the twentieth century, especially the late 1970s, Allie aims
to accomplish the linear progress from the state of nature to the year 1832, when the
Ibid., 156.
Seventy-five pushups serve as a criterion of manhood in the novel. How many push-ups
can you do? (ibid., 78, 125, 128) is one of Allies favorite phrases directed toward other male
grownups. According to this standard, men are distributed in the hierarchy of masculinity, on
top of which stands the father, as he is convinced that Im the only one around here carrying
the ball (ibid., 200).
22
Ibid., 148.
23
Ibid., 147.
24
25
26
At one point, Allie feigns that he is simply a servant of the family, caring for their welfare and
interests. However, this attitude in fact gives him a means of dominance over the family in that the
everyday life of each member becomes unsustainable without the father. Father might say things
like Im working for you or Tell me what to do, but he was in charge (The Mosquito Coast, 215).
Allie administers and manages all the activity in the community, so that his presence permeates
throughout the sphere of the family.
27
28
Ibid., 162.
20
21
10
Outside, America
term self-made man was coined in English.29 Fixing the flow of time on this immobile
present solidifies Allies identity as a self-made man. The spatiotemporal boundaries
are successfully set by the father: the inside is organized and distinguished from the
chaotic jungle, and the insides temporality, far from the unstable transition of the
1970s, becomes solid ground for his identity. His body is kept within the boundaries
and subjected to the organization that he has established, actualizing an autonomous,
self-identical man. Maintained visible in its post, comparable with the constellation of
other individuals . . . the individuated disciplined body has, or is, a value.30 Thus Allie
declares, This is the center of the world!31
Following the control of the space-time conditions of Jeronimo, the construction of
the gigantic icehouse called Fat Boy testifies to the eventual emergence of the masculine
subject. As indicated by Charlies admission that the truth was that ice was not a
necessity so far,32 Fat Boy is an excess in the community, whose primary function is
not to facilitate the workings of communal activities but to display, with its foreignness
in the environment, the victory of the fathers order over the surrounding world. As
an expression of his superior civilization,33 the ice machine comes to represent the
sovereignty of the patriarch. Entering the machine, the son feels that this was Fathers
head, the mechanical part of his brain and the complications of his mind.34 Only after the
effort of organization is carried out through the labor of the body can the brain, as the
over-all effect,35 appear to declare the sovereign manhood of the patriarch.36 Ice is the
crystallization of these practices that function within the community that includes Allie,
the family, the spatial territory of the community, and the temporal progression. You
feel a little like God,37 Allies says when handling the ice bricks the machine produces.
Beneath this throne of the self-made man, Allies bodily toil seizes all the elements of the
community. As Michael Kimmel notices, the self-made man is a control freak.38
The fall: Cracks in the throne

The fathers reign does not last long. The order of the community he builds and
maintains engenders forces of resistance in the bodies of the children. The two sons,
Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 26.
Lingis, Foreign Bodies, 60.
Ibid., 207.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 168.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1978), 93.
36
Allies transcendent position is only an effect of his actual utterances and activities, which
are themselves situated in concrete conditions in the community. As Brian Massumi argues,
Transcendence, despite its best efforts, is a mode of becoming immanent (A Users Guide to
Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, 112). The fathers sovereignty
requires the diversity of practices as its precondition. The self-made man is not merely an ideological
fiction but actually produced reality, as in Foucault: power produces; it produces reality (Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, 194).
37
38
Kimmel, Manhood in America, 45.

32

33

34

35

29
30
31
11
Charlie and Jerry, are subjected to the paternal system of masculinity, and they begin
to seek another possibility in life through their reproduction of a contemporary
American lifestyle. Additionally, when Allie encounters other systems surrounding
his, the paternal organization loses its absolute superiority through its failure to
subordinate these other systems. Like a downward spiral, the narrative rushes toward
the total disintegration of Allies plan: after a fatal clash with another system, his
community collapses, and eventually it is reduced to a floating house on the river, and
finally the fathers masculinity collapses when, mortally wounded after his escapade
at the missionaries encampment at Guampu, he is no longer able to maintain his
masculine body, the fundamental center of his territory. Insofar as the self-made man
is an ideal program that requires diverse and painstaking practices, there are always
areas of fragility and possibilities of resistance against it in the realm of its actual
administration. The growing gap between Allie and his two sons, unexpected armed
intruders, and the hostile weather, these local but significant factors decisively lead to
the fall of his kingdom.
Allies strategy of establishing himself as a self-made man is, at the same time,
also a process of actualizing the manly subjectivity of the two sons; he was making
me a man,39 says Charlie. As Allies own ideal manhood is realized by the thorough
utilization of the body, it also captures the bodies of the sons to make them men.40
Examination of their courage is one of the main tools of this process of subjectivization.
On their way to Honduras, Allie repeatedly puts Charlies courage to the test, making
him stand on a rock surrounded by a rising tide, or climb a mast in stormy weather,
saying, Think you can do it, Charlie?41 The training in the acquisition of manhood is
primarily imposed on the body, to install a manly disposition in the son. During these
examinations, however, the son feels resentment toward the father. From the rock on
the beach, Charlie regards his father and feels distant from him: I felt like a stranger
to him. We were two people pausingone on a rock, the other on the sand, child and
adult. I did not know him, he did not know me. I had to wait to discover who we
were.42 In this phase, the distance from, or the forces of resistance against, the father
emerge as identity confusion.
In Jeronimo, where children are incorporated into the manly order of the father,
Charlie and other children begin an escape from the paternal sphere, establishing
another system on its periphery. Their resistance is carried out as a return to the
contemporary way of life denied to them, even back in the United States. They relocate

Masculinity is not simply exercised from above, by Allie; it is also called for by Charlie to
differentiate himself from Jerry. The elder brother takes the fathers examination of virility not only
to win paternal approval but to prove himself superior to his younger brotherIn order to see
Jerry try and fail, Charlie says, I would have to do it first (Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 95). This
power relationship between the brothers is maintained throughout the novel, so that the family is
permeated with the logic and practices of masculinity. The sons resistance to the father does not
reach this internalized power relationship, as Charlie calls Jerry a spackoid and a sissyit was what
Father would have saidand I felt stronger (Ibid., 213).
41
42
Ibid., 72.
39
40
12
Outside, America
their bodies into different apparatuses from the paternal one, actualizing different
identities than that of the self-made man. In The Acre, a camp the children secretly
set up near the community, they reenact the school, the church, and the currency
system. I liked this place, Charlie recollects, . . . because it was filled with things
that Father had forbidden.43 In this practice, the children move from one order to
another transversely, keeping inside themselves a space that escapes the process of
subjectivization administered by Allie. Furthermore, when their bodies connect to the
jungle, another way of existence begins to emerge: [W]e ate the fruit that grew nearby
and used anything we found, and adapted ourselves to the jungle. . . . We just lived like
monkeys.44 Charlie and other children actualize several identities according to their
interactions with the environment, thus preserving a distance from Allies plan.45
It is this contact with the jungle that provokes a fundamental questioning of the
paternal cosmos. Shortly after he becomes accustomed to the jungle, Charlie comes
to recognize it as another form of organization rather than mere chaos, a view that
disarranges the rigid teleological hierarchy produced by the father:
This jungle, the start of the high forest, was tall and orderlyeach tree had found
room to grow separately. The trees were arranged in various ways, according to
slenderness or leaf size. . . . I had always pictured jungle as suffocating spaghetti
tangles, drooping and crisscrossed, a mass of hairy green rope and clutching
stems.46
The jungle, formerly regarded as a frightful and meaninglessness outside, proves to

be a system in itself, where various plants coexist. The fathers inside/outside division
loses its effectiveness: since the jungle is a system that operates on a different logic than
Allies community, the paternal space and the jungle do not form a binary opposition
between order and chaos, but reveal themselves as simply two different organizations
without a hierarchy.
Despite his assertion that his plan is a goal of civilization, Allies free space in
Honduras is in reality a new formation of forces established in the midst of other
organizations, and accordingly runs the risk of conflict or collision with them.
By the fathers expedition to a remote village, the collision between organizations
becomes apparent. After a long journey on foot, Allie and his two sons arrive at a
village where, in Allies view, white men are enslaved by the local residentsthe whole
village is governed by a different logic than his kingdom. The father urges them to free
themselves with his familiar logic of the autonomous individual, saying, They havent
any right to own you.47 However, the men only ask him to leave the village, refusing his
Ibid., 176.
Ibid., 177.
While Allie draws a strict line of division between himself and the outside environment so that his
individuality can be maintained, the boundaries of the self experienced by the children are more
fluid, which gives them possibilities of freedom from Allies dominance: they resist the identity
imposed on them by discovering within themselves the means for becoming-other.
46
47
Ibid., 231.
43
44
45
13
suggestion. Allies ice-making organization comes face to face with another order, only
to fail to transform or conquer it; the paternal order loses its privilege as the absolute
telos and turns out to be one of many organizations. This silent battle, which Allie
loses, is a watershed in the life of the Foxes in the region: it is evident that Jeronimo,
Allies shining city on the hill, is surrounded by many forces with which it could collide
at any moment. Allies kingdom manifests its fragility, which, together with his denial
of defeat, disappoints Charlie. Again and again I tried to remember ice in Fathers
hands and amazement on the faces of the Indians, the son recollects. But there was
none: no ice, no surprise. It had all been worse and odder than his lie. They had told us
to go away.48 The fathers ideal realm thus loses its status.
When three intruders come to Jeronimo, wielding guns and showing their intentions
to stay there as parasites, the power relationship in the community is significantly
shaken. Not having any weapon to scare them away, Allie can no longer act as a
sovereign in their presence, but only suggest that they find a better place somewhere
else. I am giving you a chance, he said. Now he was almost pleading. I am offering
you my cayuka. You would be wise to shove off.49 However, he fails to get rid of them,
revealing the powerlessness of his utterances in the face of a stronger force. Charlie
thus witnesses a change in Allies system of language. Fathers mood had changed. He
sulked, he chewed his cigar. He did not speak to any of us, but instead walked around
mumbling.50 The fathers sovereignty is undermined by the external force, which
disrupts his discursive system that previously dominated other members. In order to
make a breakthrough in this situation, Allie and Charlie lure the outsiders into Fat
Boy and try to freeze them to death. The eventual explosion of the icehouse, like that
of a nuclear plant, makes the whole of Jeronimo unlivable, laying the fathers previous
effort in the dust.
The coagulation of the power relationships dissipates: the ice melts away. In order
to maintain his sovereignty in this situation, Allie revives his persistent eschatological
discourse, insisting that Cape Cods been blown away. . . . Theres nothing left
nothing at all. . . . Jeronimo was nothing compared to the destruction of the United
States.51 As long as he remains the sole recourse for the familys survival, Allie can
maintain his dominant position in the family. Referring to an imaginary catastrophe
in their homeland, he erases the possibilities of going home, and thereby insists that
his is the only space of living: This is the way the first family faced things.52 By this
assertion, with its disputability being temporally suspended, Allie aims to maintain
the organized relations in the community that become mobile and unstable after the

50

51

Ibid., 235.
Ibid., 254.
Ibid., 255.
Ibid., 284. In his eschatological logic that aims at the subjection of the family, the resemblance of
Allie to Christian theology is clear, despite his apparent antipathy toward the latter. The difference
between the two systems lies only in the ideal value each carries: God in Christianity is replaced by
the sovereign man in Allies plan, as he tells Rev. Spellgood, Man is God (ibid., 93). Missionary
Spellgood and Allie-the-last-man are, in fact, coworkers who exercise the strategies of subjection
both aim to organize the herd (family or native people) with a transcendent value.
52
Ibid., 279.
48
49
14
Outside, America
collapse of Jeronimo. Nevertheless, his resulting attempt at resettlement culminates

in a worse form of life. Confronted with the ruin of his ideal plan, Allie has to modify
his objective, replacing the ice with self-preservation.53 His superior position is
gradually questioned, and his wife explicitly opposes him for the first time: Your
garden is imaginary. Your chickens are imaginary. There is no crop. We havent planted
anything. You talk about livestock and weaving! Theres nothing here but the trash
from the beach.54 With the absence of visible reality, the fathers order becomes more
and more questionable. Allie, unable to show that his plan is a better way of life, can
merely invoke the hypothetical catastrophe in their homeland.
When the heavy rain finally washes away the new settlement, their house becomes
a boat on which they live with Allie the captain, who claims, I planned it this way!55
Sailing upstream, the paternal community is cut down to the size of the floating house,
in which Allie still strives to maintain his discipline. When the two sons show a sign of
defiance, a physical punishment is inflicted on them. As he repeats the gesture of the
autonomous man, his tyrannical character is foregrounded; gradually, he becomes a
parody, rather than a copy, of the masculine model he worships and aims to embody.
The value of the original self-made man is put into question by the figure of Allie, who
becomes one of the comedians of this ideal.56 The crude character of the self-made
man reveals itself through a crack in the mask, prompting a mistrust of its value.
The tyrannical movement comes to a sudden halt when the father is severely injured
in his battle to eliminate the missionary community of Rev. Spellgood that he encounters
upstream. Totally paralyzed because of a wound in the neck, Allie finds himself unable
to respond to the expectations he has for his own body. Only Fathers head was alive,57
while his body lives independently of his own will, showing the nonsubjective aspect of
his corporeal life. Having lost the visible correspondence to the body, his words point
to the incapacity of the human body. Its a bad design, the human body, he laments.58
Then he goes on to condemn the female body in particular, revealing the status of the
feminine as the implicit precondition of his machismo:
Women, Charlie, theyre in bad shape. They leak, they drip. Its terrible about
womens bodies, how they leak. All that blood, all that useless fat. . . . No wonder
theyre so mad, wondering what theyre for. Its humiliating to have a body with a
design fault.59
In this discourse that emphasizes the inferiority of the female body, his words at first
demonstrate the process of phallicizing the male body which, according to Elizabeth

55

56

Ibid., 298.
Ibid., 298.
Ibid., 324.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kauffman and
R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 160.
57
58
Ibid., 375.
59
Ibid., 376.
53
54
15
Grosz, involves the constitution of the sealed up, impermeable body60 by excluding
the indeterminate flow as the characteristic feature of the feminine.61 However, with
his inert body, there is no longer any clear distinction between his body and the female
one; his damnation of the female body and his own body forms a continuity, without
any difference in nature: I thought I was the strongest man in the world. Im just
pulp.62 The principal mechanism of the exclusion of the feminine no longer works, so
that Allie cannot maintain his masculine distinctness. Allie loses his ability to utilize
language appropriately and connect it to reality, and his speech becomes gibberish:
He spoke in babytalk about living on all fours far away in Mosquitia, and about going
to sea in a sieve. Usually, he said nothing. He stared.63 The paternal discourse, with
the downfall of the visible body, loses its support and disintegrates without force
on others. As it becomes obvious that the father is no longer able to maintain the
power relationships based on his body, his masculinity collapses, and his words are
transformed into nonsense.64
Allies death on the coast makes eloquently manifest the collapse of his twofold
organization of discourse and visibility: he is assaulted by vultures, one of which pulls
out his tongue. His defenseless body and tongue as the final prey of birds pose the
failure to retain the process of subjectivization. Even though Allies discourse presents
the self-made man as a transcendent existence, this discourse is in fact produced and
maintained in the immanent dimension of the body and actual power relationships,
which can be deformed by contingent factors. The intruders, unstable climate, and the
accident that befalls the fathers body corrode the foundation of his thronethe space
he reigns inand finally lead to utter ruin.
Another rise: Charlie and the vicious circle

Allies little kingdom falls. In spite of his assumption that Honduras is an outside
space bereft of civilization where his order can enjoy privileged status, there are
numerous unforeseen forces that await him and his family, swallowing up his
plan. Jeronimo is in fact a focal point where a diversity of forces interact and
struggle with one another. The possibilities for mutation and disintegration of
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP,
1994), 2001.
In this sense, the practice of masculinity in the family inevitably involves the female characters,
Allies wife and the two daughters. They are not excluded from Allies kingdom, but are the silent
presupposition upon which the patriarchal order is grounded. In The Mosquito Coast, the wife
and the twins almost always follow the fathers decisions, so that the father-women relations are
kept stable. There is, therefore, a mute battle imposed on the female characters, which is not fully
delineated in the novel.
62
63
Ibid., 379.
64
Allies babytalk about going to sea in a sieve is an allusion to The Jumblees, a nonsense poem by
the Victorian poet Edward Lear. The fathers previous utterances also include quotations from T. S.
Eliot.
60
61
16
Outside, America
the sovereign subject are therefore inherent in the community itself; as Foucault
argues, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain
the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings.65 With
the patriarchs demise, the ordered forces are temporally liberated and become
unpredictablea different kind of the outside that Charlie experiences as he
recognizes the overwhelming infinity of the world. The sons eventual return to the
United States sets the limit of the knowable on this confusion. The novels closure,
therefore, implies his participation in another order in the present, the late 1970s
and the coming age of the remasculinizationa regeneration of the concepts,
constructions, and definitions of masculinity.66 Instead of suggesting the complete
obsoleteness of Allies program on the one hand or its correspondence with the
conservative movement of the coming decade on the other, various clues scattered
throughout The Mosquito Coast point to the historical change in the strategy of
masculinity: beneath the common discursive practice of traditional manhood,
the operation of masculine subjectivization on the body in the present becomes
indirect and difficult to recognize. With sporadic suggestions, the novel indicates
the becoming of contemporary masculinity.
With the fathers death, the family becomes lost in the coastal area without any plan
for the future. In this intermediary state, in which Allies system has collapsed and a
new organization has yet to be established, the ordered forces break loose, giving rise
to a realm of indeterminacy:
After Father died, time changed. The days were long and unbroken like a sentence
with no commas and we felt lost like this. . . . Once I had believed in Father, and
the world had seemed very small and old. He was gone, and now I hardly believed
in myself, and the world was limitless.67
It is the realm of potentiality per se, where Charlie cannot define who he is. When
the paternal spatiotemporal organization no longer functions, the world emerges as
frightening infinity, namely the outside. The stabilized progression of time, which
has tarried at the year 1832, is now unhinged and becomes an open-ended and
fundamentally active force . . . whose movements and operations have an inherent
element of surprise, unpredictability.68 While Allies organization holds a distinct
telos of the self-made man, the son is faced with a modality of temporality that has
no specific destination. Charlie feels threatened by this vertiginous indeterminacy,
Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, and Power, trans. Robert Hurley. In Power, ed. James D.
Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994), 354.
66
Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana UP, 1989), 51.
67
68
Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming . . . An Introduction, in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and
Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999), 4.
65
17
experiencing it as a crisis of his identity.69 However, the family is rescued from this
predicament and is on its way to its homeland at the end of the novel. Charlie is finally
relieved from the outside, and the world, no longer a limitless infinity, regains its
familiar face. The world was all right, no better or worse than we had left itthough
after what Father had told us, what we saw was like splendor. It was glorious even here,
in this old taxicab, with the radio playing.70
In spite of this seemingly happy conclusion, the novel indicates a dismal twist. The
glorious world to which Charlie returns is not so much a promised land free from
machismo as another masculine organization, an evolved regime of masculinity
the rising neoconservative era. On several occasions, The Mosquito Coast implicitly
suggests the characteristics of this new regime. The age of conservatism or the Reagan
era is characterized by the discourse of traditional values and the application of new
technologies, most notably TV images. The New Right, for all its apparent archaism,
has been far more attuned than the traditional Left to the actual lines of force in
late capitalist society.71 In this era, the ideal of the self-made man is reasserted in
harmony with other elements such as the logic of late capitalism and religious faith.
From one masculine order to anotherthis ironic twist is the final destination of
Therouxs novel.
In the Spellgood community, Charlie sees a miniature version of this society. The
preacher makes his speeches through a Sony video machine, whose screen also features
TV and movie programs, including Rocky. The screen image is not simply employed
as entertainment but also as a method of governing and organizing local people. This
transmission of discourse through the screen is not limited to the religious community.
The emphasis on the hard body, which Allie stresses and practices in his daily routine
of 75 pushups, finds its expressions in the Rambo series, The Terminator, and many
other images from the Reagan era. This rearticulation of masculine strength and power
through internal, personal, and family-oriented values72 on the level of discursive
practice constitutes a system of language that retains the archaic characteristics of
traditional individualism: [D]iscourses are presented which operate to constitute
the self of the viewer.73
This mode of experience can be likened to Giorgio Agambens notion of human being as singularity:
There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence
nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of ones own existence as possibility or potentiality (The
Coming Community, 43). Agamben views this possibility or potentiality as something positive,
but Charlie is concerned with finding a way out of this realm of vast potential by relying on a
definite identity.
70
71
Massumi, A Users Guide, 127.
72
Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
UP, 1994), 13.
73
Mark Poster, Foucault, the Present and History, in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, ed. Timothy J.
Armstrong (New York: Harvester, 1992), 310.
69
18
Outside, America
However, when Emily Spellgood, the preachers daughter, boasts to Charlie,

Sometimes they only stay when Dads on TV! They all want to be baptized now, so
they can watch. . . .74 her words point to the force of the image itself that captivates
the viewer, rather than its linguistic and ideological content of expression. With this
attention to visual fascination, the image system shows its crucial difference from Allies
system. While Allies system of the visible masculine body explicitly captures the male
body and operates on it, the screen imagesthe hard-body iconography,75 as Susan
Jeffords puts itfunction as an indirect means of the subjectivization of the viewer.76
The multiplied body images replace the unifying singular body of the leader, as Brian
Massumi and Kenneth Dean state: The physicality of the unifying body disappears,
leaving only its image, which is then relayed to infinity, composed, decomposed,
re-membered, and dismembered.77 This does not mean, however, that the images are
separated from the body of the individual and henceforth lose their force to operate on
it; the images maintain an unapparent relationship with the body, for they constitute a
quasi-corporeal space emanating from bodies and with which bodies can be made to
coincide. . . . It lures bodies. It possesses them.78 The body image sweeps down to the
body and possesses it, and consequently produces the masculine identity of the viewer.
The regime of 75 pushups is replaced by the system of manly images.
It is in this context that Honduras, the novels setting, takes on specific significance,
for the location also implies another facet of the indirect battleground of American
masculinity of the Reagan erathe battle against the communists power in Central
America. For Allie, the country is the safest place on earth79 outside of civilization,
where he can start over from scratch, as is in road narratives. However, the region,
far from being characterized by mere emptiness, is the scene of a variety of political
forces coexisting and colliding with each other, as references to communists are
inscribed throughout the novel. Among them is Emilys casual remark that [t]heres
millions of communists around here80this shadow of communists in Honduras
has a significant implication for the US politics of the era. As Thomas Carothers
indicates, The United States began to take note of Honduras in the late 1970s when
the upsurge in leftist revolutionary movements in Central America . . . provoked the
Carter administration to engage itself more actively in the region.81 Allies exodus,
despite his American vision of Honduras as an empty wilderness, encounters this
Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 22.
76
Referring to this nature of images that confront the viewer directly, without mediation (The
Cinematic Body, 26), Steven Shaviro points out that images exert their force on the viewers body
in spite of their immateriality: Perception is turned back upon the body of the perceiver, so that it
affects and alters that body (ibid., 51).
77
Brian Massumi and Kenneth Dean, Postmortem on the Presidential Body, or Where the Rest of
Him Went, in Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family, ed. Michael Ryan and Avery Gordon
(Boulder: Westview, 1994), 158.
78
Ibid., 167.
79
80
Ibid., 362.
81
Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), 47.
74
75
19
entanglement of political forces, which develops into a military intervention in the

1980s. However, there is a discontinuity between the interventionist policy in the 1980s
and the Vietnam War in the previous decade, which caused a crisis of masculinity.
Though the Reagan administration saw Honduras not only as a potential victim
of communist aggression but also a potential base for a U.S. military counterforce
in Central America,82 the direct collision between American soldiers and the local
forces is avoided throughout the decade. Instead, proxy forces take on the battle, the
most notorious of those being the Nicaraguan Contras. Consequently, an incorporeal
battle for American men is createdthe war is kept going, without directly injuring
the bodies of American soldiers. The war apparatus is reorganized, adapting to the
post-Vietnam era. In this system, there is no longer hard labor and pushups that seize
the body. The body images and distant conflict are the main components of masculine
practices behind the mask of the traditional individual. The existence of the battle
itself becomes difficult to discern.
In the final analysis, then, the surviving son is faced with the alternative between
two modes of masculinity: on the one hand, Allies archaic order in Honduras and,
on the other, its refined version in the United States. Whichever path he chooses,
it certainly leads to the making of a man in the masculine conditionsthere is no
freedom the sons can enjoy. The novel thus implies a double trap for Charlie. The
return to the glorious world after the fall of Allie foretells nothing other than a rise of
the son as another masculine subject. The infinite potentiality of the outside Charlie
glimpses after the dethronement of the father is thus reduced to a one-way street or,
more precisely, a dead end.
Charlies journey to the end of the father comes full circle in his return to the present,
the late 1970s, and the coming age of Reaganism. Rejecting the current American
identity, Allie seeks to to revive archaic masculinity in Jeronimo. On the other hand,
the familys return is brought on by the contrary movement, the sons effort to escape
the system of the self-made man. Since Charlies resistance relies on the current mode
of life, he is incorporated into a new strategy of masculinity that awaits him on the
coast of United States. Eventually, then, these two movements leave the value of man
itself unquestioned. As an investigation of masculinity, The Mosquito Coast addresses a
somber diagnosis of the historical landscape that illuminates the nature of the present.
According to Foucault, The history which bears and determines us has the form of
a war,83 but the roar of the battlefield becomes faint, almost imperceptible to the son.
Having gone through the struggle with the father, Charlie returns to the American
coast, where he is ready to wear the coat of man without realizing its ill-fitting nature,
while the subterranean battle silently continues to be waged. Thus Allies exodus and
Charlies roundtrip present the drawing of what we are and what we are ceasing to
be84 in the land without the simple promise of the outside space.
Ibid., 48.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings & Other Interviews 19721977, ed. Colin
Gordon. trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marchall, and Kate Soper. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 114.
84
Gilles Deleuze, What Is a Dispositif? in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong
(New York: Harvester, 1992), 164.
82
83
20
Outside, America
A traveler himself, Theroux keeps returning to the question of the present state of
America. Like the journey of the Foxes, his literary inquiry into American machismo
is a long detour through the foreign jungle that finally returns to its starting point.
However, this loop is not a futile meandering that is destined to arrive at the same
old landscape; after the quest, the present reveals another face, making the formerly
imperceptible battlefield audible and visible: a different struggle is called for. In
this sense, Theroux is far from a pessimistic writer who despairs at the fatal trap of
American machismo. He is fundamentally a writer who questions, an inquirer after
the possibility of becoming something other than the current form of man, outside
of the insipid alternative between the two modes of manhood. The Mosquito Coast is a
preface to the coming struggle against masculinity itself.
THE American Travelers Love and Solitude:

The Atlas, or William T. Vollmanns
Pragmatics of the Double
A man on a journey meets a woman and falls in love with her; however, this romance
is always doomed to fail, and the traveler leaves her with another disappointing
experience added to his itinerary. Such scenes are at the center of America as developed
in William T. Vollmanns oeuvre. For Vollmann, America is an uncontrollable force
deprived of all transcendent value that guides the traveler and leads his romances to
ruin; it is an immanent force at work everywhere. Vollmanns work is devoted to the
investigation of this forcefor instance, his Seven Dreams series rewrites episodes in
North American history with an emphasis on their violent aspect. It is an attempt to
redraw the historical map of America, wherein the narrating subject finds himself
caught. This cartography ultimately concerns the interrogation of the American I, the
product of this sociohistorical force. Vollmanns work, in other words, constitutes the
subject in the present as the double of America.
His 1996 book, The Atlas, reflects this relentless inquiry into the relationship between
the map and the I. The book brings together the numerous fragments of an American
travelers experiences in the United States, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Thailand,
Mexico, Australia, and so on. The fragmentary style is therefore inseparable from the
age of globalization; yet the texts focus is on the constitution of the American subject
out of those pieceseach fragment functions as a piece of the American dynamic that
produces the I as its effect.1 A constant insight running through Vollmanns work
is that this American self is not so much a free individual as a formation in power
relationshipsthe nameless traveler always finds himself in asymmetrical relations
with others, typically monetary relations with women in the third world. The text is
In this sense, the books focus on the specific practice of the American self within each fragment is akin
to Michel Foucaults view on discursive practice, which refers less to the signifying organization of the
text than to the series of events (acts, effects, qualifications) which the discursive practice . . . carries
with it: it is a question of the modification of the subject by the very exercise of discourse (Michel
Foucault, My Body, This Paper, This Fire, 405). In a similar vein, Vollmanns use of the fragmentary
style points to the pragmatic aspect by which the American self is constituted: The Atlas demands less
an interpretation of meaning than a description of how each fragment functions.
22
Outside, America
therefore a map of power relationsas J. B. Harley argues, the atlas cannot escape
involvement in the process by which power is deployed.2 Therefore, the simple notion
of the outside space is foreclosed in the Vollmannian map. While Seven Dreams is a
vertical exploration into the historical genealogy of American subjectivity, The Atlas
undertakes a horizontal analysis, exclusively maintaining its focus on the emergence of
the I in the contemporary atlas.
Though the book assembles fragmentary experience from all over the world, the
opening and closing episodes transform this seemingly cosmopolitan quest into an
American experience: Opening the Book describes the moment in Grand Central
Station in New York where the travelers journey begins, whereas Closing the Book
finds the man at a bus terminal in Sacramento. The composition of The Atlas thus
retraces the American movement from the East Coast to the West, establishing
it as a prototypical American narrative. Yet the linear progression is undermined
by the fragmentary style: fragments occupying the in-between space do not follow
chronologically. In other words, the text decomposes the linear space-time sequence of
his journey, reorganizing disparate events and highlighting the function of each piece
in the making of the I. In traveling from one fragment to another, the travelers self
is defined and modified.
Each fragment bears a date and a place name, establishing the force that produced
it as historically and geographically specific: Place not as points or areas on maps,
but . . . as spatio-temporal events,3 as Doreen Massey puts it. The main preoccupations
of the book, namely violence, death, sexual relationships, and desire, are grasped
in their particular forms in the contemporary atlas. In this sense, The Atlas rejects
transhistorical explanations of those motifs; the text displays the anatomy of the
American I produced by the contemporary workings of power relations. Most of
the episodes fall between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, which corresponds to the
closure of the Cold War and the rise of the New World Order. The American self thus
involves the whole atlas, the global movement of powerin the age of globalization,
his travel becomes the double of American self-fashioning in the world theater.4
However, Vollmanns text does not follow the affirmative logic of US-centered
globalism. Rather, The Atlas constructs the American double as an intolerable man,
whose existence betrays the dismal aspects of a powerful US discourse centering on
the global and the global economy.5 The Vollmannian double reveals the unbearable
weight of being American, to keep moving without the promise of the outside.
J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 2001), 55.
3
Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 130.
4
Brian Massumi, Requiem for Our Prospective Dead: Towards a Participatory Critique of Capitalist
Power, in Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in the Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor
Kauffman and Kevin John Heller (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 40.
5
Frederick Buell, Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American
Culture, American Quarterly 50.3 (1998): 577.
2
THE American Travelers Love and Solitude
23
Into the atlas of power

Motion is the keynote of The Atlas. In Opening the Book, the narrator sits on a bench
in Grand Central Station, watching the crowd that never ceases moving: no one stayed
here, except the souls without homes.6 Then he gets up and joins the crowd, obeying
the same law that dispersed the others. . . .7 The moment of stasis is but a brief interval
in his journey. From the outset, the I is inseparable from the collective movement of
dispersion; he begins his quest by joining the American impulse to move.
The opening fragment establishes two characteristic elements in his journey. The
first is the absence of community. In the station, the crowd is incessantly on the move,
but there is no sense of shared destiny: the people who rushed through this concourse
came from the rim of everywhere to be ejaculated everywhere, redistributing
themselves without reference to each other.8 The narrator is faced with a collectivity
that has no common identity. The second is a hint of death. When he peers down the
tracks, they remind him of death, one of the major preoccupations in the bookthe
sunken tunnels where the trains stretched themselves out, gleaming their lights, were
the catacombs.9 From the outset, the traveler is accompanied by the premonition of
death, so that his movement vastly differs from the expansion of the American frontier,
in which the utopia of open space . . . plays such an important role in the first phase
of American constitutional history.10 The opening piece carries out the two operations
that overturned traditional American motifs: collective movement is deprived of a
sense of common destiny, and instead linked to death. Engaged in this dynamic, the
travelers atlas unfolds.
With the leap from New York to Sarajevo, the American movement is no longer
limited to domestic coast-to-coast geography: now the global landscape is involved.
This move further intensifies the sense of death that accompanies the journey. In
Sarajevo, the protagonist travels under the threat of deathNo matter which way I
turned, the sniper who was going to kill me kept the back of my head in his sights.11
Though he is not certain this sniper exists at all, he is in constant fear.
The fragments from Sarajevo reveal a significant aspect of the quest: the contemporary
atlas is changing. The city under siege testifies that the old atlas of the Cold War is
no longer tenable, and that the nation-state is disintegrating into ethnic groups. As
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, we have entered the era of minor and
internal conflicts.12 The war also indicates the specificity of death: death is no longer

8

9

10

11

12

6
7
William T. Vollmann, The Atlas (New York: Penguin, 1996), 3.

Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 4.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), 169.
Vollmann, The Atlas, 5.
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 189.
24
Outside, America
a final void toward which individual lives are carried; it becomes banal, visible in
everyday life. In other words, death becomes not so much a personal or psychological
matter as a social phenomenon. Conflict or violence cannot be separated from this
post-Cold War global landscape: in Michel Wieviorkas words, the end of the Cold
War on the one hand and the globalization of the economy on the other have brought
considerable change in violence by making local conflicts possible or more deadly, by
exacerbating cultural fragmentation and the radicalization of social identities.13 The
atlas of violence is changing its configuration, and the journey of the I constantly
bears witness to its particularsLos Angeles in the 1992 riot and Somalia in the civil
conflict are typical examples.
The next episode in Sarajevo introduces the motif of a relationship with the sexual
other. In the city, he encounters an unhappy young woman, for whom he feels a violent
tenderness.14 He tries to encourage her by giving her money, saying, How much money
would you need to be happy?15 but she refuses it; soon he has to leave the city. Here
is a basic idea that the book repeatedly poses: a relationship with the other mediated
by money, and therefore doomed to fail. The encounter with the other constitutes the
travelers self as an American man with cash, free to arrive and depart as he pleases. It is
this relation that thwarts the possibility of lovemy guilt about being free to leave has
built a silence over time that drowned whatever she actually said.16 Because of their
asymmetrical relationship, there is nothing the two can share: the fragment redefines
the problem of community in terms of this failure.
Hence the crucial role of whores in the atlas (San Francisco, Berlin, Madagascar,
Bangkok, etc.), for money, desire, and the failure of community intersect precisely
where traveler and prostitute meet. In his transitory relations with whores, the traveler
cannot avoid being identified as American or, more specifically, a white customer. In
fact, he is involved in nothing but a power relationship, and Vollmann himself counts
prostitution as a form of institutionalized slavery.17 Though he tries to alter this relation
by acting as a savior of prostitutes or as their devoted partner, he eventually ends up
repeating the familiar relationship, frustrating his yearning for community. Across the
atlas, the traveler encounters difference, but that only serves to strengthen his sense of
self no matter where he visitscontrary to the claims of those who operate within
a difference paradigm, Mark Fisher and Rohit Lekhi argue in their analysis of New
World Order, difference actually reinforces rather than undermines the dominance
of the (white, Western male) subject.18 The traveler cannot overcome this dynamic
of difference. Butterfly Stories (I), which recounts his journey in Phnom Penh in the
Michel Wieviorka, The New Paradigm of Violence, in Globalization, the State, and Violence, ed.
Jonathan Friedman (Walnut Creek: Altamira, 2003), 117.
15
Ibid., 9.
16
Ibid., 11.
17
William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent
Means (New York: Harper, 2005), 22.
18
Mark Fisher and Rohit Lekhi. The Fate of Subjectivity in the New World Disorder, in Sovereignty
and Subjectivity, ed. Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Vronique Pin-Fat (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,
1999), 89.
13
14
25
early 1990s, presents a similar case. Scars of the Pol Pot genocide are found throughout
the episode, extending the undertone of death and destruction. After a long period of
absence, he comes back to Cambodia to search for a prostitute he once loved. There is
no clue as to her whereabouts, however, and he wanders around the city looking for her
in vain. Then a strange woman appears, and he enters into a relationship defined solely
by cashAs long as he could keep dancing with her (and paying to dance), shed be
still his.19 The possibility of romance is thus replaced by a monetary relation, namely
relationships of power, eventually leaving the traveler in a somber mood.
The motif of asymmetrical relationships with the other is not confined to the sexual
realm. In Canadas Northwest Territories, he travels with native hunters who are going
after walrus, but is faced with a boys hostile attitude that reminds him of his awkward
position in the whole business: The boy who hated white people sat sullenly with his
back turned toward me and sighted in his rifle. I was only allowed along because I had
paid three hundred dollars.20 In this tour, the money fixes his white-man-with-money
identity, which inexorably differentiates him from the native people. Because of this
dynamic of difference, a haunting sense of homelessness accompanies him throughout
the book. The protagonist cannot find a community where he can enjoy a sense of
equality and belonginghe has to continue his travel, witnessing his condition of
homelessness, which subsequent pieces further confirm.
Journey in the contemporary atlas is therefore inseparable from the idea of the
double. This does not suggest, however, that world and self are simply mirrored in the
atlas; as in the preceding fragments, the travelers subjectivity is formed in his relations
with the mapthere can be no free subject who stays outside it. In Spare Parts the
man loses his lover in Mexico; then in Rome, Italia, he buys an atlas and speaks to his
lost lover: Im not asking for you. Im only asking for a spare you.21 The atlas opens the
domain of the double, in which he seeks solace.
Again in Mogadishu, he looks at another old map, in which African countries
are still colonies of European nations. He gazes further into the world of the atlas:
he approached Muqdisho, which was spare for Mogadishu.22 The past name is the
double of the present, so that the map ultimately concerns the presenthowever
old the map is, it tells his position in contemporary Somalia, with refugees, the US
Embassy, UN Flags, and armed civilian forces signaling American involvement in the
confusion. As Catherine Besteman points out, Somalia was a strategic site during the
Cold War, and the year 1993 is marked by the unsuccessful US military mission: The
bungled diplomacy and confused military intervention that followedinvolving the
withdrawal of American troops following the loss of American livesappear only to
have exacerbated local tensions.23 The obsolete map does not so much represent the
past as it partakes in the present practice of the American self.

21

22

23

19
20

Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 148.
Catherine Besteman, The Cold War and Chaos in Somalia: A View from the Ground, in The State,
Identity and Violence: Political Disintegration in the Post-Cold War World, ed. R. Brian Ferguson
(London: Routledge, 2003), 288.
26
Outside, America
The map and the observer, then, are not separated: Looking up at his giant blinking
eye, little girls in red or yellow garbashars stood and tried to sell him packs of cigarettes.24
To these inhabitants, the American observer is a potential buyer, reestablishing the
monetary relationship. In this living atlas, he finds the spare her.25 The lives of the
doubles are played out, but this spare world is never an ideal utopia; the present is
doubled by the map with the emphasis on its dark side. The spare woman recognizes
and rebels against the observershe threw off her veil and looked upward at him
with the deadly dark glide and glitter of a tiger snake. She was one of the doubles.
This time he was mesmerized by the approaching bullet.26 Theorizing space, Massey
states that the dominant form of mapping . . . does position the observer, [himself]
unobserved, outside and above the object of the gaze,27 yet in Spare Parts the traveler
is caught inside the atlas, where he is also the object of the gaze, monetary aspirations,
and hatred of the other.
He buys the atlas to fulfill his need for the lost love, to substitute the map for the loss
of the real; this starting point follows the notion of the map as a fictive representation
designed to ensure the observers freedom. However, his expectations are overturned
when the map-book reveals the world of doubles, involving the traveler in another
American experience. In this sense the map is part of the dramaturgy of the real,28
and The Atlas redefines itself as a domain of the double that seizes and forms the dismal
American self. The space of freedom cannot be found in this map.
Not all the fragments, however, function to nail his self onto the dominant power
matrix. Exalted by the Wind, one of the most imaginative pieces in the book, expresses
his hope of escape. The place is Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada, located
at the very limit of American space. This Arctic spot is delineated as a space of potential,
where everything escapes rigid definition: I seemed to see nothing but solidified space
without a predicate. It was a blank page of all possibilities, not excluding loveliness
and terror.29 While Sarajevo, Phnom Penh, and other places are marked by highly
determined power relations with the other, the Arctic space is laden with promises,
which defy any predetermined schemeit is a very different imagination: instead of
space divided-up and bounded here is a vision of space as barrier-less and open.30 He
visits this indefinite space with his friend, and the two set up camp in a blizzard.
In the tent, he has a dream. Carried away by the strong wind, he sees the
black silhouette of a woman, with white fur-ruff around her face.31 Through this
encounter with an imaginary woman, the protagonist pursues the possibility of a new,
nonmonetary kind of relationship, and in turn his new self is envisioned. When the
snow ceases, the traveler and his friend go outside to climb a small snow-covered hill,

26

27

28

29

30

31

24
25

Ibid.
Ibid., 155.
Massey, For Space, 107.
Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men, 160.
27
but it is his friend, not the traveler, who achieves a relationship with the Arctic woman:
Before he disappeared in a lenticular cloud, I saw that his eyes were closed and he
was smiling tenderly and his arms were outstretched as if he were about to embrace
someone.32 Although the opportunity of being exalted into the outside, namely an
ideal community with the woman eludes the traveler, this imaginative experience in
Canada shines as a beacon of hope among his other disappointing encounters.
The weight of memories: The Atlas

After a series of disappointments, the traveler is on a train to Canada. Numerous
memories of encounters and relationships across the world have accumulated to
produce and fix the contours of this American I: despite his disgust, his existence
is inescapably defined by, and confined into, this space of the power relations. The
largest section in the middle of the book, The Atlas unfolds this dynamic of the self,
from which the traveler attempts to escape. The middle section incorporates many
fragments from the first half, appearing as the center around which other episodes, like
satellites, revolve. However, the narrative itself denies this view:
one might hope by now to have established the center of our travellers world, but
the Earth itself is scarcely a sphere, only an asymmetric rotational spheroidthat
is, a pearand so the reference point . . . is not quite where intuition might lead
us to expect.33
The Atlas is not a preestablished center but an effect produced by the preceding
partsin Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris words, it is a whole of these particular
parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated
separately.34 The section does not function as a final telos where all movements cease
to reveal a stable meaning; rather, the assortment of micromovements produces yet
another journey that maintains the principle of ceaseless dispersion.
The beginning of the trip northward is marked by a sense of exhaustion: He had
used up every place now. Everywhere he went, hed say to himself: Theres nothing for me
anymore. No more nowhere nobody.35 The repetition of power relations forces him to
recognize his American identity in every location; in his atlas, there is no possibility
that some unknown place may give him an opportunity for achieving his authentic
self: Now he understood that nothing would ever happen. It was time to go back
to Canada.36 The opening page of the section indicates that his journey on the train

Ibid., 253.
34
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.
Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 42.
35
Vollmann, The Atlas, 202 (Italics added).
32
33
28
Outside, America
begins at Montreal in 1993 and ends at Ellesmere Island in 1988, so that the journey
also leads to past memory. His hope of escape lies in the place where, in Exalted by the
Wind, he once glimpsed possible transformation in his imaginary relationship with
the Arctic woman.
The traveler began his journey with an innocent goal in mindBy his own
standards, he reminisces, he was simply looking for something. He wanted to see the
world, that was all. He wanted to know and love the entire atlas.37 But this movement
toward the outside space results in constituting the very atlas of power that captures
him. To move as far away from his present self as possibleit is in this sense that his
journey to the Canadian north is often associated with death: Traveling, especially
early in the morning, is equivalent to dying.38 Moving to Ellesmere Island, he attempts
to exit the grid. Death here is given a new function as a promise of a final release from
the atlas.
On the train, memories of sexual relationships with women come to him one after
another. He wishes to remember his first love, but realizes that his love was in out
up down everywhere everybody. . . . Hed been too promiscuous.39 With memories
weighing down on him, his thoughts lead back to his relations with womenin
Budapest, Algeria, then Beogradand the battles he has witnessed. Memories surface
and disappear without conforming to the order of any totality.40
Still, the American traveler tries to fabricate the final destination of his movement.
He gets off the train to walk in a no-mans land, this time alone. Now the woman
appears: Willow Lady grew slowly out of his thoughts, hour by hour in that summer
of perpetual chilly light. The wind was her breath and the winds voice was her voice.41
With Inuk eyes and hair of woody strands, Willow Lady is an ensemble of the Arctic
earth, namely the double of the region; he tries to attain, through inventing a relation
with her, a sense of belonging. The past memory in Exalted by the Wind is revised
Willow Lady rolled on top of him and took him in her arms42to enable an ideal
Ibid. The repeated motifs of failure and death in his journey invoke the personal history of the
protagonist. In Hanover, New Hampshire in 1968, a boy loses his sister when she drowns in the
river; 25 years later, in Mauritius, Bangkok, and Rome, he is still searching for her: Catacomb,
honeycomb of the slow bees of souls, the slow crowd in the halls, where do you keep my little
sister? (Vollmann, The Atlas, 109). Yet, though the fragments in Under the Grass provide the
personal background for the mans quest for love, they do not come together to form either a
privileged core or the origin of his journey; with the reorganization of spatiotemporal order, the
emphasis falls on collective movement. Opening the Book describes the beginning of his quest in
the dispersing crowd, while his personal motives come only after repeated failures. In Vollmann,
the collective force of America always precedes the personal: filled with death and frustrations, the
contemporary atlas summons the spectral past as its double.
37
Ibid., 224.
38
Ibid., 202.
39
Ibid., 211.
40
An antipathy to dialectic thinking runs through Vollmanns oeuvre. His writing flatly rejects the
notion of history as a movement toward a destination. Throughout his Seven Dreams novels,
American history is conceived as a series of violent acts, which include the foundation of the
UnitedStates and the narrative present of the 1980s and 1990s. Thus Vollmann claims, we need
not delude ourselves that history has accomplished much in the way of human achievement
(Rising, 22).
41
36
29
relationship. The most comforting page of his memory-atlas provides him with a
refuge, an imagined love: She rocked him to sleep. No more nowhere nobody. . . . He
lay at the center from which the world rotated round and round and round.43
The traveler apparently achieves a stasis at the centerseemingly nothing can
affect their union. However, the maps of the Arctic and the Antarctic, which follow the
closure of The Atlas, overturn this dream. His final destination in the atlas, Ellesmere
Island, is still some ways from the North Poleits location is 80.00 N, 85.39 W.44 As a
result of this separation from the axis, the center of his atlas then spins off in a display
of centrifugal force, and the apparent unity of the section gives way to another series
of fragments in the second half of the book.45 The Atlas eventually forecloses the
travelers wishful desire to escape into the fabricated pastthe journey continues.
Seeing more doubles

The Atlas is followed by episodes that correspond to those in the first half of the
bookthe fragments are doubled, and this duplication modifies and rejects the
remnants of optimism in the preceding fragments. The double always defies an
idealistic gesture: the escapist fantasy in The Atlas is immediately replaced by the
relentless drama of life in Red and Blue, which presents the narrator watching boxing
matches in Bangkok, Thailand. The observer perceives the matches in terms of sex
They locked knees around each other. More than anything else Id ever seen, it was like
some new and terrible way of making love.46 An analogy is established between the
fight and the sexual act, turning the latter into another struggle for power: no matter
who you are or what you do, the traveler thinks, life is war.47 The fragment cancels out
the optimistic view of life, and reconfirms its violent character.
This gloomy view of life is further intensified in sexual relationships; the romantic
dream in Exalted by the Wind is subverted by the somber mood of its double,
Disappointed by the Wind. In gusty Toronto, the traveler at first claims a close relation
with the cold wind, as in the preceding episode. I was in the bedroom of the wind. The
wind wanted to play with me, love me and eat me. I married the wind, and rode the
wind all night.48 But soon this ideal love exhausts itself: Then the wind got tired of me.

44

45

Ibid., 265.
Ibid. (Italics added).
Ibid., xxi.
This decentering force of the earth itself is inseparable from the modern cosmological view.
Vollmanns book on Coperinicus, Uncentering the Earth, demonstrates the post-Copernican
ontological assumption that defines his uncentered world-view: My entirely uncentered
sensibility (William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth, 64), we uncentered ones (Ibid., 88), and
our thoroughly uncentered point of view (Ibid., 130) are among the many expressions through
which Vollmann characterizes the contemporary perspective, and The Atlas is no exception.
46
47
Ibid., 273.
48
Ibid., 337.
42
43
Outside, America
30
I dont know why.49 Disappointed, he is deprived of the fantasy of the windnow he is

left with yet another series of power relationships.
In this landscape of violent struggle and disappointment, the text reconsiders and
then finally rejects the possible role of death in achieving an exit. Butterfly Stories (I)
also has its double, Butterfly Stories (II) that foregrounds and modifies the death motif.
He comes to a Chinese restaurant in Sacramento, where he sees a woman with whom he
slept the night before. He asks for her love, saying, if I paid you right now, would you
go to bed with me one more time?50 Faced with her cold attitude, he realizes his failure;
she only responds, you want to fuck me now? Its that important to you? Go ahead.51
When he does so, she reveals the risk of having sex with her: Both the guys who did me
said they had AIDS. So I have AIDS. Take the rubber off and fuck me and get AIDS if
thats what you want.52 In this situation, the two appear to enter a community:
Its good.
Can you feel my death crawling inside you?
Oh, it feels so good
Youre thrusting deeper and deeper into my death. My death is in you now. Are you
getting ready to come? You look like you are. I love you. This time I really mean it.
I love you. I love you because youre going to die for me.53
This sharing of death provides a glimpse of community. With nothing else in common,
death is the sole principle that unites them; disappointed by the wind and faced with
the vast gap between the prostitute and himself, he seeks the possibility of a communal
moment. It is the only equality the American traveler can hope for: a democracy
of death. Yet, the fragment also indicates that sexual relations with the two men
with AIDS precede the womans words: her I love you is uttered in the context of
monetary relations, so that it is neither the representation of her authentic voice nor a
promise of ideal love.54 Even the promise of death is caught up in relations of power. As
Maurice Blanchot comments on the absence of community in the capitalist age, the
absoluteness of the relationships has been perverted from the onset . . . there is indeed
commerce between beings but never a veritable community.55 Butterfly Stories (II)
eventually denies the community of death.

51

52

53

54

Ibid.
Ibid., 357.
Ibid., 359.
Ibid.
Ibid., 360.
Although the words of women and ethnic others abound in his atlas, the traveler is constantly
reminded that their voices are inseparable from the power relationships in which they are
situatedwhen, for instance, a Thai prostitute appears in front of him dressed in a kimono and
[speaking] English like a Japanese (Vollmann, The Atlas, 30), her appearance and utterance always
already presuppose her monetary relations with Japanese and European men. Thus, as Foucault
writes, it is doubtless impossible to ever grasp them again in themselves, as they might have been
in a free state (Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men, 161). There is no authentic experience outside
or beyond the power relations that entangle the traveler.
55
Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill,
1988), 356.
49
50
31
The exit from the atlas of power is closed, which leads to the reconsideration of the
atlas-self relation in Outside and Inside, a meta-commentary on The Atlas itself. It
examines the presence of power in composing the map-book, continuing the line of
thought seen in Spare Partsto carry and make an atlas is inextricable from sexual
domination. In this act, the map-book captures and defines the travelers masculine
self.56 He always finds himself in an in-between zone where he and the atlas enter
into a relationshipthe clear distinction between outside and inside finally evaporates,
leaving only an interactive space where the subject-position of the traveler is continually
interrogated.
Outside and Inside begins with a simple distinction. People turn the pages of
picture books inside a bookstore, while, out in the street, two panhandlers quarrel.
One of the picture books is already described as an object of male desire in that its
paper is as smooth as a virgins thigh.57 Reading and buying this book is another
form of sexual act. When the man buys the book and leaves, the male panhandler
smashes the females head against the window of the bookstore. The man with
the book attempts to rescue herHe opened his book and invited her in. . . .
Spangles of blood struck the pages like a misty rain, becoming words which had
never existed before.58 By smashing the window, the boundary between the inside
and the outside is crossed; then the blood flows into the page, transgressing the
boundary of the book.
Since the picture-book is perceived as a sexual object, the notion of possession
accompanies the act of rescuing her inside the bookin inviting her into the book
of his desire, he makes her his property. Now you have loved me, and I will love you
forever,59 she says to him from inside the book; yet the love is inseparable from the
owner-owned relationship. Thus incorporated in the book, the woman speaks, But
where are my hands? where are my feet, my breasts?60 Thus he starts his journey to
constitute the double of the woman in the book, which opens an intermediary space.
Walking in the city of Hong Kong, he realizes that he is in the zone of in-betweenHe
was at the nexus . . . the city that was neither outside nor inside.61 At first he thinks he
is inside the atlas, but it is no longer clear:
Open the book, she said weakly.
Its open already.
Where am I, then? Am I inside or outside?
Vollmanns work abounds with such practices of the self with the book. In Argall, Captain John
Smith carries Machiavellis Prince, which he memorizes and keeps consulting in need of advice
You practice right tunefully to play the melody calld Michiavell. Trarintra-rarara (Vollmann,
Argall, 92). John Smiths subjectivity is formed in his relation with the book. As Vollmann himself
explains, a book should be more than a container for the words. Your book is like your body
youre simply born with it (Interview with William Vollmann, 22).
57
58
Ibid., 395.
59
Ibid., 395.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid., 398.
56
Outside, America
32
I dont know, he murmured, suddenly resentful. I dont know where I am anymore,

either. I lost my freedom because of you.62
Deprived of a free position by the book, he sets out to make her complete, searching
for her spare parts in the city. When he finishes the work, he says to her, Now youre
complete in the book,63 and she says goodbye.
This does not suggest, however, that the man finds a final place outside the book;
he remains at the nexus. The Hong Kong fragment is followed by another, which tells
of his 1992 release from a mental institution in Mexico. He gets on a train, which goes
underground to reach the core of the earth, revealing another form of domination:
an atlas on a chain64 at the very center of the world. The center of the earth is not, as
The Atlas indicates, a comforting place of mutual affection; it is nothing but an act
of subjugation. When he opens the book, the womans bones, hair, blood, flesh, etc.
fall out. The man buries them with a crystal, and then a brilliant flower growsJust
before it enveloped the space which he had occupied, it invited him in . . .65 To the very
end, outside and inside does not resolve into a clear distinction: in constructing the
atlas, the subject cannot maintain an outside position, since the nexus disavows any
safe place from which a supposedly transparent subject can represent the other. The
fragments constitute an intermediary space where the atlas captures both the woman
and the traveler.
Exhausting every hope of solidarity or reciprocal love, the journey returns to
Sarajevo under siege. In a piece called Last Day at the Bakery, he visits the final bakery
left to provide bread for the city. He is permitted inside because he is American, while
other citizens have to wait outside: I could feel the stares of the waiting people in my
back.66 At the time of his visit, the bakery has already run out of electricity, water, and
dieselWeve come to the end,67 the director tells him. The bakery is closing, and the
city will be without a major source of food; the traveler likens the empty room to the
heart of a dying man, still pumping life, but only in negligible quantities and only for a
little longer.68 The director offers him one of the last loaves left in the bakeryas the
traveler goes outside, there are about 50 people waiting to get bread. There is no room,
on his part, for sympathy with them. The American is given a loaf, while the others still
wait empty-handed; death is invading the city, but he cannot share it with them: the
travelers tears are a testimony to his failure to achieve any solidarity with the other.
Closing the Book finds the traveler in Sacramento, 1992. The journey from
New York has finally reached the other coast, but there is no sense of completion. A
relationship with a woman has already collapsed in the beginning of the fragment: He
had left her burning in her tears at the Greyhound station, and now he was about to

64

65

66

67

68

62
63
Ibid., 399.
Ibid., 401.
Ibid., 403.
Ibid.
Ibid., 445.
Ibid., 446.
Ibid.
33
take the city bus home.69 This initial passage at first suggests the existence of his home,
where his journey comes to an end. Yet, even when he is pretending that he is returning
to a woman he loves, the traveler realizes that [t]here was nowhere to go except home,
and home was nowhere anymore.70
Then the monetary relation reappears and concludes the book. He goes into a coffee
shop, where a Chinese waitress works. He leaves seven dollars for the $4.60 bill:
Too much! she shrieked.
Wearily he pushed it into her hand.
Tank you, tank you!
Thank you, he said. As he got up he watched her fingers tighten ecstatically around
the money.71
Her excitement and words of gratitude are inseparable from the tip: the moment
never overcomes the difference between them. Thus the book ends, with the mans
final destination never having been disclosed. As in Opening the Book, a ceaseless
movement occupies an interval, but the motif of death completely disappears from
it. Without hope of either community or exit, the traveler keeps moving; the closing
piece turns the American westward movement of expansion into its negative double, a
meandering without destination.
Vollmanns atlas is constituted as a battlefield where fragments struggle and battle
with each otherthe American subject is produced as the double of this battle. Being
American in the Vollmannian atlas rejects any promise of the outside space of liberal
democracy, equality, or freedom. As Hardt and Negri put it in their discussion of
globalization, [d]ifference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves.72
The overall effect of The Atlas conveys a sense of the intolerable: numerous deaths and
scenes of violence, lines of difference run through the map, defining the position of
the traveler where, against all idealism, he discovers himself to be an unbearable white
man scattering his desire and cash across the globe. In Fisher and Lekhis words, he is
the possessive individual for whom the whole world becomes a screen on which to
project his own dreary dramas of guilt and redemption.73 Yet, in Vollmanns case, the
fragments cancel out any possibility of redemption. The hope of exit vanishes, leaving
only the unbearable weight of being American. The American dynamic mutates
according to a principle of unbearablenesson this map, community, belonging, the
hope in the future or past memory, even death expose their incapability of providing
the possibility of the ideal self.
The politics of the double in Vollmanns book are what make visible the somber
workings of power relationships in the contemporary atlas. In other words, the

72

73

69
70
71
Ibid., 447.
Ibid., 453.
Ibid., 455.
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 156.
Fisher and Lehki, The Fate of Subjectivity, 93.
34
Outside, America
constitution of the double is a strategy to specify the longitude and latitude that nail the
American self. In the post-Cold War era of Americanism, Vollmanns atlas converts any
optimistic view of the self into an intolerable presence in the power-map; the weight
of the American becomes heavier as his cartography produces more doubles. As with
Foucaults notion of statements, the figure of the double is a particular, vacant place
that may in fact be filled by different individuals.74
This idea is not limited to Vollmanns work; it attracts other contemporary
authors in America like a gravitational force. In Paul Austers Leviathan, the writer
Benjamin Sachs becomes a political activist, the Phantom of Liberty, thus defining
himself as the ugly double of the American ideal who moves around in the United
States until he blows himself up with his bomb. In a different vein, Sherman Alexie
also uses the theme to explore the past-present relationship of Native American
historythe experience of a blues rock band in Reservation Blues is expressed as
the double of the past. Those contemporary writers constitute an ever-growing
atlas of the double; the Vollmannian atlas is but a fragment of this interrogation.
The travelers survey the vast American battlefield, far from innocent outside space,
where they encounter the sociohistorical forces that shape themseeing double on
the road has become the sober literary cartography of the present.
74
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon,
1972), 95.
Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of

Masculinity in Denis Johnsons Already Dead:
A California Gothic
A man who has come to an impassethis motif keeps reappearing in contemporary

writers, testifying to the dead space of American manhood. Among them, Thom
Jones story, Rocket Man, stands out in its use of Nietzschean ideas in describing a
power-obsessed man: Billy Prestone, a light-heavyweight boxing champion, visits his
boyhood hero and second in the ring, W. L. Moore, in the hospital. In a conversation
that allows them to confirm their male bond and display their masculinity to each
otherI can hang with anybody,1 Prestone insiststhe two talk about the
champions next fight; then Moore reads from The Portable Nietzsche, his favorite book,
and encourages the boxer by calling him The Will to Power personified in the body
of Billy Prestone!2 Of course, the story itself does not affirm this understanding of
Nietzsche; instead, by describing two men obsessed with masculinity to the point of
self-destruction, Jones ultimately raises the question: are such men the only possible
embodiments of Nietzschean philosophy?
Denis Johnsons 1997 novel, Already Dead: A California Gothicwhich explores
the possibility that Nietzschean concepts function as transformation of masculine
subjectivitycan be read as a radical response to this question. Through the tale of a
petty crime and its destructive consequences for the nihilistic protagonist, Nelson
Fairchild Jr., the novel also pursues a dead end where the heros subjectivity, previously
defined by a set standard of masculinity, mutates to give way to a different mode of being.
The novel is filled with references to two styles in particular: Friedrich Nietzsches Thus
Spoke Zarathustra and the crime novel.3 On the one hand, Nietzsches constant criticism
Thom Jones, The Pugilist at Rest (New York: Back Bey, 1994), 219.
Ibid., 227.
3
In addition, frequent allusions to demons, resurrections of the dead, ghosts, and channeling in
the narrative indicate its gothic elements, so evident in the title of the novel. In its motif of the
collapse of the Fairchild family, the novel draws on the American gothic convention, which adapted
a gothic imagery to exemplify the destructive power of families (Davenport-Hines, Gothic, 267).
However, those gothic characteristics do not form a view of a supernatural that exceeds human
understanding: the demons are Nelsons past traumas, the ghosts represent the nihilists interiority,
and channeling suggests the indeterminate character of the self. Such clichs of gothic fiction are
deployed methodically in the Nietzschean strategy of the novel.
1
2
36
Outside, America
of the modern subject and his idea of self-overcoming are turned into a subversion of
masculinity; in Johnson, Nietzsches imperative that Man is something that must be
overcome4 functions as a problematization of the masculine.5 On the other hand, the
sexist subjectivity of the crime novel, marked by all the clichs of the genrea male
criminal with a murder plot, the bond with another male accomplice, femme fatales, and a
detection processis transformed to give way to a new form of the individual. Following
the Nietzschean vision, the narrative accelerates Nelsons nihilism until it reaches its limit
and his identity is destroyed, whereupon a metamorphosis of his subjectivity takes place
with profound forgetting of the past. Johnsons tour de force, instead of a mere critique of
manhood, tries to foster the potential to overcome the force of masculine identity and to
reach the outside, now detached from the spatial dimension.
The birth of tragedy

August 8, 1990. While the nation heads toward a war in the Persian Gulf, a man plans
to have his wife killed. The criminal, Nelson, is a man of Nietzschean ressentiment in
the middle of a crisisan approaching divorce, a drug-deal gone bad, his father on
his deathbed, and a mistress who causes ceaseless fear. In this portrait of a man in
despair, Already Dead follows the tradition of the American crime novel, which tends
toward alienation and nihilism.6 Nelsons first-person narrative cynically analyzes his
own situation, where he finds power relationships with others, especially his father, that
corner and nail him against what he sees as the dismal coast of Northern California.
Trapped in this web of relationships, Nelson reacts by accusing himself and others for
this dead end, which leads to his hatred of the feminine. Nelson displays the typical
characteristicsThe imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities, perpetual
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1995), 37.
5
While there have been various arguments on gender issues in Nietzsches work, a number of postwar
thinkers have attempted to define Nietzsches philosophy in terms of resistance to normative
subjectivity: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Klossowski, Judith Butler, and
William E. Connolly being just a few. Keith Ansell-Pearson summarizes the matter: Nietzsches
critique of Christian and liberal notion of the self can certainly be of use to a . . . politics of
difference (Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche, Woman and Political Theory, 31). Among such attempts,
Jeffrey T. Nealon shows a crucial insight in linking the issue of masculinity with the Nietzschean
perspective. In his analysis of contemporary American WAM (white, angry male) discourse, Nealon
argues that WAM shows its pedigree . . . precisely in that which Nietzsche set out to analyze in
On the Genealogy of Morals and so much of his other work: resentment (Nealon, Performing
Resentment, 274). Instead of setting the masculine/feminine dichotomy, Nealon suggests that the
Nietzschean perspective can problematize masculinity itself.
6
Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1990), xiii.
4
Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity
37
accusation7of the nihilistic man. From Nelsons perspective, California appears as a

lifeless land, the American Dream without any more promise of the outside.
From the beginning, Nelsons dismal mood is clearly contrasted with that of his
wife, Winona: she enjoys her life in the Golden State, while Nelson is full of pain and
resentment against her. Explaining the role that real estate plays in the Fairchild family,
Nelsons words point out his weak position in relation to his wife. She loves our forty
acres, he says. Shed do anything to keep itincrease itdivorce me? Without a blink.
I think shed shoot me.8 With a coming divorce in sight, his place completely vanishes
from their property, where Winona now lives alone.
Nelson refers to another powerful source of his woes when meditating over his
current situation: RightI knowthe world has its horrors, mine among the
privileged, American kind. But let my statement stand: I blame my father for myself.9
This relation with his father has produced the sense of incompetence as a man that has
characterized his whole life:
Uneducated in the ways of domestic life itself, marooned on the shore of parenthood
without any equipment, his manner of teaching us, my brother and me, was to ask
mysterious questions as a way of indicating wed made some mistake or other. . . .
But in that case where on this earth should I be, Father? Where do you want me,
what should I do? Anything, but only tell me. I dont know what you want! Speak!
A child, Im miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his fathers
sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?10
Thus the child turns into a man of ressentiment; his identity has always been defined by
his relationship with his father, in which he, as the son, always finds himself dominated.
He is guilty a prioriin Gilles Deleuzes words, pain is made the consequence of a
sin, a fault.11 Repeatedly uttered and finally internalized, the paternal words that
indicate a failure the son cannot clearly grasp become the defining principle of his
whole being. As Denise Riley argues: The tendency of malignant speech is to ingrow
like a toenail, embedding itself in its hearer until its no longer felt to come from the
outside.12 Constantly implying the sons deficiency, the fathers words indicate the
lack of ideal masculinity in Nelsons self; therefore, Nelsons initial situation is akin to
the psychoanalytic notion of the subject, which explains that there is an inescapable
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983),
118.
8
Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 25.
9
Ibid., 26.
10
Ibid.
11
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 129.
12
Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005), 11.
7
38
Outside, America
debt of negativity, an ontological deficit which can never be repaid, or filled up.13 Thus
the son desires that phantasmic wholeness he cannot attain, making his situation an
embodiment of one of Zarathustras lamentations: only man is a grave burden for
himself!14
Nelsons sources of uneasiness are not confined to the familial sphere. His past
failure as a drug trafficker has made him a fugitive on the coast of California. Assigned
a job by his gang boss Harry Lally, Nelson took money to Italy to smuggle drugs back
to California; but, he bitterly remembers, the fear of being discovered by the officials
got the better of him, and made him abandon the task. Nelson speaks of his failure and
its consequence: Okay, I dont need to be flip: I can admit that first by my avarice, and
then by a compounding cowardice, I earned myself a mortal enemy. And now Im in a
war.15 While the government prepares for its biggest war since Vietnam, Nelson finds
himself in another war, an asymmetric struggle with Lallys organization that sends
after him the two hunters, and their dogsclearly part of Harry Lallys program for
extracting reimbursement.16
Along with these troubles, Nelsons affair with Melissa is far from stable. He
constantly expresses his fear that she may abandon him: Its sad to love a woman
who wont love back,17 he says, and in fact she is carrying on a sexual relationship
with another man. The girl is described as an unfaithful woman who might betray the
protagonist at any moment, confirming Joyce Carol Oatess comments that the noir
tradition, or clich, has it that women are evil and disgusting if they are sexual beings.18
His manly integrity is constantly threatened in his relation with her, his femme fatale.
Everywhere he looks, Nelson finds the sources of fear that belittle him. At one
point, he scornfully analyzes his own current condition, entangled, as he is, in a web
of relationships:
I sit out here and think convulsively until Im numbed by dope and confused by
my own brainthink about my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2002), 54.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 193. However, the novel presents the lack that constitutes
Nelsons reactive subjectivity as the product of his power relationship with the father, rather than an
essential condition of the subject: the fathers words are a force that works on and shapes the sons
subjectivity, while Nelson, lacking the power to overcome the father, has no other choice than to
obey. In this view of the self as the product of forces, the novel follows the Nietzschean-Deleuzian
view, which holds that all reality is already quantity of force (Deleuze, Nietzsche, 40), which
also applies to The Mosquito Coast. As the narrative progresses, Already Dead deviates from the
psychoanalytic notion of the subjectit explores the possibility that the existing combination of
forces can be rearranged to produce a different form of subjectivity.
15
Johnson, Already Dead, 35 (Italics added).
16
Ibid. The two hunters, Falls and Thompson, are eager to display their hard-boiled character; their
conversation is filled with clichs of masculine character: I shouldve fucked her (Ibid., 369) is a
typical example. However, as their pursuit proceeds, the killers begin to show characteristics that
defy their initial attitude. There is a hint of homosexual desireFalls runs his hand along Tommys
belly and crotch (Ibid., 371)before they break into a Buddhist temple, totally naked. They also
miss a number of chances to kill Nelson. Thus they subvert the codes of hard-boiled masculinity.
17
Ibid., 37.
18
Joyce Carol Oates, The Simple Art of Murder, The New York Review of Books 42.20 (1995): 36.
13
14
39
and my regions demands and allowances. My idiot brother. My ugly father. Free
will? Personal decisions? Its not that simple, not at all. What am I but the knot, the
gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands?19
He condemns the power relationships that leave him no room for autonomy. Nelson has
become a reactive force within this web, full of resentment against himself and others:
resentment is always based on or in some notion of failure, absence, or lack.20 His
sense of incompleteness as a man thus defines his view of the world, which leads him
to accuse the sexual other, the feminine. Nelson tries to trace his origins to explain
his current situation, which leads him to the masculine/feminine dualism: the strong
British male is dominating, that hes going to do the horrible things made necessary by
the woman inside, the crazy Italian female part of me whos disarranged my life.21 In this
Manichean explanation of his being, the female part is always responsible for his misery,
while the Anglo half of the paternal is left blameless.22 The sense of incompleteness and
the consequent negation of otherness define Nelsons masculine subjectivity.
For him, then, California reveals its dark face as a land of interminable rains,
baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick, cloying fog banks. For twenty-one
successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like . . . like the American
Dream plowed up against the freezing sea.23 The dream has reached its limits, where
the quest for the outside space is blocked by the sea: it points to the speakers inner
reality. In this sense, Nelson is a typical protagonist from American crime fiction who
infects the landscape with desire and doom.24 In this world, Nelson aspires to a kind of
transcendence: In order to get on in this underworld, he says, youve got to practice
bushido, the warriors way, the samurais inner art, the art of being already dead. Bury
yourself and go to war.25 The world is conceived as an underworld, and he seeks the
way out by waging a war of revengehis murder plot is activated when the perfect
accomplice, Carl Van Ness, arrives on the scene.
The killer inside me

Everything I am is shit, Nelson says, condemning himself. Everything to do with me.
Everything Ive made.26 The past of failures imprisons him in what Pierre Klossowski

22

19
20
21

25

26

23
24
Johnson, Already Dead, 44.

Nealon, Performing Resentment, 277.
This binary explanation of self recalls the Polish-German dichotomy of origin by which Nietzsche
tries to explain himself in his unpublished final draft of Ecce Homo. According to Jean Graybeal,
who analyzes the final revision made by Nietzsche, the writer rejects and represses maternal
inheritance, and distances himself from the negative complex of German attributes with which he
associates his mother (Graybeal, Ecce Homo, 156), while identifying with his Polish father, who
represents noble character.
Hilfer, The Crime Novel, 31.
Ibid., 134.
40
Outside, America
explains as the Nietzschean idea of ressentiment: the will cannot reverse the flow of
timethe nonwilled that time established as an accomplished fact. This produces, in
the will, the spirit of revenge against the unchangeable.27 Nelson, a man full of pain,
seeks revenge on others; then he encounters Van Ness, who attempts to kill himself
out of despair. Accidentally saving his life, Nelson draws Van Ness into his scheme: if
the would-be suicide kills Winona and then perishes as he wishes, Nelson can safely
receive the life insurance on his wife, and thereby repay the debt to Lallys organization.
The coast will be clear for him to start a new life with Melissa. However, Van Ness, once
launched as the incarnation of Nelsons spirit of revenge, increasingly deviates from the
plan; instead he carries out a counterplot to eliminate the Fairchild line. Thus Nelsons
reactive will turns back on himself.
On the night when Nelson witnesses Van Ness going into the water to kill himself,
he is struck with the mans total abandonment: For him, the planet, and its ponds
and such, didnt count.28 Nelson yearns to be like Van Ness, to transcend all worldly
affairs. It is a typical male bond in the noir genre, as Oates observes: Such males
understand one another instinctively; when they meet, their bonding is immediate
and unquestioned.29 Talking with Van Ness after saving him, Nelson offers him a deal:
You do this murder. Maybe you should kill everybody who troubles me! Anyway you
do this murder. Then . . . you go somewhere. And finish committing suicide.30 As for
Van Ness, he does not hesitate to take on this task. I will kill this person for you31 is
his answer to Nelson, and the course of the plot is irreversibly set.
A dangerous chemistry develops between us,32 Nelson says to Van Ness,
considering his sudden arrival as an opportunity to solve all his problems. As Tony
Hilfer characterizes this type of character in the crime novel, The figure emerging
from darkness and absence may be the protagonists savior.33 Yet, the relation is only
an alliance between two forces of nihilism. Nelson wishes for the death of others, and
Van Ness tries to annihilate himselfboth are life-negating nihilists. The reactive force
of Nelson attracts another nihilistic force and both grow even stronger; the promise
of their alliance is nothing but an aggravated version of the reactive being. As Jeffrey
T. Nealon points out, resentment preeminently produces more reified, effective, and
pernicious versions of resentment.34
For Nelson, Van Ness points toward the possibility of an ideal world of invincible
masculinity where he can enjoy completeness. Van Ness dies, and comes back to
life; the suicide returns, but in a different universe where, in his view, he has become
immortal: Hed done it. Hed killed himself. And here he was. He was probably dead in
that universe, but in this one right next door he persisted; his consciousness had simply
Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Athlone,
1997), 52.
28
29
Oates, The Simple Art of Murder, 36.
30
31
Ibid., 76.
32
Ibid.
33
Hilfer, The Crime Novel, 37.
34
27
41
moved over into this other, potential world in which he did not die.35 It is Van Nesss
return that leads Nelson to unveil his own creed of eternal return:
Imagine a slight revision of Nietzsches myth of eternal return . . . that it starts again
and again with one infinitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule
every time, and an endless number of times . . . the bullet hits your brain in this
world, but in a late one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet
in another go on without a hitch.36
In this version, each return of difference works in such a way that it strengthens him, until
he becomes invincible. If this were true, dreams Nelson, the person who understood
it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman.37 The
difference each return brings is finally subjugated to an idealized masculine identity.
The Superman is, in Nelsons version, the name of the hypermasculine, an ideal to which
he continues to conform. He is still trapped in the transcendent value that Zarathustra
criticizesYou still want to create the world before which you can kneel.38
However, Nelsons plot goes astray. As planned, Nelson comes to Winonas house
where her dead body lies, being already regretful. I would do anything to undo this,39
he says, realizing that he cannot will time backwards. Immobilized by a sense of
incapacity, he is startled when the telephone rings, and Winona moves to take it: she
answers. Turns over. Reclaims her outflung arm. Fumbles with the telephone. Clears
the death from her throat with a rasping sound.40 Winona comes back to life as if
nothing happened. Over the phone, his brother Bill tells Nelson that their father is
deadpossibly murdered by Van Ness.
The dead woman was alive again,41 and from then on, the situation is beyond the
schemers control. Van Ness and Winona form a new alliance, and the killer redirects
his powers of destruction toward the Fairchild family. When Nelson accidentally comes
across his former accomplice on the road, Van Ness speaks of his own revised version
of the Nietzschean chain of transformations: Once you become a lion, a spirit acting
from will and making its freedoms, thats the end of it.42 While Thus Spoke Zarathustra
presents the spirit-camel-lion-child metamorphosis, Van Ness rules out the child from
the original vision, so that the destructive lion occupies the final stage; there is nothing
beyond its violence.
Thus speaks Van Ness, and he carries out his plan. After the death and return of
Winona and the funeral of the father, Van Ness goes into the woods to kill Nelsons
brother. He shoots Bill dead, then plays Russian roulette to test his strength: He put it

37

38

39

40

41

42

35
36

Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 95.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 113.
Ibid., 134.
Ibid., 145.
Ibid., 201.
42
Outside, America
to his own head. One. Two. Three. The pin smacked the cap. The cartridge whispered
irresolutely.43 The murderer again proves himself immortal. His triumph in the murder
and the subsequent trial constitute another return; thus he moves on, in yet another
universe, laughing.44 The killer returns to a new universe in which Bill Fairchild is dead
and he is not. Eventually, the former partners confront one another on the California
shore. A fight to death, Van Ness, a metal pipe in his hand, declares to Nelson. One
of us dispatches the other one to another realm.45 Hit in the head, Nelson falls into
the sea, and Van Ness triumphs: he takes Nelsons place and erases the existence of
the father, Bill, and Nelson, all of whom are springboards for his return to yet another
universe.
Nelson comes out of the water alive, but falls deeper into despair and ressentiment.
He withdraws to a hotel room and starts writing a letter to Van Ness and Winona.
Aware that they have launched a counterplot against him, Nelson finds himself in
deep emptinessNothing. Nothing. Nothing. Thats what you created.46 Tracing the
beginning of the whole plot, Nelson begins to analyze his own hardened subjectivity
in the letter: A man decides to kill his wife. Whats so unusual? . . . I want her dead;
therefore I am.47 This modified Cartesian statement testifies to the force of negation
at the heart of his being; instead of the I think as the basis of rational subjectivity,
Nelson posits the spirit of destruction, which defines him as a man of ressentiment.
Then the two hunters from Lallys organization, Falls and Thompson, spot him; they
shoot Nelson, but he escapes from their manhunt and hides on the Lost Coast. When
the wounded protagonist reaches School Marms Cove, Nelson encounters two ghosts,
his dead father and a headless woman, the former being dominant at this stage. The
father, incorporated into the sons self, still works on him as the force of interpellation
in the Althusserian sense, which defines the sons self, manifesting Rileys observation
that the afterlife of malignant speech is vigorously spectral.48 The paternal shadow
outlives the father to haunt the son: The dead father, the fathers shadow . . . became
the sign of the meaning of life, its value.49
Nelson prepares to sleep, as his father suggests. Under the paternal shadow, his
reactive self does not change but further deepens itself, bringing him to the nihilistic
void: He renounced control over his train of thought, he said farewell to concerns, to
any capacity at all for concern, he let his will fall into a bottomless pit of passivity and
nihilism. . . .50 Yet this extreme will to nothingness leads him to a different realm. Taken
to its limits, Nelsons reactive being clashes with itselfhere the novel corresponds
with Deleuzes explanation that nihilism is defeated, but defeated by itself.51 When the
force of destruction folds back upon itself, he has a glimpse of the first messages of a

46

47

48

49

50

51

43
44
45
Ibid., 240.
Ibid., 241.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 282.
Ibid., 284.
Riley, Impersonal Passion, 23.
Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 135.
Johnson, Already Dead, 417 (Italics added).
43
new worldhypnagogic phenomena. He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed.52

It is the destruction of his own nihilistic subjectivity that leads him to another kind of
outside, a new mode of being.
Metamorphosis
The next day witnesses a transformation of Nelsons self: On the day of his death Nelson
Fairchild received numerous grants of peace and grief, proofs of the beauty of the
world, clarifications, deep consolations, and happiness.53 At this extreme point, Nelson
discovers another dimension of his existence that extends beyond the paternal realm:
the nihilist metamorphoses into a woman. Already Dead thus presents a redefinition
of the idea of the Superman, echoing Deleuze: The overman . . . is a different subject
from man.54 It is not so much a hypermasculine figure as a transformative force within
the self that defies the normative subjectivity.
Wounded and faint, he is in the process of dyingI am dying in Wheeler,
California, he writes in his letter, a village by the Pacific around forty miles straight up
the coast from Fort Bragg.55 Nelson tries to summon the force of the father, namely the
form of his familiar selfbut the paternal shadow has disappeared: He called Father?
but his throat let out only a breath shaped like Father. The Old Man wouldnt show, no
phantasms visited him other than the schoolmarm passing headless by.56 The nihilistic
force of his subjectivity has destroyed itself; there remains only the ghost of the headless
schoolmarm who had been, according to Nelson, the victim of the extreme violence
of a priest and a Moorish boatman. Nelson relates her story in his letterrunning out
of ink, he continues to write using his own blood. The word/thing or body/language
dichotomy breaks down: there are no clear boundaries between his life and the story
of the schoolmarm. His act of writing thus works directly on his self, with his lifeblood
itself as the material. Thus he practices an intensive mode of writing of the sort that
Nietzsche praises: Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his
blood.57 The letter becomes the transmuted life of the dying man.
Thus a breakdown of the previous form of the self takes place; the paternal
voice vanishes, giving way to his writing of the schoolmarm as his sole practice of
subjectivity. This is where a crucial change is attained. Nelson suddenly finds that he is
the woman he has been witnessing and writing: Oh, but he understood now: I am the
schoolmarm of School Marms Cove.58 The ghost of the headless schoolmarm ceases to
be an other in front of him and becomes himself, or more specifically, he becomes her.

54

55

56

57

58

52
53

Ibid., 418.
Ibid., 421.
44
Outside, America
It is a fundamental metamorphosis of selfhood accidentally attained, dissolving the

opposition between masculinity and femininity.59 With the dissolution of his former
self, there is no practice of subjectivity other than the act of writing, and the life-blood
relates the story of the schoolmarm; the self assumes the style of the woman. Writing
here functions as a force of counterinterpellation that redefines Nelsons existence. As
Foucault argues: The letter one writes acts, through the very action of writing, upon
the one who addresses it.60 In this metamorphosis, Nelson, now referred to as a she,
releases the memory of childhood from her body:
The demons roiled in her belly and exited through her heart as sobs and sighs.
Worst were the slow stirrings of frozen emotions waking up, astonishingly delayed
responses, the putrid dregs of childhood traumas, old griefs clawing their way up
out of her, bursting from her throat, nothing connected with any memories at all,
only the feelings themselves.61
Now that the self defined by the paternal shadow has dissolved, the haunting memory
the father inscribed on Nelsons existence loses its hold. In this state of forgetfulness,
Nelson is opened to another mode of temporality, the anamnestic now, in which I
remembers its multiplicity, its being outside I, and forgets itself and becomes open to
the radical alterity of unrealized possibilities.62 Here, the hunters and their dogs, who
have been chasing Nelson, are affirmed as having provided him with an opportunity to
destruct his masculine-bound subjectivity:
The dogs. The dogs. She heard them baying. Saw them come like leaves blown
down the hill among the trees. Then again, lower down the hill. Their music was
the song of dogs, full of joy, tamped down and flowing over. And offshore the seals,
some yipping like pups and others saying, Heart? Heart heart? Heart? When she
saw the men she felt explosive incommunicable gratitude.63
From ressentiment to joy, the composition of the self has been altered. Before this
mutation, his subjectivity was constituted by the relations with his overwhelming
father, his failure in business, his strong wife and whimsical mistressnow all
these forces cease to capture and define the protagonist. Nelson becomes a different
In her analysis of the figure of women in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Tamsin Lorraine argues that Life,
whom Zarathustra represents as a woman, is a force of futurity that allows for self-overcoming:
She it is who cannot be pinned down, who always requires new words, new songs, new ways of
being. To win her, one must always be trying something unprecedented, and letting the old perish
in the attempt (Lorraine, Nietzsche and Feminism, 125). This idea is close to the state Nelson
finally reaches; with his past self broken down and his words in blood, the man activates the force
of life, through the figure of the schoolmarm, that triggers his metamorphosis.
60
Michel Foucault, Self Writing, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New
Press, 1994), 214.
61
62
Petar Ramadanovic, From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsches Active Forgetting and Blanchots
Writing of the Disaster, Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001): para. 30.
63
59
45
combination of those forces that occupy the space of School Marms Cove: the act
of writing, the animal voices, the memory that lets go of the childhood trauma, and
the approaching men.64 When the nihilist reaches this transmutability of the self,
he detaches himself from the masculine norm; thus Nelson reaches what Nealon
calls a certain kind of Nietzschean productivity within subjectivity.65 Nelsons
self-overcoming is achieved by actively mutating the past self; he finds an outside
of masculinity by invoking the force of difference that lies immanent to his being
the moment before death. If there is an idea of Overman or Superman in Johnsons
novel, it is the potential for self-mutation, which lies outside the normative identity
of man.
End of investigation
October 31, 1991. The clean war in the Persian Gulf has ended, announcing the
advent of the New World Order, in which American strength occupies a central place.
On the other hand, Nelson has been missing, only leaving his letter, a record of war
of another kind. Others continue their lives as if nothing happened: the dogs and the
assassins have died, Van Ness and Winona are about to marry, while John Navarro,
the county officer, is unable to solve the riddle of Nelsons disappearance. However,
Nelsons letter to Winona and Van Ness, now in Navarros hands, produces an effect that
carries the officer beyond the dimension of traditional detective genre. The principle of
metamorphosis is at work here, too: the novel mutates the style of crime fiction, taking
the detective hero to the outside of his subjectivity.
As an officer, Navarro personifies the typical masculine detective novel hero.
Divorced three times, he enjoys his relationship with a waitress in town, while playing
the game of seduction with another womanhow comfortable it made him feel to
be seduced by a woman of the elevated, arty type.66 When the affair with the waitress
is over, he simply blames it on femininity, preserving his masculine self: One day hed
In its description of the release of the childhood memory, the novel demands a careful distinction
from a solipsistic affirmation of the masculine self. The frequent references to the Gulf War in the
narrative function as a counterexample against such a risk, by pointing to the radical difference
between the national amnesia and Nelsons memory mutation. The war in Iraq, at the end of which
Americans greeted the Feb. 28 cease-fire with relief and priderelief at miraculously few U.S.
casualties and pride in the brilliant performance of the allied forces (Gulf War, and Peace, Revisted,
editorial, New York Times August 2, 1991, late edn: A28), succeeded to some extent in clearing away
the trauma of the Vietnam War, which kept haunting American masculinity. The victory offers an
integral opportunity to affirm the collective manhood of the state: it is the antimasculine memory
that becomes the object of forgetting. Nelsons joy, on the other hand, lies elsewhere: while the
national narrative erases its bad memory in order to affirm its manly integrity, Nelson opens a line
of becoming-other by forgetting the masculine mode of existence; there is a huge gap between the
two movements of memory.
65
66
64
46
Outside, America
seen clearly she wouldnt go to bed with him anymore. Women, in general. . . .67 Then
he continues his game of seduction.
On the other hand, his policing job keeps frustrating him. As the investigator of
the death of Nelsons father, he suspects the possibility of murderthe window was
open in the room where the body was found, indicating that someone might have
broken in from outside. However, with no further evidence to verify this hypothesis,
the case is closed. The death of Bill Fairchild is also ruled as self-inflicted, refusing
further inquiry. Thus a clear division between good and evil cannot be drawn by this
guardian of lawhe no longer knew what evil was. It rarely got arrested.68 In the
end, he decides to quit his job and prepares a letter of resignation, when Nelsons letter
begins to occupy his mind. What was needed, the officer thinks, was a letter like the
one hed been reading the last few days.69 The remnant of Nelsons detachment from
masculinity is about to trigger another mutation, this time Navarros movement out of
the world of law and order.
Nelsons letter, now held by the officer, ends abruptly, failing to describe the details of
his transformation. Moreover, in spite of the officers effort, it enigmatically refuses to
form a comprehensible orderFor days hed been combing through these unnumbered
sheets, but he couldnt quite get them into a sensible sequence.70 Navarro thus fails as
a detective hero who is the knowledgeable and autonomous subject, restoring order
to society through his clear-sightedness at the narrative end.71 The letter subverts his
masculine subjectivity; it remains incomprehensible as the mystery of the Fairchild
family remains unsolved, with a gigantic silence at the center of everything.72
Yet the letter does not designate the mere meaninglessness of the signs. Just as Nelson
finally escapes his nihilistic subjectivity haunted by the paternal imperative, his letter,
instead of being reduced to the law of symbolic signification, points to the outside of
language. In Jane Bennetts words, language is not only a matter of significations and
failures of signification (indeterminacy), it is also about sound, noise, and differential
intensities or affects.73 When Navarro reads and rereads the letter written in blood, he
feels it as a kind of music:
He thought he could make out the first words of the bloody entry, but the rest were
completely illegible. The blood hadnt behaved like ink, had worked a microscopic
dispersion through the fibers and had averaged out into blots, mainly, with
occasional stems, so that it looked as if for his last words Nelson Fairchild had
composed a piece of musical notation, a song, a melody, an air.74

69

70

71

Ibid., 428.
Ibid., 430.
Ibid., 427.
Ibid., 142.
Peter Messent, Introduction: From Private Eye to Police ProceduralThe Logic of Contemporary
Crime Fiction, in Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel, ed. Peter
Messent (London: Pluto, 1997): 7.
72
73
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 2001), 153.
74
67
68
47
The officer tries to decipher the words, but he no longer seeks the meaning of the letter.
The blood that Nelson inscribes into the sheet appears as music, that is, something
irreducible to the realm of linguistic signification: Maybe hed take it to a musician.
Maybe it was, in fact, a bit of music. But he wouldnt take it anywhere. He really didnt
want to give it up, give it away. It was his. It spoke the language.75 The language of
the outside attracts Navarro, who is ready to leave his law-oriented job, so that he
experiences the double detachment from the domain of law.
Navarro has set out to illuminate the past event of Nelsons disappearance: its
specific date, place, and the person responsible. This effort to replicate the classical
whodunit collapses when the event eludes the officers grasp and befalls his own self.
A dead letter from nowherethe sender vanishes, and the addressees no longer care
about it. Still the letter returns, finding its new reader. The Nietzschean quest intersects
with the detective style, producing a chain of transformations that mutate the current
form of masculine subjectivity.
Tracking down Nelsons crime and punishment, Already Dead presents masculinity
as a form of nihilism. Yet, the novel does not stand for the recuperation of a healthy
manhood that would satisfy the protagonists thirst. Instead, it tests the limits of a
nihilistic movement where Nelson glimpses and experiences health in a different form,
that is, health as the overcoming of masculine subjectivity. Johnsons narrative thus
performs one of the tentative explorations of the outer edges of the current regime
of subjectivity.76 Given the triumph in the Gulf War, the present state of the nation
is marked by the reconfirmation of its strength. However, another Now of mutation
is attained through Nelsons journey, which is irreducible to the national quest for
masculine strength. This divergence of the nihilists transformation from the triumph
of the state can be seen as the incompatibility between the state and the Overman as
stated in Nietzsche: Where the state endslook there, my brothers! Do you not see
it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?77 The overcoming of manhood is
fundamentally a micropolitics of the outside that is not integrated into any mass-scale
political map.
Confronting the limit of Nelsons masculinity at the edge of California, namely the
limit of the westward national expansion, Already Dead also belongs to those American
novels that critically examine the impasse of American ideas of self and space. Therefore,
it is no coincidence that Johnsons first novel, Angels, starts with a womans eastward
bus ride from Oakland; the writers career begins with the resistance to the national
myth of the westward road. Yet Already Dead does not simply negate the American
grand narrative of outside space. Just as the schoolmarm emerges from Nelson the
Ibid., 435. This view of language follows Deleuze and Guattari, whose concept of a purely intensive
usage of language is opposed to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it
(Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19). Therefore, the workings of Nelsons letter differ from Butlers
notion of a radical resignification of the symbolic domain (Butler, Bodies That Matter, 22), as
well as from the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic. Unlike this signification-based attempt, Nelsons
writing in blood points to the nonsignifying force of language. Language stops being representative
in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 23).
76
Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 146.
77
75
48
Outside, America
nihilist, the novel mutates the American myth to invent a new idea of the outside
as the force of difference within the self, which entails the mutation of past-present
relationship. Therefore, the nature of inquiry is fundamentally transformed; on the
coast of California, where external space no longer exists, the novel reveals the internal,
self-differing potential in the temporal dimension as the outside. One must begin
with the end of the Dreamit is at lands end where a new quest begins.
Where the Tide Rises and Ebbs: Power, Becoming,

and America in Steve Ericksons Rubicon Beach
Denis Johnsons Already Dead gives a new aspect of potentiality of transformation

within the self to the idea of the outside, which involves reconfiguration of temporality.
There is another writer whose work is dedicated to such a notion of exteriority: Steve
Erickson. Los Angeles, the city at the edge, coherently offers the settings of the writers
literary quest for America, which reveals a spatiotemporal dimension in which the
distinctions between dream and reality, life and death, and the boundaries of space
and time dissolve into the vast continuum. His characters leave ordered space-time
to enter this fluid landscape to find that the subterranean dynamics of powera
struggle between forces of capture and escapedrives America. The outside as the
nonhistorical temporality emerges out of this quest, and Ericksons second novel,
Rubicon Beach, offers seminal expressions of this attempt.
The novel consists of three parts that intertwine with one another, mapping the
characters quests for America, which necessarily lead to the question of power and
subjectivity. Each quest becomes an incessant tug-of-war between a power relationship
and efforts to escape from it. Power as an apparatus of capture operates everywherein
Rubicon Beach, the subject and its identity are the means of power relations, the
two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individuating ourselves on
the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known
and recognized identity.1 The act of naming and the machinery of face make them
visible as individuals. The characters, in turn, continually try to reject the identities
given to them and become clandestine: Cale becomes a flow, approaching the beach
where he will be decapitated; Catherine struggles to escape from the tyranny of the
face and Llewellyn hauls himself into the movement of writing; Lake is drawn into the
realm of impersonal music. In short, America, beyond the simple idea of the spatial
outside, emerges as a spatiotemporal zone of in-between where power relations strive
to seize the characters who nevertheless attempt to pass to the other side2 that lies
in themselves. For the male American characters, passion unlocks the passage to the
1
2
Michel Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men, trans. Robert Hurley. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion
(New York: New Press, 1994): 161.
50
Outside, America
point of no returna quest that leads to a landscape that the space-time continuum
of America infolds in itself.
Feeling myself disintegrateCale

The novel begins when Cale, the first-person narrator, is released from prison and starts
to work in a library tower in Los Angeles. Set in the futuristic city, this part presents the
basic principle of the novel, the interwoven struggle between the operation of power
and the movement that keeps escaping from it. The city-space is in a continual state of
collapse, and in this site Cale is caught in a power relationship with the police. Power
collides with him by the act of naming, assigning to him an identity or a side, to
which Cale displays an explicit antipathy. He gradually becomes aware of an unknown
realm of flow, in which he begins an escape from power and its order. Still, the sense
of guilt is the crucial knot of his individuation, a thorn in his flesh, which is evoked in
a haunting image of a man decapitated by a girl. In search of the girl, however, Cale
is told that the headless man is himself, a fact that accelerates his movement into the
zone of impersonality.
His name, Cale, works as a sign that constitutes his identity in his relationship with
Wade, a detective in Los Angeles: someone in a brown suit walked up to me and said,
Are you Cale?3 The narrators identity as Cale begins with this address from the other.
This interpellation by the police is repeated throughout the first part of the novel. The
act of naming renders the protagonist the subjectThe act of recognition becomes an
act of constitution: the address animates the subject into existence.4 In other words,
with Wades utterance of the name, the man is constituted as Cale. The protagonists
identity, in this sense, is the product of his power relationship with the police.
However, movement or flow always points to a realm of intermediacy, where the
operation of power loosens its gripwhile it operates by the function of fixation, the
city on the lands edge appears as the site of chaotic disorientation, in the middle of the
process of a slow collapse. The sea causes this disintegration, making music ring on
the streets:
I noticed that music was everywhere. . . . It came out of the buildings, a distinct
and different melody out of each one. . . . The sea, the sound was the sea, seeping in
under the city and forming subterranean wells and rivers. The rivers made a sound
that came up through the empty buildings, and the echoes of the buildings made a
music that came out into the streets.5
The city in movement is not a solid space on the beach but in an incessant process of
breakdown. The undercurrent increasingly erodes the city at the spatial limit of the
Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach (Lodon: Quartet, 1986), 10.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 25.
5
Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 13.
3
4
Where the Tide Rises and Ebbs
51
continent, causing a melody that designates the disintegration. The beach, the territory
governed by power, is now becoming-flow.
The fundamental imagery of water is significant in this regard. In the world of flow,
the clear-cut definitions of reality no longer hold. Cale is no exception in this movement:
instead of adhering to his solid identity, he begins to liquidize himself. He gradually
becomes aware of the indefinite aspect of himself that escapes the constitution by power
relationships. This sense of flow is intensified in his obsession with the blood-flow. I
once supposed I was bleeding in order to bleed myself dry; now I wonder if it was the
flow I loved. Now I wonder if it was the spilling itself that held me speechless.6 Instead
of establishing himself as dry and therefore solid, Cale feels an attachment to the flow
itself. As the logic of identity is maintained through the attempted expulsion of the
improper, the disarranging,7 the abjection of the indeterminate flow constitutes the
boundary of the individual. Cale, inversely attracted to become the flow itself, rejects
the notion of identity and border. From a fixed identity to an indeterminate flow: this
shift inevitably resists the category of belonging. I had never been one of anything,
Cale says. I distrusted being one of something; I knew it wasnt real, I knew the only
oneness that was real was my own, being one of me.8 The idea of belonging to some
category or identity is refuted in favor of his singularity that cannot be defined by other
terms.
This attitude causes a political problem, for power is preoccupied with deciding to
which side Cale belongs.9 The duality of America One and America Two appearing
in this context, in which Wade questions Cale Where were you born, Cale? America.
As I thought. America One or America Two?10 Cale answers I never could get straight
on that. I think it must have been somewhere in between11therefore subverting the
duality.12 In the city that becomes a gigantic flow, the authority machine seeks to operate
by deciding sides, thus fixing the state of things by the logic of identity. Resisting this
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP,
1994), 201.
8
9
The police also prohibit Cale from carrying a radio. If I know you had a radio, Wade tells him,
Id have to take you in (Ibid., 17). More than just a machine for amusement, the radio appears as
potentially subversive. Wade continues, In a town where music is the topographical map, radios
are compasses of anarchy (Ibid., 18). The music of the flowing ground and the radio are correlated
with one anotherboth are ungrounded, without the solid origin, and therefore it is unable to
track down the identifiable origin. For the political apparatus that is concerned with mapping the
social field with the definite coordinates of the city, the floating nature of the radio is a political
problem.
10
Ibid., 289.
11
12
The assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 is alluded to throughout Rubicon Beach. As Cale says,
The murdered man had been born in America One (ibid., 32), the idealism Kennedy embodied
points to a certain duality of ideal and reality. With Kennedys death in Los Angeles, on the beach
where the frontier ends, the duality vanishes: the New Frontier or a newer world ceases to
imply the outward movement; the dream is inflected inward, into America where all the clear-cut
boundaries break down. Cale modifies his conception of the Kennedys according to this vision,
saying, A whole family of murdered men. . . . Not America One or America Two. . . . Just America.
They were born in America (ibid., 74).
6
7
52
Outside, America
logic, Cale positions himself in between. In this sense, he is in a constant negotiation

with power, and still escapes its mooring line. The only way to get outside the dualisms
is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.13 To identify himself with a flow
assumes, therefore, a politically subversive attitude. The machinery of power tries to
fix him to his identity, to constitute his identity as Cale. Cale, in his turn, increasingly
escapes the effect of power by becoming-flow.
In the process of mutation, his guilt of the past is nevertheless evoked, which defies
his transformation. In prison, Cale struggles with authority over the identity of Ben
Jarry, the leader of a political movement. In the questioning I did not identify Ben
Jarry,14 he says. As long as Cale refuses to identify him, power cannot decide who
Jarry is: They knew Jarry was their man but they couldnt pin him down.15 However,
by his unconscious providing of the crucial clue, Jarry is recognized and hanged
immediately, while Cale is released. The fact that Cale has benefited the manhunt,
despite his antipathy toward it, in turn designates him on the side of authority. Even
though he resists the classification, the sense of guilt continues to haunt him with the
resultant individualitythe past imprisons him into one side. Therefore, he must
rescue himself from being the victim of his memories, his guilt.16
Thus the image of a man beheaded by a girl, which is repeated throughout the
first part, becomes dominant. Walking near the canal, Cale sees the image on the
beach ahead: I saw it in her hand, the source of the flash, a two-foot-long blade that
had . . . very efficiently separated the head she held in her hand from the rest of the
mans body.17 The second time the image comes to him, even though Cale tries to
deny its reality, it leaves blood on the floor of the library. Then he seeks to identify the
murdered manHis name is Ben Jarry, I said.18 The image of a headless man for
him represents his own guilt of betrayal. The scene hauntingly points to his identity
as Cale-the-betrayer. For him, the image functions as an interpellation, by which he
is named as the guilty subject. After the third murder that leaves a headless body,
however, Wade tells Cale that the dead man is Cale himself:
The prints and the blood, we went over it and over it. Didnt that corpse look
just a little familiar? All those times you got a look at it? You decided it was the
object of your guilt, but you know it is a little more familiar than that. Because
its your body.19
Thus a paradoxical situation arises: Cale is already dead, but still alive. The murder has
taken place three times, and at the same time it is yet to come. This is the absolute state
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum,
1987), 277.
14
15
Ibid.
16
Paul Kincaid, Defying Rational Chronology: Time and Identity in the Work of Steve Erickson,
The Review of Science Fiction 58 (1993): 33.
17
18
Ibid., 37.
19
Ibid., 85.
13
53
of in-between, where he is neither on the side of the living nor the dead. The linear
progression of time is twisted, leaving him in a zone of indistinction.20 Death and life
cannot be separated but intermingle with each other, desubjectifying him into the state
of indeterminacy. I had this ridiculous sense of being in control of everything21this
illusion of autonomy is replaced by the feeling of nausea and weakness. Neither the
subject nor mere absence of life, Cale becomes an anonymous life that is unmoored
from his identity. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of
a life playing with death.22
It is at this point that authority desperately tries to nail him onto a definite place
Cale is put under house arrest. The zone of indistinction in which Cale finds himself is
a kind of threshold: this is where the effort of the police to organize a spatial category
that defines him as a recognizable subject, and, at the same time, the process of
becoming-flow manifests itself intensively. Where the clear-cut space gives way to the
new zone of unhinged time, he commences his movement, plunging himself further
into the flow:
I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guilt, to live where I once
died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own
grave. . . . By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every
form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I
know the water.23
It is by escaping from the past sense of guilt that subjects Calethe decapitation
of my own guiltand instead placing himself in the zone of indistinctionto live
where I once diedthat he tries to reach the girl, through the flow, in order to be
decapitated, to get free of oneself,24 by reaching a state where his identity cannot hold.
The movement does not lie outside his existence. Cale discovers he is always already
in the tide, despite the relationships of power that attempt to anchor his identity. The
other side or the outside is to be found within himself.
Cales becoming-flow involves the girl, who points to a realm of invisibility within
America. Recollecting the second murder, Cale realizes that the girl with the knife
has been present at the scene of the murder: She was there all along, right in front of
us. . . . I thought, How could we have not seen her? Cops all over the room and she
was right there in the corner; how could we have not seen her?25 Cale, who is in the
process of desubjectification, becomes aware of the invisible in the visible.26 The girl
escapes the recognition of the police in spite of her undeniable existence. Relations
Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Rozen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000), 255.
21
22
Gilles Deleuze, Immanence: A Life . . ., trans. Anne Boyman. In Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life
(New York: Zone, 2001), 28.
23
24
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), 8.
25
26
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995), 134.
20
54
Outside, America
of power construct a real, whereas the girl exists in a world of intermediary among
the real, where power becomes inoperativeThe multiplicity of the possible is here,
it is now. It is intermediary between the phenomenon, it rustles in the midst of the
forms.27 At the end of the first part, the girl and the blind people on the boat repeatedly
appear: they haunt the city, always moving, like a black hole in the real. This is why
The town was terrorized by her. America was terrorized by her, by the mere fact of her
being.28 Confronted with this omnipresent exteriority within ordered space, America
becomes silent in terror, while the disintegrating city goes crazy with sound.29 As Cale
discovers the flow within himself, America includes the nameless exteriority of space
and time that escapes the trap of power.
The girl imperceptibleCatherine and Llewellyn

In Rubicon Beach, the girls quest that is finally confronted with contemporary America
as the apparatus of capture displays an inverted image of other characters voyages.
Along with the act of naming, the face is presented as the main machinery of power
that animates the function of the individual and the subject. Catherine, the girl who is
unconscious of its existence,30 is nevertheless individuated by her face with the arrival
of a sailor from the outer world. In Los Angeles, where she comes to live in the house of
Llewellyn Edgar, her face has a double effect: it causes Llewellyns becoming-flow, and
at the same time she is trapped by the individuating function of the face. The voyage
of Cale also reiterates this antinomy of passion. Her struggle reveals America as the
place of collisions between the forces of capture and escape, which manifests itself
everywhere in the country of face-worship.31
The act of naming appears in the beginning of the second part, in which her name
Catherine is mentioned: Actually her name was not Catherine. She would be given
the name of Catherine later, in America.32 Her original name, instead, indicates
a multiplicityHer actual name was an impossible sound, a mutation of Spanish,
Portuguese and an Indian dialect33which is not reduced to a coherent identity. This
plurality makes a sharp contrast with Catherine, which represents a single role or
function in Llewellyns household, and the girl is individualized by that function. As
in Cales relationship with the police, the name works as interpellation that constitutes
the girls identity.
This contrast is seen in the motif of the face. In her life with the Crowd in South
America, the girls face is presented as independent of her being: for the first time, she
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan
P, 1995), 24.
28
29
Ibid., 88.
30
Ibid., 158.
31
Ibid., 299.
32
Ibid., 95.
33
Ibid.
27
55
saw her own face. She thought that it was a strange and marvelous watercreature.34
Others in the Crowd also understand her face as an aggregation that disperses into
every direction:
They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of the
river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or perhaps
their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a bough and
her hair to be the night when there was no moon.35
The face, in other words, does not constitute her as a coherent individual. It forms a
multiplicity with heterogeneous elementsinstead of the facial unity of the whole
being the dominant mode, . . . in this case the separate and multiple parts of the
face taken on a life of their own.36 However, a light coming from elsewhere37 in
the figure of a European sailor, Coba, arrives. He brings the notion of value into
the Crowd: a different power relation sets in. The girl is individualized by her face,
plucked out of the Crowd, and given a new identity. In this sense, the face is indeed
a traitor to her.38
After she outlives the struggle with Coba, the girl begins her northward journey
to America, where she comes to live in Llewellyns house. When she reaches the
City of Angels, the encounter triggers a twofold effect: Llewellyn is uprooted from
his identity by the passion she stirs, while the girl is named, individualized, and
caught in the machinery of identity. Even though he continues to turn away from her
faceIm like a man who cant bring himself to love her.39 However, he is caught in
the passion that makes him abandon his identity as a screenwriter and try to become
a poet. I have this poem in my head, he insists . . . Not the last poem but the poem
after the last poem: I keep trying to find it.40 The last poem does not finish the
writing. Rather, writing appears as a movement toward the poem of no return41it
is a blind dive into the flow of passion, the outside of his given identity. As he
continues on writing, his house also goes through a strange mutationLlewellyn
Edgars house . . . with several walls missing, two new doors six feet off the ground,
and a window erected out by the curb.42
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 98.
36
Richard Rushton, What Can a Face Do?: On Deleuze and Faces, Cultural Critique 51 (2002):
230.
37
Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men, 161.
38
When Cale meets her, the face-betrayal-subject connection is made explicit: His eyes said, . . .
I never thought treachery was like a face. I never thought it was something one wore whether he
knew it or not (Erickson, Rubicon Beach, 222, Italics added). As Cale is subjected by his identity as
the consequence of his act of betrayal, the girl is also constituted as an individual by the face, from
which she seeks to escape throughout the novel.
39
40
Ibid., 198.
41
Ibid., 200.
42
Ibid., 220.
34
35
56
Outside, America
His transformation nevertheless exercises the power of the face inasmuch as the
poems are about a face that was ignorant of its own image.43 Instead of subverting the
face machine, Llewellyn continues to concentrate his passion on the face. In this sense,
Llewellyns flow, anchored to the girl, is a restricted one.44 Catherine, on the other hand,
goes through the individuation by her face that aims to capture her entire being:
In the days and nights that followed, her face became more. Her eyes became more
and her mouth became more. Her hair became more. Her beauty blossomed like
the flower of a nightmare. . . . Im caught in America, thought Catherine, where
people knew their faces and wear them as though they own them.45
To liberate herself from this power of faciality: it is the struggle the girl sets out in
America. After she leaves Llewellyn, she achieves the state of sheer invisibility. The
local police receive the calls that claim a girl with black hair was staring through
someones window,46 but when they arrive at the site, There was no one at all. What
they had taken to be her eyes were simply the large fiery insects that buzzed among
the bushes . . .47 The girl does not leave America but remains inside its space, and
eludes perception of the police apparatus: to escape the face, to dismantle the face and
facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine.48 The face is perceived,
only to be scattered into a multiplicity.
Her movement of escape, a becoming-clandestine, is again arrested by the force of
individuation. The catastrophic fire in the hotel occurs when the apparatus of capture
forcibly tries to appropriate her. Two men came up on each side of her and grasped
her arms. She flinched and they held her firmly.49 The following calamity is caused by
a spark of the conflict between the two opposed forces of capture and flight. The case
demonstrates that, in the apparatus of the face, the event is finally attributed to the
responsible subject as the cause. The girl is arrested, confined, named as a Jane Doe,50
charged with the crime, and investigated by Lieutenant Lowery. Thus she is surrounded
by several layers of capture that strive to make her visible as the guilty subject.
Still, holes of escape are worn in the middle of these strata of power. Lowery dozes
off beside her, and is called back to wakefulnessLieutenant?51by another officer.
But Lowery falls asleep again and wakes up to find the girl gone. He went to the open
Ibid., 197.
Cale, whose movement is more intensive than the poets, reads his pieces in the library and takes
up composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next (ibid., 79). The movement of
writing is a transpersonal flow that exceeds the individuality of the writer: to write is to renounce
being in command of oneself or having any proper name (Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster,
121).
45
46
Ibid., 202.
47
Ibid., 204.
48
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 171.
49
50
Ibid., 218.
51
Ibid., 222.
43
44
57
window. . . . After a moment his eyes narrowed. Theres someone out there, he said.52
The two phrasesLieutenant? and Theres someone out thereare the effort
of the apparatus that tries to block the flow of flight. Lowery is called back from the
dream, but the girl escapes from the cell and reaches the beach. In front of her appears
Cale, who has sailed away from his power relationship with the police in the first part
of the novel. Thus a new journey begins, toward the world of speeds and slownesses
without form, without subject, without a face.53
Cales journey with the girl and the forest reveals the deadly aspect of passion,
which can turn into an apparatus of capture at any moment. When Cale meets the girl
on the beach, on the other side, the murder does not happen: I looked at her and she
finally said in her bad funny English, It is you, but it is not you. I said, Its me but it isnt
me.54 In this exchange, they remain in the zone of impersonality. By both affirming
and negating the address at once, the girl and Cale do not constitute themselves as
individuals. The decapitation, in this sense, has already occurred in another form, in
which the logic of interpellationIt is youis replaced by a zone of indistinction:
Its you, but it is not you. The power of the name is suspended. It is in this state of
indeterminacy that they start their escape from the police. Gradually they enter the
realm where the distinction of memory and dream vanishes, where only difference
returns, nullifying the logic of identity: Every morning when I woke up, we were
somewhere else.55 This journey is not only a spatial onenow they move through
a temporal zone of indistinction. The other beach Cale reaches to find the girl is not
a finality where the quest is halted. Rather, through this threshold, a different voyage
beyond the realm of the individual begins.
However, the double effect of passion finally eliminates the journey. As is seen
in Llewellyns passion, it causes the flow to begin the movement within the mans
being; on the other hand, the girl is named as the object of his attraction. The men
in love are sailors in this sense: they approach the girl by the becoming-flow. For
the girl, each of them is equally a light coming from elsewhere inasmuch as they try
to capture herMy life, she thinks resentfully, its nothing but sailors.56 Passion,
insofar as it is focused on the individual and the face, works as an apparatus of
capture that threatens her faceless movement. This relation comes into existence in
the journey of Cale and the girl. I was in love with her. I had fallen in love with her
long before, though Im not sure when,57 Cale recollects. As this attraction becomes
obvious, his dream ends:
The closest we got was on one afternoon when I came back from exploring the
landscape and there she was, out on a limb, looking into the water at the reflection

54

55

56

57

52
53
Ibid., 223.
Ibid., 269.
Ibid., 207.
Ibid., 270.
58
Outside, America
of her face, as though she and that reflection were bound too. . . . And she looked
at me sadly, and I turned and climbed to my place to sleep.58
His desire individualizes her: when passion induces the power relationship of capture
into the multiplicity, when Cale, like Coba, becomes another sailor who desires to
extract her from the forest, the girl disappears. The next thing I knew, the cold
sand was beneath me and I felt as though every bone were broken inside, as if Id
been thrown somewhere hard.59 Thus Cale returns to this sidesailing out of the
futuristic LA, he moves beyond the spatiotemporal borders to the beach of the Old
World in 1923.
America in the novel does not designate a specific regime, but appears as
a multiplicity with two poles. On one hand, it is a land of the face, where power
operates by subjection, individuation, and the logic of identity. On the other hand, as
Cale witnesses the disintegration of the entire city, and as Lowery falls into a dream
in the course of investigation, America also implies numerous forces that escape
the solidified form of reality.60 The two inclinations continually entangle and collide
with each other, without dividing into such duality as America One/America Two:
there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight.61
In the beginning of the last part emerges a continuum, which embraces the clash
between the operation of power and the flight from it without any synthesis of space
and time:
It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of
justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice
and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned
to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.62
One and the same landAmerica. In the course of this, the narrative gradually
emphasizes the temporal aspect of the other side with its repetitive style.
Ibid., 2701.
Ibid., 271.
60
It is in this sense that signs are lost in the novel (this is Shingo Nagaokas idea). However, the lost
signs, free from their referents, do not point to the emptiness. In the world that becomes a gigantic
movement, language loses its static solidity and is plunged into the becoming-flow. The sign of
America does not lack its referent but instead contains a movement that is beyond the boundary
of the identical state of things. Thus the power of naming in the novel is unstable, ceaselessly
overturned by itself. This is the task of Rubicon Beachto create the flow within language. In the
novel, statements or phrases often travel beyond the spatiotemporal limits: Nothing swims in the
dust (ibid., 94), first uttered by the girl on the beach of South America, comes to lake in North
America before he is faced with the music at the riverside. The night was cold and, pushing the
palms of his hands into the sand, he shook his head slowly to the sound, rousing himself and saying,
or perhaps someone said it to him, Nothing swims in the dust (ibid., 247). The statement moves,
like a radio voice, beyond a specific speaker or context.
61
Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, trans. Leslie Sawyer. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion
(New York: New Press, 1994), 346.
62
58
59
59
Journey into the end of dreamLake and the girl

The last part of Rubicon Beach delineates the quest of John Lake, from his birth, in
1913, to 1968. This part introduces number as another logic of power: just as the name
and the face act as individuation, numbers divide the world into a definite, bounded
space. A genius in mathematics, Lake becomes aware of the realm of intermediacy, The
Number, in the order of given numbers. It was there between nine and ten. Not nine
and a half or nine and nine-tenths, not the steroids of ten or nines missing moon, but a
world of a number unto itself.63 This zone of in-between finds its expression in the
music and passion, both of which are connected to The Number. The music of The
Number implies the event that the occurrence of America inevitably carries within
itself: the clash between the two worlds, which repeats itself as the encounter between
the sailor and the girl on the beach where this side and the other side become
indistinguishable. At the point of the encounter called America, passion becomes
the force of release and imprisonment at oncethe voyage of Lake finally runs into
the girl.
There is a number for everything. There is a number for justice. There is a number
for desire.64 In this numbered view of the world, even the abstract notions of justice
and desire are distributed into definite places. However, when passion enters this
sectionalized world, the whole landscape suddenly changes. In his relationship with
Leigh, Lake experiences the zone of indistinctionWhat I felt for her was the new
place beyond nine; when I entered her I was on a far journey into what I was capable
of being. I was the anarchist of passion in an age when passion was a country.65 He
thus becomes aware of the intermediacy that escapes the grasp of numbers. Lake
goes through this realm as the flow after Leigh leaves him: To the tracks below,
to the country beyond them, he called her name, and the hardness burst beneath
him, the wet white of him rivering off into the beyond country; and he called her
again.66 When his act of addressing or interpellation fails to seize her, passion begins
to flow into the territorythe outsidethat surpasses the border of the numbered
individual.
The beyond country of passion is also the realm of the music, which Lake begins
to hear in his childhood. After Leigh is killed in her political activity, and his mother
disappears, Lake ceases to hear the music. When he hears it again, the music looms
as the state of in-between of time-space. In 1937, riding on a train, Lake comes to a
river and dozes off on the beach. When he wakes up, he finds himself in the scene of
the shipwreck, which is the earliest memory of Catherine in South AmericaTo the
corpse at her feet the small child explained, Nothing swims in the dust.67 Lake hears

65

66

67

63
64
Ibid., 238.
Ibid., 227.
Ibid., 240.
Ibid., 242.
Ibid., 94.
60
Outside, America
the girls voice, as if he were the corpse, and falls asleep again. He wakes up again and
follows the girls steps to the river, where the music sings to him:
I heard it again, the music Id never heard before. . . . It was right there, coming from
the other side of the river. . . . It occurred to me that this particular music was the
music of The Number, the number and music of the black distant part of me beyond
desire, beyond justice.68
All boundaries dissolve into the music: dream and reality, life and death, and
spatiotemporal divisions.69 Music . . . makes audible the irreducibility of in-between
spaces, polyphonic hybridization.70 In this in-between where the borders of numbers
break down, Lake finds that The Number and its music is not the unreachable outside
but the furthest interiority, the black distant part of himself. However, unlike Cale
who willingly enters into this zone of indistinction, Lake cowers and flees from it.
Convinced as he is of the existence of the realm of The Number, it is denied from
the perspective of order. In a secret organization in which Lake works during wartime,
he reports The Number to his director, who simply tells him that Of course there is
no such number, Mr. Lake. We have all the numbers already.71 By Lakes responseIf
thats so, . . . then tell me why the Old World came to the New72the vision of beaches
and the intermediacy is extended to the encounter between the two continents across
the gigantic flow of the Atlantic that launched the history of America. In the figure of
Lake, the two worlds intermingle with each other: he bears the paternal name that leads
back to the Old World, while his mothers name, Rae, is a substitute for a Potawatomi
name for which there was no English sounds.73 The musicbeyond the river that
stunned the fathers and uncles of America into incommunicable silence74indicates the
point at which the two worlds violently collide with each other. For the sailors from
the Old World, the music from the other side lures them into the unknown, into a
further westward movement; for the native inhabitants, the movement is a wave of
destruction that befalls them. Thus life and death run against each other in the time
of the land. The duality of the two worlds melts into Lake, the son of the encounter
between the two worlds.75 However, after his father dies, Lake goes to the Old World in
Ibid., 248.
This notion of America as noise is Ericksons consistent preoccupation. These Dreams of You, his
2012 novel, in describing an Ethiopian girl adopted by an American family in Los Angeles, finally
reaches the essence of the countrymore than ever its a country of many songs all of them
noisy, without a single melody that anyone cares about carrying. The country is a babel of not just
melodies that no one shares but memory (Erickson, These Dreams of You, 300).
70
Rosi Braidotti. Metamorphosis Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2002), 157.
71
72
Ibid., 2501.
73
Ibid., 228.
74
Ibid., 249.
75
In the sense that she was the last to hear the music, [Lake] thought one day, my mother was the last
American. In the sense that he must now survive never having heard the music at all, . . . the last
American was my father (ibid., 249). As an American after the last, his being is itself a movement,
the site of the collision between the machinery of name and the impersonal zone of the music.
68
69
61
1951, as if to follow the paternal line away from the music and passion. In Penzance,
on the far southwestern tip of England,76 he meets the old Cale, who has returned
from his journey.
In a far-off lighthouse located at the lands end and exposed to the outside, Cale
and Lake find the girlShe had a face like none hed seen.77 Thus passion for the girl
also affects Lake. With the death of the old man, she vanishes away.78 Lake, after 15
years of fruitless attempts to disprove the existence of The Number of No Return,79
comes back to his native land. Im going back. . . . I dont pretend to have the passion my
dreams once had. I dont pretend Ill hear the music I once heard or that Ill even reach
the place where I heard it.80 Nevertheless, after he has failed to disavow the existence
of the music, the quest into the heart of America gradually approaches the huge river
that exists apart from actual space-time of the land. Angeloak, a tree turned into a
station he reaches by the train, stands alone in the river as the enormous center where
his movement is temporarily blocked. The train leaves him in the tree, forcing Lake to
stay for months.
In 1968, he resumes his movement on foot toward the other beach, following the
track until he reaches the girl. Through this movement toward the outside, he steps
into the zone of indistinction. They make love, and it is not so much the fulfillment
for both of them81 as a fatal collision between Lakes passion and the girl, repeating
the encounter that marks America. Lakes passion is revived, but it is accomplished by
possessing the girl: she arranges her silent revolt against the sailor whose light captures
and individualizes her. Then comes the moment when Lake loses sight of her: she
wasnt there . . . as though she had slipped through the tracks into the black river far below,
even as I felt her in my hands.82 It is the sparkle of her knife that reflects his own light
of passion and makes him turn away. At this moment, when his desire that captures
her seems to open itself to the world, as if Lake drained himself into the country
beyondI emptied myself in her; and maybe, for just a moment, I fell asleep83the
music comes to him again:
And then theres the sound, the sound I followed out onto these tracks: its huge, the
sound I cant bear to hear or disregard, . . . I realize the lights in her hand, loud
and white and sharp, in her hand as though to sear her fingers with it, as though to
extinguish it: and then almost faster than I can see it, it comes to me.84
Ibid., 277.
78
At the moment of Cales death, the indiscernible zone between life and death reemerges to confront
Lake. You made a mistake once, he croaked to the young American. . . . Should have crossed
that river, the old man said. . . . lake cried desperately, That beach was as far as I could go. No, the
dead man said, there is one farther. (ibid., 280, Italics added). The twisted temporality reemerges,
suggesting that the other beach lies beyond the dichotomy of life and death.
79
Ibid., 284.
80
Ibid., 285.
81
Kincaid, Defying Rational Chronology, 35.
82
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid., 300.
76
77
62
Outside, America
The decapitation approaches. In the very act of seizure by passion, when the flow and
the imminent death void the subject, the music reappears. This zone is therefore the
intermingling of power and escape: voices from the apparatus of capture break into
this process of becoming-flowLieutenant. Lieutenant? and Theres someone out
there85which are uttered by Lowery and his fellow officer. Thus the voices of power
and the music of the flow are interwoven with each other, all in one and the same land
called America, which repeats the struggle over time.
To cross the Rubicon: Rubicon Beach is an attempt to infuse the unceasing
movement or multiplicity of forces into a nameCale, Catherine, Lake, and
above all, America. Each name implies conflicts between forces beyond it, so that
the novel is not so much a representation of America as an expression of those
battlefields. It does not advocate a future utopia nor a lost ideal of the past as the
other side. Rather, the novel opens up a continuum in which each part communicates
with every other, obliterating the distinction of past, present, and future. Memories,
dreams, even worlds are only apparent relative circuits which depend on the variations
of this Whole.86 Escape and capture presuppose each other, which inversely implies
that every effect of power, the solid territory of the real or the individual, is always
already inhabited by a flow. Passion leads the American characters to the point of no
return, the beach that yields the subject of appropriation and the dominated object.
Everything exists on this beach called America where the tide rises and ebbsthe
music, the sound of the city in collapse, the girls voice as well as the voices of capture.
The beach is not confined to a particular place or date: as the encounter between the
sailor and the girl, it is an event without beginning or end, repeating itself in every
American. The essence is always of an encounter; it is an event; it is neither stable nor
transcendental nor eternal; it is immanent to the dynamic process it expresses and has
only an abyssal present infinitely fractured into past and future.87
Ericksons oeuvre revolves around this event: Rubicon Beach is itself a threshold,
anticipating further mutations in the subsequent attempts at exploring the history of
America. History carries its immanent exteriority, namely numerous collisions that
have slipped away from its ordered realm. In Leap Year and Arc dX, passion plays the
fatal game of liberation and captivity beneath the recorded nameThomas Jefferson.
Succeeding these motifs and incorporating the opening passages of Rubicon Beach, Our
Ecstatic Days displays the futuristic vision of the reversed ruler-ruled relations of power,
which is inserted into the story of a mothers quest for her lost son beyond the course
of history. These texts, among others, gather unhistorical forces of America that move
around the solid temporality. Always already past and eternally yet to come,88 the silent
clamor of the event roars in each text, inviting further attempts to describe America
and the question of subjectivity in ahistorical temporality: to cast the die.
Ibid.
Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1989), 81.
87
Brian Massumi, A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and
Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 18.
88
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: Athlone, 1990), 189.
85
86
Part Two
Time Will Tell
As seen in the preceding chapters, the quest for the outside encounters the question
of time. Steve Ericksons description of the fluid city, which induces the twisted
or unhinged mode of time, suggests that a struggle against the current subjectivity
involves an interrogation of a linear temporality as well as a stable sense of space.
This complicity between space and time is clearly seen, again, in road natrratives; the
ideal future for the traveler lies ahead, spatially and temporally, only to be reached
and grabbed. The westward movement thus presupposes the teleological idea of time
progressing toward the ideal. Hence the importance of Los Angeles, where the end of
the road bears witness to the limit of current subjectivity, and the march of historical
time necessarily begins to question itself.
Richard Powerss Operation Wandering Soul begins with this connection, or
disconnection, between Los Angeles and the time of the road. As a part of the writers
early preoccupation with the nature of America itself, Operation Wandering Soul also
explores the nature of the country through relying on and overturning the idea of the
road in its temporal aspect. The dynamics of progressive history reveal their dismal
side in the city and suggest that different modes of time have to be envisioned.
The main parts of the narrative are set in a pediatrics ward in the East Los Angeles
hospital, where Richard Kraft, a doctor, works in a temporary public service. The
novels focus on the temporal aspect of the road genre is made explicit in its opening
section, in which Kraft drives on the Los Angeles freeway to the hospital:
Time (in this country of ever-expanding unusable free time) for an experiment:
infinitesimal easing up on the throttle produces a gap between his grille and the
nether parts of the Marquis in front of him. The instant this following distance
exceeds a car length, the two vehicles on either side both try to slither in. . . . Fills
the otherwise-idle nanosecond. A way to absorb extraneous frontier spirit.1
1
Richard Powers, Operation Wandering Soul (New York: Perennial, 1993), 6.
64
Outside, America
On this freeway, the linear and progressive sense of time, inherent in the road
narrative, is overturned; frontier spirit, now paired with extraneous, is no longer
a movement toward the promise of the great future, but an act of making a useless
nanosecond. Consequently, the freeway offers an experience of time quite opposite
to the American ideal: Aim High in Steering2 is a parodic slogan of this freeway
culture.3 The driver, then, is not an autonomous individual but a mere player in this
total driving environment,4 which appears as a self-sufficient world in itself.
It is therefore inevitable that the following narrative is haunted by a sense of
exhaustion instead of youthful vigor. Kraft arrives at his workplace, with an old
song going around in his mind, which he is too fatigued to remember.5 Moreover,
describing the freeway with its everyday car accidents, Powerss narrative always hints
at the motifs of death and disaster. According to the novel, the basic concept of the
freeway originated in Nazi Germany; the same section also refers to Crystal Night,6
postholocaust dcor,7 and death camps,8 which describe a dystopian space-time on
the edge of the North American continent. The national trope, the narrative suggests,
the Route 66 wayfarers picaresque, here looks out over the vertical cliffs marking its
premature dead drop.9
Powerss novel goes further, identifying the road with the straight movement of
history and undermining both of them in the description of the Los Angeles freeway;
history is nothing but a repetition of violence with the hospital being located at the end
of its path:
Pediatricsthe next generation, wave of the future, Americas hope for, etc.
provides the quintessential, unexpurgated view of just where Western Civs whole
project is really headed in its third thousand years.
By clinics third hour, the traffic of juvenile misery drifting through his office begins
to mirror the freeways aimless lane change. Its as if Krafts still on his commune
here . . .10
Ibid., 7.
Reyner Banham, in his seminal analysis of the urban ecology of Los Angeles, points out that
driving on the freeways demands an open but decisive attitude to the placing of the car on the
road-surface, a constant stream of decision that . . . would be better to regard simply as a higher
form of pragmatism (Banham, Los Angeles, 199). This attitude is born out of the movement without
the realization of promise: Los Angeles has long been considered as a city without the Dream.
4
Powers, Operation Wandering Soul, 6.
5
Ibid., 12.
6
Ibid., 11.
7
Ibid., 13
8
Ibid., 25.
9
Ibid., 11. The sense of repetition thus counters the promise of the road. In Joan Didions Play It As It
Lays, the Los Angeles freeway also provides this idea, together with the repetitive style, that signals
the protagonists despair: In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the
summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria
drove the freeway (Didion, Play It As It Lays, 23). The American Dream is replaced by a repetition
of purposeless movement at the continents edge.
10
2
3
Time Will Tell
65
The hospital where the victims of urban life are brought day and night is the ultimate
destination of the freeway and, furthermore, the history of America and Western
civilization; they are now grasped as part of a gigantic system of death and disaster
that repeats itself over time. Therefore, the refusal of the road in the narrative is always
accompanied by the criticism of the concept of history itself. Los Angeles offers a
perfect background to this reversal of the national belief in the road-time.
Kraft begins another day in the hospital, witnessing time and again the most notable
victim of this system: children. This sense of repetition runs through every episode of
the novel: in describing the Pied Piper of Hameln, for instance, one of the townspeople
asks himself, This has all happened already. When have I seen this before?11 The
chapters on Childrens Crusade and Anne Frank, together with the pediatrics and the
freeway in Los Angeles, exemplify that the progress of history has always claimed the
lives of children. While typical road narratives tell the fable of a youth who moves into
the open space-time,12 Powerss novel, beginning on the freeway, focuses on boys and
girls as the prey of history, thereby overthrowing the teleology of the road.
The novel further questions the idea of the narrative act itself, in that it often
reproduces the dynamics of history: You are going somewhere. You are going
somewhere. . . . the shape of the storied curvebeginning, development, complications,
end.13 In an ironic allusion to Peter Pan, the idea of a progressing history,14 which also
requires a closure, is criticized as something sadistic. This is why the following chapter
witnesses Kraft, still sleeping, who misperceives his girlfriends nasal noise as a child
stands screaming at the historys downward, disintegrating spiral.15 The historicized
narrative mode only repeats the violent gesture of history.
Los Angeles, then, is the limit of this history-narrative progression. As the novel
refers to the City of Angels as capital of the Land of the Free,16 the city in Powers
symbolizes the nation itself, now a gigantic hospital-freeway, characterized by the sense
of growing old. Freeways, like rivers, age and meander17the sense of aging, seen in
this early passage, is intensified by the appearance of a patient, Nicolino, who suffers
from premature aging due to Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. This sense of
aging goes beyond a single character to touch on the city and America at large. It is
most explicitly expressed in the following line: Yet this [LA] seemed the most ancient
place he had ever seen.18 Just like the boy Nicolino, Los Angeles and America, while
pretending as if they had nothing to do with death, appear as the fast-aging community
at the dead end of history.
Ibid., 233.
Brian Ireland, American Highways: Recurring Images and Themes of the Road Genre, The Journal
of American Culture 26 (2003): 477.
13
14
Ibid., 122.
15
Ibid., 124.
16
Ibid., 254.
17
Ibid., 5.
18
Ibid., 254.
11
12
Outside, America
66
Therefore, the idea of the outside in the freeway country takes on a different
function: an escape from the set course of history. The novel, stating that children were
born knowing it isnt home.19 suggests that the Western history, the very framework
of their lives, is not a place to be. Kraft, facing this fact, seeks a way out of this impasse,
in order to leave hope for the children in the hospital. Something wants to insist that
there is still a route out, a path, perpendicular to every other, that they might still take.20
This typically American impulse is now detached from the spatial dimension to raise
a different questionif the path of Western history has arrived at its dead end at the
edge of the continent, is there any possibility of an exit?
As it approaches the end, the novel borrows from the convention of fantasy tales.
Kraft takes the children to the top of the hospital, where they set a new direction
. . . now revealing itself as perpendicular to everything.21 Kraft assumes the role of
the Pied Piper, trying to invent a new way out; the group of children begin to fly and
track the freeway for a while along a hidden frontage22 to mock the road myth, then
soaring skyward, perpendicular to any other road and finally leaving the planet. This
undisguised unreality reveals the impossibility of a horizontal road toward the space
of freedom. The whole of history provides the framework of this unbearable weight of
being American; therefore, a way out must be explored in another dimensiontime.
Operation Wandering Soul does not provide a decisive idea of such a temporality of
the outside. The novel is primarily a set of questions to be explored: the limit of space,
violence of progressing time of history, temporal aspect of the narrative act, and the
outside as an idea of freedom distinguished from the flat denial of reality. The quest
of time begins anew at the city on the edge.

21

22

19
20
Ibid., 242.
Ibid., 345.
Ibid., 345.
A Man with a Green Memory: War,

Cinema, and Freedom in Stephen Wrights
Meditations in Green
The world as cinema:1 in American postmodernist fiction, this idea is indicated

in Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow, in which Tyron Slothrop appears as a
conditioned man in World War II. In the Zone, where the War has been reconfiguring
time and space into its own image,2 Slothrops subjectivity is inseparably connected
to the plot of the war; inexorably reacting to the rocket, he is deprived of any inner
space of autonomy. Hence allusions to cinema throughout the novelthe whole Zone
is conceived as a gigantic film-set, where the characters are cast to play their roles.
My function is to observe you, one of the characters tells Slothrop. Thats my
function. You like my function? You like it? Your function . . . is, learn the rocket,
inch by inch.3 The individual is reduced to a function or role, which is determined
in the script of the war; the whole world becomes indistinguishable from cinema. This
cinematic view of the world does not allow autonomy of Slothrop, who instead appears
as a mere product or construct embedded in the apparatus of the war. Thus this
notion comes close to the Foucauldian view of the individualpower produces; it
produces reality. . . . The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him
belong to this production.4 Therefore, the idea of cinema-world immediately raises
the question of freedom: How is freedom possible for human beings whose very
existence is linked inseparably to a matrix of anonymous forces . . . which seems to

4

1
2
3
I owe this idea to Takashi Nibuyas thought on Deleuze, Foucault, and cinema.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973), 261.
Ibid., 219.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage,
1977), 194. Gilles Deleuze implies the cinematic aspect of Michel Foucaults philosophy; according
to Deleuze, Foucaults point is that the workings of power range over the domain of the visible as
well as that of discourseevery mechanism is a mushy mixture of the visible and the articulable
(Deleuze, Foucault, 38). The subject is a being constituted by the visual-discursive formations of
power relationships. Hence the motif of cinema: the place of the subject is close to a character in a
film, who is deprived of a transcendent position to become a product of the film, namely the mixture
of visual and linguistic media. This view is also shared by the arguments of cultural construction,
with their emphasis being on the domain of discourse.
68
Outside, America
dictate our every move, our every thought?5 As Slothrops quest in the Zone ends up
in his fragmentation, the cinema-world, without any promise of the outside space,
fundamentally rejects the integrity of the free individual.
Among contemporary American novelists who confront this conundrum in the
framework of the cinematic world, Stephen Wrights Meditations in Green presents
a singular notion of freedom. Following Pynchon, Wrights 1983 novel describes
Vietnam as a cinematic space in which the workings of the army define the ontological
framework of every soldier. Narrated by a veteran, James Griffin, the novel explores the
possibility of freedom within this conditionit is found in the internal transmutability
of his self. The narrative does not appeal to the traditional notion of the autonomous
subject who holds a transcendental or outside position; rather, freedom is opened inside
the cinematic world, in the act of rearranging his subjectivity through a new practice of
temporality. Instead of relying on the idea of the free individual, the novel carries out
a rearrangement of past-present relationship to produce the potential of self-mutation.
Griffins memory of the war is reshaped into a memory of resistance that affects his
present situation; his meditations are an attempt to subvert the current constitution
of his self, which is haunted by the lingering effects of the war. It is not a freedom
for individuality, but from it.6 Resisting the trauma that threatens to seize him in the
shape of an individual soldier, Griffins narrative is an act of counter-memory in the
Foucauldian sense: through the lens of meditations in green, the veteran desperately
tries to transform himself.7
The cinema-planet in the jungle: The military-clich complex

I, your genial storyteller, wreathed in a beard of smoke, look into the light and recite
strange tales from the war back in the long ago time8thus begins Griffins narrative.
Introducing a number of characters, it provides a glimpse of the workings of the army
in Vietnam: as an apparatus of power, it sets the conditions of the emergence of the
masculine soldier as the subject of military activity. Its operations range over the
Michael Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault: Savage Identities (London: Routledge,
2001), 132.
6
Ibid., 136.
7
Past discussions on the novel have tended to highlight the gesture of resignation and meaninglessness,
which is often associated with postmodernism. Most recently, Lucas Carpenter identifies a typical
postmodern attitude in the novel, arguing that all Griffin learns is a dizzying, de-centering, and
ultimately paralyzing relativism (Carpenter, It Dont Mean Nothin, 401). Christopher Metress,
despite his important discussion of the novels utilization of the American movie tradition, finally
agrees with Carpenter: Wright seems to suggest that even the horror film analogy must ultimately
prove futile, must ultimately find itself spinning round and round projecting not a new meaning
but only emptiness (Metress, Hopeless Tatters, 120). Discussing the entropic vision of the novel,
Pilar Marin also concludes that Griffins attempt only results in destruction (Marin, Entropy in
Meditations in Green, 147). The only exception comes from Philip D. Beidler, who points out a new
imaginative possibility by which the novel presents the promise of new life (Beidler, Re-Writing
America, 89).
8
Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green (New York: Vintage, 1983), 8.
5
A Man with a Green Memory
69
dimensions of the visible, the discursive, and temporalitythe army organizes these
domains so as to produce a certain type of man, soldier, as the end-of-chain product.
Power organizes the horizons of seeing and the limits of saying.9 It is in this sense that
cinema, a hybrid expression of image and language, comes to the fore in the description
of the military life. Griffins first introduction to the army is accompanied by a film that
juxtaposes Ho Chi Minh and Adolf Hitler: jack-booted Fuehrer, grinning peasants,
rubber sandaled Ho, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf
Hitler, Ho Chi Minh. . . .10 The image of the Vietnamese leader assumes a figure of the
enemy of democracy in its relation with that of the German fascist. However, the use
of cinema does not stop here. Much more than an instrument in military education,
Vietnam itself is described as a huge cinematic space, where the soldiers are cast to play
their rolesGriffin finds himself in an entirely cinematic vision of the world.11
In Vietnam, Griffin is surrounded by a number of clichs typical of military life.
The daily life of the soldiers is punctuated by various discourses of the army, which
constitute the linguistic dimension in Vietnam. Radio communication, the military
slogans everywhere, fragments of conversation between soldiers, the clerks of the
First Sergeant who types Rosters, directions, memoranda, orders,12 a soldiers letters,
a tattoo of a soldier that reads DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR13these scattered
statements float throughout the army. They are presented as the anonymous clichs,
which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and
constitute his internal world.14 Marked by the logic of war and masculinity, they
constitute the utterers identity as soldiers.
This discursive realm works together with the space of visibility: along with the
linguistic domain, the gaze of the soldiers is also caught in the apparatus. Power has
its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies,
surfaces, lights, gazes,15 Foucault observes the importance of this dimension of the
visible. The space of the soldiers daily activity is arranged to facilitate the military
functionFrom the air the compound of the 1069th Intelligence Group was a
triumph of military design16so that the environment, like a film set, is already
prepared in such ways that the men, as the bearers of the gaze, perceive the outer
word through the military lens. The space is divided, the positions distributed. We
therefore normally perceive only clichs.17 Far from a neutral perception, their gaze
is marked by the masculine color: The trees stood straight up thick as phalluses and
R. N. Rodowick, The Memory of Resistance, in A Deleuzian Century? ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 1999), 41.
10
Wright, Meditations in Green, 11.
11
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso,
1989), 66.
12
13
Ibid., 64.
14
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 208.
15
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202.
16
17
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 20.
9
70
Outside, America
cautiously they picked their way among them like blind explorers.18 This vision, in
which the jungle is experienced metaphorically as a projection of the mens masculine
interiority, is an effect of the army apparatus. Visibility is a trap, as Foucault suggests.19
As an image interpreter, Griffins role in the war is to analyze aerial photographs of the
jungle to find signs of the enemy: Trees, trees, trees, trees. Wherever he put circles
on the film there the air force would make holes in the ground.20 As a vital function
of the search-and-destroy mission, his eyes are also integrated into the complex war
apparatus. Griffin is thus connected to the army organization, being himself a clich
among others in the world which surrounds him.21 The soldier is the product of the
twofold system, the bearer of both the clich-discourse and vision.
In sum, with its systems of vision and language, Vietnam appears as a huge cinematic
field where the clichs of military statements and visibility cover the whole region,
under the determined progression of the military calendar:
At this level there existed a universe in which Vietnam actually was a planet,
an entire globe, curious, resourceful, technologically advanced, a confident and
impatient world launching missiles in all directions, bombarding the stars, opening
frontiers, establishing distant colonies, angry little people with blistered skin and
black pajamas roving long ago through the tall grass of Griffins boyhood and now
passing outward, long marching columns, into the city of his future.22
Griffins life is squeezed in this single sentence: not only the whole spatial territory of
Vietnam but his past and future are contained in it. The spatiotemporal coordinates
are caught in the army apparatus, and human relationships are no exception on this
planet. Once Griffin tries to prove his humanity, which is supposed to be outside
and therefore impervious to the war, through having sex with a Vietnamese cleaning
woman, thinking, At least one Oriental woman today was going to experience his
capacity for tenderness and understanding.23 In other words, he tries to prove the
existence of his free self that remains immune to his military life. However, the
interaction does not reach beyond the fixed relationship between an American soldier
and a native woman; in the end, the sexual encounter makes him recognize his given
position, so that he eventually falls back into a clich, describing the affair as Best I ever
had. . . . And you know, she never once asked me to take her to America.24 Including
all the milieu, from soldiers, buildings, the jungle to the intersubjective relationships,
the army that simultaneously produces and distributes the soldiers and the object of
their activity, the apparatus, as its effect, makes Vietnam a closed system; it is a film-set,
in which Griffins function is already determinedin Gilles Deleuzes words, it is the

20

21

22

23

24

18
19
Wright, Meditations in Green, 76 (Italics added).

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.
Ibid., 172.
Ibid., 176.
71
world which looks to us like a bad film.25 In this cinematic globe, Griffin feels as if
his existence were completely absorbed into the spectacle of war without any external
reality. The war was real; he was not.26
Then Wendell Payne, a film director, comes to the camp. At first, he tries to shoot
scenes in accordance with the aesthetics of traditional action movies. Okay, listen
up! Wendell shouted through a battery-powered loudspeaker. I want all Americans
over here on the side of the bunker . . . and all you VC out there in the field.27 His
direction is order-oriented, drawing a clear division in the battle scene. He wanted
grace and beauty of the movement, he wanted to see a spring flower open and quietly
close.28 In this sense, his point of view is close to that of the commander, Major
Martin Holly, who demands neatness and order in the 1069th Intelligence Group,
so that the film in this phase is called The War in Vietnam: Leadership in Action.29
Wendells film-making starts as a world of orderly emotions and movements,
controlled by the commander-director. As the colonels official photographer he
occupied a cozy position warmed by the artificial light of bureaucratic power.30 In
this film within the film-world, everything is under his control, allowing no room
for the actors freedom. Wendells first film thus reproduces the movies produced
and directed by the army apparatus.
Seed of resistance: The Bush

To be a survivor is to remain both actor and spectator of a living cinema.31 The soldier
is nothing more than a role that the bad film called Vietnam provides. Since the entire
region is grasped as a film, an outside or transcendental position is impossible; there is
no outside or an immune space where the men are free from the operation of the army.32
However, this does not rule out the possibility of resistance: as long as the soldiers, in
their practices of clich-utterances and perception, are involved in the constitution of
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1989), 171.
27
Ibid., 160.
28
Ibid., 161.
29
Ibid., 162.
30
Ibid., 163.
31
Virilio, War and Cinema, 48.
32
The same principle applies to other characters in the novel. The commander of the intelligence
group, Major Holly, is preoccupied with his appearance, which is an important part in the
administration. Holly himself was blessed with The Look. . . . Appearance. In the military you
couldnt ever forget. Burnished surfaces were mandatory (Wright, Meditations in Green, 93). The
commanders management includes being the object of the soldiers gaze as the ideal standard of
the unit, instead of seeing without being seen from a privileged position. The filmmaker Wendell
Payne is another example. As a director, he finally appears in his own film, when he gets injured
and hands the camera to Griffin, directing, Focus on my head and begin, slow pan down my
body . . . (Ibid., 334). The commander is seen, the director gets shot: there is no outside or
transcendent position.
25
26
72
Outside, America
their very selves, there are always possibilities of resistance inside the film-world. By
entering into the activity of shaping our own subjectivity, each of us can potentially
thwart, challenge, or at least question the ways in which we have been made, John S.
Ransom formulates the Foucauldian notion of resistance.33 The narrative explores this
possibility, suggesting unexpected potentiality for a different vision within the realm of
the army. There is an excess that is irreducible to the given meaning and perception in
the everyday life of warthe jungle.
In the second section of his narrative, Griffin describes the use of drugs in his
unit. There is a deviation of perceptionGriffin pointed solemnly to the floor. Has
anyone ever noticed that that knothole there looks exactly like a profile of Richard
Nixon?34and, along with it, the mens complaint against the war. Its all a grotesque
hoax, declared Trips, concocted for economic purposes.35 Yet the narrative does
not present these conducts of the men as an indication of their freedom; they do
not give rise to effective resistance to the function of the army apparatus. The plank
that resembles Nixon and the grumbles about the war do not leave the domain of
clichs; insofar as their subjectivity, formed by those clichs, is left unquestioned, the
soldiers remain caught in the workings of the army. The problem is reduced to the
degree of smoothness of the military operation, over which the tug-of-war between the
bureaucratic administration and the soldiers is fought.
The new commander, Major Holly, strives to keep the organization from slipping
into disorder: No doubt the 1069th Military Intelligence Group had its problems
too, but here he would be in charge, he would correct them.36 For him, the soldiers
clandestine practices are nothing more than correctable deficiencies. The superior
leader understood that his ability to command in periods of stress was a function of his
talent in the creative management of boredom.37 He reinstitutes the physical training
and abolishes the private partition of soldiers quartersin short, he reintroduces
military discipline, which is meant to sustain the normal perception of the soldiers.
Lets keep our vision unobstructed, yours, mine, working as a team.38 he addresses the
soldiers. This statement works literally, as well as metaphorically, for the clear vision
of the soldiers is an integral part of the war. In the second month of his command, he
receives an anonymous threat. From then on, the tension between Majors rigid coding
of the unit and the soldiers antipathy against it continueswhich is a banal plot of the
war-cinema, another clich among others.
Nonetheless, a different path is hinted in the midst of this cinema. One soldier,
Kraft, appears to introduce another possibility of vision that dissociates itself from the
operation of the army. For him, the jungle is something more than a mere representation
John S. Ransom, Foucaults Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997),
152.
34
35
Ibid., 31.
36
Ibid., 92.
37
Ibid., 96.
38
Ibid., 97.
33
73
of masculine subjectivity. He calls it the Bush, which is irreducible to any illusion or

projection of interiority:
The Bush was a professional secret. . . . The Bush had a taste and a touch, a scent
and a bite. It moved. It made sounds. It was real. Moving through it, conscious
of it, you were conscious of yourself. Irrevocably itself, a presence distinct and
unyielding, it offered opportunities for definition.39
The tropical forest is conceived as something other than representative of his inner
image or a threatening obstacle that conceals the presence of the enemy. In this view of
the forest, Kraft makes a sharp contrast to other soldiers of the unitHerschel, hit in
the chest in a battle, asks Doc, My balls, are my balls okay?40 before he dies; entering
a village, another corporal murmurs, Shit . . . these bitches is too ugly to rape.41
While the other soldiers remain in the domain of a stereotypical view of Vietnam
and its people, the Bush points to another visual dimension in the battlefield, kept
unperceived by the clichs but waiting for an opportunity to sprout.
Wendells camera began to stray.42 As the shooting proceeds, his direction no longer
follows the view of the commander but picks up various fragmentsWendell photographed
indiscriminately, confident that form, like invisible writing exposed to a flame, would reveal
itself beneath the heat of his talent.43 Though still believing in his faculty of command, he
begins his quest for another way of perception. Gradually, his camera deviates from the
order-oriented viewpoint, and the image becomes more fluid. Under Wendells eccentric
direction the thick light flowed like a blob of mercury over the scene, coating rubble and
spectators in a momentarily brilliance, unable apparently to choose or to find an object
suitable for focusing.44 Then another version, The War in Vietnam: Philistines At Large45
comes up. On seeing the film, Griffin complains to the director, theres no beginning, no
middle, no end. Theres no coherence.46 In these practices of film-making, Wendell breaks
with the harmonious viewpoint or the hierarchical composition that previously marked
his direction, in search of other possible images. The unforeseen quality of the image is
attainedhis film is now directed toward the resistance to clich-images.
A close encounter with the jungle

The mutation of Griffins perception, which leads him to a deviation from the army, is
triggered by the actual encounter with the jungle, the object of his everyday gaze and

41

42

43

44

45

46

39
40
Ibid., 77.
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 163.
Ibid., 164.
Ibid., 201.
Ibid., 266.
Ibid.
74
Outside, America
discourse. When the plants exert an uncontainable force on the soldier, it disturbs
his composition of subjectivity into disequilibrium. After the event, Griffin begins
to veer from the determined function in the army. His perception is distorted so
drastically that he becomes unable to perform his duty as the image interpreter;
his body, heretofore captured by the military machinery, begins to mutate, and
the cinematic world of Vietnam reveals an unexpected landscape. Griffin detaches
himself from the war, but this movement is not based on any transcendental position;
rather, his viewpoint, along with his whole self, is moved within the film-world. The
inauguration of this shift, the encounter, does not derive from Griffins subjective
intention; after the affect of the jungle, he magnifies the intensity of the deviant
perception to the nth degree, so that his rearranged self cannot be recaptured by
the army. His freedom lies in this act of self-mutation, which makes him a different
character in the film.
Before Griffin, Claypool experiences the mutation of the self on his first mission
in the jungle, which drives him into the unknown: the plants, the plants were
all wrong. No movie had ever been made in here. Claypool recognized nothing.47
Instead of the act of recognition that finds its correlate in the ideal of common
sense, which is defined by . . . the supposed identity of the subject,48 Claypool
undergoes an encounter with the unrecognizable force which brings his sensibility
to its limits. The jungle is an uncontainable excess over Claypools cognitive schema
that grounds his identity. Coming back from the mission, Claypool rarely talks
with others, and eventually abandons the effort of communication entirely. Then
Claypool abruptly disappeared.49 Apart from the domain of the military discourse,
he is momentarily detached from his own identity: He took off his shirt to study
the letters stenciled above the right pocket: CLAYPOOL. Whose clothes were
these? . . . He had abandoned that name and the life clinging to it like dead meat.50
However, Claypools movement of deviation remains a limited one, for he still
regards himself as a spy, therefore a member of the army. He watched and wrote
in dirt upon the wall notes for his superiors of what he saw.51 Severing his verbal
relation with the army, his gaze is still caught within the apparatus: his detachment
remains incomplete. Kraft discovers him, and Sergeant Mars takes over the task
of readjusting Claypool to the army calendar. Shower, dinner, then sleepMars
commands him that if he Claypool were not up and ready to work by 0800 the next
morning he would be treated to further on-the-job training.52 Thus he is recast into
the spatiotemporal script of the army.
Daniel W. Smith, Deleuzes Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality, in Deleuze: A
Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (London: Blackwell, 1996), 30.
49
50
Ibid., 234.
51
Ibid., 234.
52
Ibid., 236.
47
48
75
Griffin also experiences the encounter that affects his capacity of perception.
When joining a ground mission, he comes into direct contact with the jungle for the
first time:
As he moved in deeper and deeper, he had the eerie sense of vegetation thrusting
itself at him for inspection and comment. . . . On the ground, crawling like a bug
through the bed of those deceptive film images, he sensed a force the camera
could never record, a chemical hardly subdue. Getting out alive was the major
priority now.53
The former distance between Griffin and the plant vanishes, and the perceived forest
assaults his body with an unrecognizable force. He is faced with the whole image
without metaphor:54 his perception is not mediated by film-images nor is it understood
metaphorically. A new relation comes into being between Griffin and the forest: the
jungle directly confronts him and touches his body with its unmediated force. As Steven
Shaviro puts it, Perception is turned back upon the body of the perceiver, so that it
affects and alters that body, instead of merely constituting a series of representations
for the spectator to recognize.55 There manifests a totally different landscape from
the films with which he has dealt in his duty as the image interpreter; his capacity to
process the image in such a way that secures his position as the solider-subject is no
longer effective. Griffins body, formerly captured within the army apparatus, is affected
by the unknown force within Vietnam.
As a result, Griffins self is thrown into disequilibrium. The event of the encounter
commences his movement of metamorphosis, which is more intense than Claypools.
It dissolves the contours of the ego and transgresses the requirements of coherence and
closure that govern normal experience.56 Accordingly, the use of drugs changes its
function: no longer a harmless respite from the everyday routine, it becomes, for Griffin,
a means to accelerate the mutation of perception. His eyes and the world shattered
simultaneously. It was like staring into a cracked kaleidoscope at bright pieces of color
that no longer resolved themselves into any unified pattern.57 There is no recognizable
form, such as the profile of Nixon; instead, the trip leads him away from the military
service, making his eyes useless for military operation. A quiet uncomplaining Griffin
spent hours at the office, patiently sharpening pencils and with stoned devotion shading
in his wall map with tinted squares and rectangles of orange and blue and white.58
Then the progression of time is altered. The determined and linear time of the
military calendar is replaced by another rhythm: Once the days had gone squeeeak,

55

56

57

58

53
54
Ibid., 2767.
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 51.
Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 294.
76
Outside, America
now they went zip.59 Riding on this new pulse of time, Griffin enters into the unknown
realm, in which he eludes the grasp of the military schedule. He was zipping too fast to
be plotted and charted.60 He finds himself in an outside zone where the ordered form
of time that grounds the identity of soldiers is no longer effective: Griffin realized it
didnt matter whether he was on this airfield or back on the block, RVN or USA, here,
there, space was so insignificant once you had truly learned how to occupy an interval
of time.61 Instead of escaping from Vietnam, Griffin enters a space-time of interval
where his self undergoes a series of mutations. When posted in night watch, his body
begins to catch previously imperceptible sounds and forces, which communicate with
him and transform him further:
At night Griffin sat naked and alone on top of the bunker, listening to the rats and
centipedes who lived in the wire. . . . He could feel the jungle, huge and silent,
move right up to the wire and lean its warm dark presence against his skin. A
spiders web broke delicately across his face. The night flowed in and out of his
body. He wanted to walk out into it, float away through the black and green tide.
Something scurried in the weeds. He masturbated on a sandbag.62
His body can no longer be cut off from the jungle; there is no subject-object relationship
between Griffin and the environment around him, and his sexuality, which previously
resulted in a mere repetition of his privileged position as a man-soldier in the relation
with a Vietnamese woman, is sucked into the milieu. His body thus ceases to be
an integrated part of the army apparatus and finds connections to the other forces
found within the cinema-planet. His perception and sexuality transgress the limits of
the man-soldier, and the form of the self is transfigured under his uniform. Griffin
becomes an ineffective body in the army by finding a different order of corporeality;
his conducts now aim, in Foucaults words, to counter the grips of power with the
claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility
of resistance.63
A totally different scene of the battlefield is thus opened up. Affected by the force of
the jungle, his identity as a vehicle of war is actively mutatedit is a struggle against
the program of the army installed in his own self. After going through the change of
perception, Griffin quits going to work altogether: Griffins war was over, processed
and distributed.64 Griffins self, previously constituted in the power relations in the
army apparatus, finds another mode of existence: his former self as the man-soldier
is turned into a mutant who is disconnected from the war. He still remains inside the
cinema-world of Vietnam, but he sees a different landscape and inhabits another mode

61

62

63

64

59
60
Ibid., 290.
Ibid., 295.
Ibid., 2978.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 157.
77
of time: for him, the battlefield becomes a foreign planet.65 In other words, he attains
the perception of an alien. The narrative presents Griffins freedom as this shift of
perspective, which is accompanied by a change in the mode of the self. The constituent
elements of the scene are the samethe army, the soldiers, and the junglebut the
war movie turns into a science fiction. Freedom lies in the practice that rearranges
the relationships that constitute the subjectivity from within. Griffin is free, not in his
individuality but in his practice to become a mutant in a remade film.66
The opportunity for Wendells best film comes when the soldiers gather to watch
a zombie movie. Though one of the soldiers claims that This is the grossest movie
Ive ever seen,67 the introduction of the zombie film tries to establish a certain
analogy between the world of military destruction and that of the struggle with the
living dead. When the incoming siren blares during the show, Vietnam reality and
horror film reality are indistinguishable.68 In the battlefield, Wendell finds that the
boundaries between the living dead and the human completely vanish. Wendell
couldnt believe his luck: Captain Raleigh and a genuine VC in black shorts locked in
a lovers clench on the gravel outside the O club and stabbing one another at intervals
with long knives.69
The War In Vietnam: The Final Hours. In this final chapter of Wendells
filmography, the director himself not outside the battle, but a part of the battlefield
landscape. The next instant Wendell was slammed to the ground.70 An explosion
hits him; unable to move, injured, he nominates Griffin-the-mutant as the honorary
cinematographer: Shoot, you cocksucker, shoot me, shoot them, shoot the whole
fucking compound,71 the director exclaims. Filming the landscape in confusion,
Griffin notices that the director is dead. Yes, those were still Wendells eyes, that
was Wendells face, but Wendell was gone. Something else occupied his space suit.72
When the eye-camera ceases to receive the light, the film is over. Death: another
way to get out of the real. What had Wendell seen at that instant? What was he
seeing now?73but Griffin does not share the perception of the dead; his exit lies
in a different direction, within the realm of life, the discovery of an unforeseen
perspective in the cinema-planet. Then he, too, is injured and sent back to his
homeland.
Ibid., 333.
Naturally, for all its cinematic associations and emphasis on vision, the novel ultimately belongs
to the realm of language. This does not mean, however, that the defiance against the normative
vision is futile, or everything is reduced to the matter of discourse; Meditations in Green disturbs
the correlation between vision and discourse through describing the mutation of the perception,
thereby subverting the functioning of the army. It anticipates a new subjectivity as the bearer of the
new gaze and discourse that is no longer captured by the apparatus.
67
68
Metress, Hopeless Tatters, 118.
69
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid., 333.
72
Ibid., 334.
73
Ibid., 335.
65
66
78
Outside, America
Germination year zero

Griffins narrative of the war is not a neutral recollection: it fundamentally works on
his own self in the present. In the beginning of his narration, Griffins present life in
the United States is marked by a sense of instability. He is under a doctors care, and
suffers from a traumatic vision of the battlefield. This is not a settled life,74 he admits.
Griffin is still caught in the effects of the war; his physical injury, trauma, a psychiatrist,
a fellow soldier, and drugs surround and punctuate his life. The war continues to seize
his current self, and his inquiry into the past in Vietnam serves to explore the potential
for the self-transformation as a counteraction. The fragmentary style of the narrative
is crucial here. The post-Vietnam days in the United States do not occupy an external
position in relation to the war: the fragments of his present life and the past event are
woven together in his narrative. Griffins postwar life thus forms a coextensive continuum
with the past, and the status of the present is altered in its relation with the memory of
the past event. The entanglement of the fragments of the past and the present is not so
much an act of representation as the reinterpretation of ones past in order to reinvent
oneself as if one were the product of a new past.75 Whereas the logic of representation
assumes that any subject will also be given through representation; the subject who
represents is a transcendental condition,76 Griffins narrative signals another direction.
His act of rearranging the memories of the war is carried out within the constraints
that define the framework of his present self. His narrative is a specific action that
constitutes his self: as Foucault argues, meditations are a practice of the self.77 His
present is not immune to the threat of falling into the clichs of familiar identity
the angry and maladjusted veteran, PTSD, or the drug-addict. In its relation with the
new memory of mutation, his present self is rearranged to produce a future-oriented
movement. His meditations in green are a Foucauldian act of countermemory that
introduces discontinuity into [his] very being.78
Trips, one of his fellow soldiers, frequently visits Griffins apartment. Trips is
completely dominated by his memories of Vietnamhis obsession with the war
makes him seek revenge on his superior. Since Sergeant Anstins rumored retirement
more than half a decade ago, Trips had claimed to have spotted either him or a
Ibid., 8.
Jon Simons, Foucault & the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), 20. Though Matthew Stewart
identifies the novels significance at an almost metaphorical level (Stewart, Stephen Wrights Style
in Mediations in Green, 132), from the perspective of the relational character of the past and the
present, the style of the novel works quite differently. The fragments of the past are narrated in the
third person, while those of the present in the first person. Thus there is a certain gap between the
two modes of time. However, this does not point to the totally separated status of the past; rather,
there arises a certain space of relation between them. The fragmentary style does not indicate
Griffins shattered self but demands a relinkage that constitutes his new self.
76
Claire Colebrook, Questioning Representation, SubStance 92 (2000): 52.
77
Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 278.
78
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology,
trans. Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press,
1998), 380.
74
75
79
cleverly disguised double in almost every quarter of the city.79 His vision is tied to his
subjectivity as a soldier. A reactive memory, or the birth of prison: his present, defined
by a reactive mode of relation with the past, is immobilized with resentment against
the Sarge. Youre gonna help me kill the bastard,80 Trips says to Griffin.
Griffins present, on the contrary, is characterized by his ongoing experiments with
the plant. After he has a traumatic dream of the war, he goes to the botanical garden in
the city, where he attempts bodily communication with the garden: My spine began
transmitting coded messages into the mud, the mud relaying secret signals back. The
leaves sighed. I could feel myself slowly emptying.81 It is not an act of identification
with the plant or nihilistic abandonment of the self; he searches for an internal realm
that is not sucked into the spirit of revenge against the past. Later, he carries soil into
his apartment to grow plants there.
Even in the homeland, his vision is infected with the vegetative force. His perception
is caught in the disequilibrium, which displays the force of the plant in his room: On
the wall above Tripss right shoulder was a faint dark spot . . . I realized I had been staring
at for some time when it erupted into blossom, unfolding moist petals of unbelievable
color, a liquid-quick stern plunging to the floorboard, extending curly tendrils and
acid green leaves.82 His perception goes beyond the domain of his subjective control
and develops on its own accord: The imagery has become self-generating. The minds
gone organic. Theres no control.83 When placed among the Vietnam fragments, this
seemingly tragic lack of stable or normal vision takes on a different color. Juxtaposed
with the past encounter with the jungle, his unstable perception points to his capacity
to mutate, which lies beyond his personal realm governed by the residue of the
soldier-subject. Far from a lament over the lost stability of identity, the perception in
flux becomes a means to escape from the script of the war. The jungle, the botanical
garden, drugs, and the hothouse in his room: all these plants constitute an experiment
by which Griffin seeks a nonsubjective sphere in his body.84
Trips finally takes action. He spots the man he wants and, like two soldiers on a
mission, he and Griffin secretly get closer to him. With the narrator in the position to
cover him, Trips approaches the man. Hi Sarge, remember me? There was something
in Tripss hand.85 Realizing the man is a stranger mistaken for Sarge, Griffin hits his
partner with a trash can and stops him: Stop it! I screamed. Stop! Its not him, you
hear me, its not even him!86 The reactive memory of the past hovers over Tripss
Ibid., 116.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 1434.
Ibid., 145.
In the novel, the use of drugs follows and intensifies Griffins mutation, so that they are
complementary to the exploration of other possibilities of perception. As long as the drug serves
to enhance the movement of perceptual transmutation, it can be part of the practice against the
fixation of the gaze. Addiction still remains a fatal trapwhen the drug takes itself as the sole end,
this strategy would no longer be effective as the resistance to the apparatus.
85
86
Ibid., 318.

81

82

83

84

79
80
80
Outside, America
perception in the present: while Griffins vision is directed toward self-mutation, Tripss
gaze is connected to the will to destruction. The memory of the war can be fatalfaced
with this danger Trips poses, Griffin chooses a different path, namely the narrative
as a countermemory, which is intended to transform the past-present relation in a
nonlinear fashion. Counter-memory counters, or suspends, the power of identity.87 In
Griffins version, the present is grasped in its movement that differs from the identity as
a soldier. Who has a question for Mr. Memory?88this question suggests more than
a desperate escape from the past; the narrator challenges the personalized memory
that, as Trips is imprisoned by his past, tries to nail him onto his individuality.
It is this act of countermemory that Griffin practices to attain a movement toward
the future. The narrated encounter with the jungle and the subsequent mutation,
whether they are actual incidents or not, imply the transmutability of his self, in
which lies the room for the exercise of freedom. I think my thumb has always been
green89this passage in the novels last section, creating a memory that affirms his
inseparability from the plant, is a springboard for his leap into the unknown: In the
spring Ill wander national highways, leather breeches around my legs, pot on my head,
sowing seeds from the burlap bag across my shoulder, resting in the afternoon shade
of a laurel tree.90 To remake the past, so that it becomes a reservoir of freedom in the
present: though there is no guarantee of success in this process, Griffin strives to grow
over the fence of the war with his meditations in green. Freedom, in Foucaults sense,
is . . . not a private right or a public unity, but an ongoing practice, a way of thinking,
and a space of activity91this Foucauldian notion of freedom is embodied by the
narrator who attempts to present a counternarrative of the war that mutates himself
from within.
In 1984, Ronald Reagan, with his Hollywood background, gave an address for
the burial of an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War. As Paul D. Erickson puts
it, By speaking of the burial as a homecoming, Reagan ritualistically reconciled
post-Vietnam America with those impulses that the country rejected during and after
the war.92 Through the lens of Meditations in Green, this postwar ritual is nothing more
than another episode in a moviethe exactor president presents the dead soldier as a
perfect American hero,93 who is worthy to be given credit in the gigantic film-world
called America. Thus the apparatus of power keeps operating through the making
of the public memory, a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public
or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.94 Griffin
always finds himself in this collective cinema produced by power.
Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault, 135.
Ibid., 341.
Paul D. Erickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth (New York: New York UP,
1985), 57.
93
Erickson, Reagan Speaks, 59.
94
John Bodner, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth
Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 15.

89

90

91

92

87
88
81
The world as cinema: this idea rules out the possibility of an outside position.
In Wrights novel, however, this despairing gesture is mutated into the new form of
the outside. The site of freedom is in the concrete plot in which Griffin is situated;
remaking this cinema from within, he seeks to subvert the current composition of
the self. In other words, he attempt to open a space of concrete freedom, that is, of
possible transformation.95 In the long shot, it seems as if nothing happened; like the
filmed data being processed, soldiers are organized and charted in such a way that
the collective apparatuses continue to operate. In the close-up, however, there are
always uncounted particles that move unceasingly in the internal space, escaping
the workings of the apparatuses that try to capture them into the recognizable chart.
Dedicated to the graphed, the charted, the data processed and to all the uncounted,96
the novel maps the micromovement of James Griffin, who discovers the cinematic
freedom in his resistance against his current self: his remade memory transforms the
figure of an American hero into a mutant. To activate an outside within the long-run
film called Americathe film continues, but the hero is becoming something else.
Michel Foucault, Structuralism and Post-structuralism, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology,

trans. Jeremy Harding, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 450.
96
Wright, Meditations in Green, n.p.
95
Time and Again: The Outside and the Narrative

Pragmatics in Don DeLillos The Body Artist
A narrative, once started, activates a mode of time. The opening paragraph of Don
DeLillos The Body Artist foregrounds this aspect of the narrative act: Time seems
to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a
spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined
precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay . . . and the world comes into being,
irreversibly.1 These sentences are not so much a description as a composition of a
spatiotemporal experience; it introduces an ordered sense of space and time, which
ensures self-identity within that frameYou know more surely who you are on a strong
bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness.2
As it progresses, the novel calls into question this stable sense of subjectivity of the
protagonist, Lauren Hartke, through exploring the idea of the outside suggested by a
mysterious man, Tuttle, who is outside the easy sway of either/or3 and leads Lauren
to interrogate the inside/outside framework that defines her self.4
The basic plot of the novel seems simple enough: Lauren, a body performer, is faced
with the sudden death of her husband, loses her grip on reality because of the ensuing
grief and encounters or imagines the strange man, but then finally accepts the loss and
the world as it is.5 In this reading, the structure of the novel is circular, with its telos
being the reclamation of her identity. Yet, much more than a temporary distraction
before the desired return to the normative identity, her encounter with Tuttle works
Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001), 9.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 71.
Cornel Bonca suggests that the main motif of the novel is an ontological question, but in his effort
to discover the Heideggerian idea of Dasein, Bonca runs the risk of reducing the idea of the outside
to another linear model of time, Time as a teleological leaning toward death (Bonca, Being,
Time, and Death in DeLillos The Body Artist, 65). Laura Di Prete also focuses on the subject of
temporality, but according to Di Prete, the time of death does not change throughout the novel:
Lauren reproduces traumatic temporality in all intensity and urgency (Di Prete, Don DeLillos
The Body Artist, 507). The same tendency is found in Rachel Smiths and Peter Boxalls argument,
where they only analyze the temporality of grief, thereby failing to notice the interaction between
the two temporalities in the narrative.
5
Joseph Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (Columbia, SC: U of South
Carolina P, 2006), 138.

3

4

1
2
84
Outside, America
as a profound reconfiguration of her view of reality. I try to analyze and redesign6

this pragmatic principle, which Lauren mentions in explaining her body performance,
is at work everywhere in the novel. Language, body, time, and the outsideall are
inseparable from how they function in the narrative; a profound pragmatism runs
through the novel, which is always based on the logic of mutation. The progression of
the narrative, through repeating former scenes with alterations, ultimately constitutes
a loop, which alters the nature of Laurens present characterized by grief.7 Undermining
a narrative of subjectivity that holds to a model of linear time,8 The Body Artist itself
constitutes a time-space of metamorphosis in which Laurens conception of self is
redefined.
The break in the present: Death and babble

From its beginning, the novel is inseparable from the idea of repetition: it begins with
an ordinary morning, just like any other, with Lauren and Rey preparing the breakfast
and talking to each other. Though Rey speaks of the terror of another ordinary day,9
a sign of despair, Lauren dismisses it as insignificant. Then Rey commits suicidean
inserted newspaper article, which summarizes his career as a film director and mentions
Lauren as his third wife, visibly interrupts the narrative progression, introducing a
sudden break in the progression of her everyday life. Lauren completely immerses
herself in the obituary, as she often experiences with the newspaper stories.10
Having incorporated the habits of the previous days, she cannot cope with the
current situation: When she was downstairs she felt him in the rooms on the second
floor.11 Whereas others try to make her come to terms with Reys death, Lauren does
not accept the present defined by the loss, which causes a past-present disparity: She
climbed the stairs, hearing the sound a person makes who is climbing stairs.12 Death
effectuates a splitting of her self between she and a person, between the past and the
present tenses. Her basic assumption of temporality is already evident in this situation:
DeLillo, The Body Artist, 107.
David Cowart introduces an important insight when he claims that, in DeLillos work, language
reveals itself as a system defiant of systems, a system whose complexity is at least as vast and
inexhaustible as that of the world it constructs or attempt to represent (Cowart, Don DeLillo, 6).
It is this dimension of signs in relation to spatiotemporal experience that the narrative explores
through the hypothetical man, Tuttle, whose linguistic system is different from Laurens. Thus
the novel assumes a plurality of systemsDeleuze and Guattari suggest that the prevailing
view of language as the system of the signifier-signified relation be seen as only one regime of
signs among others. . . . Hence the necessity to a return to pragmatics (Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, 111). Tuttles practice of signs is understood in terms of how it works.
8
Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
2007), 120.
9
10
Ibid., 16.
11
Ibid., 34.
12
Ibid., 35.
6
7
Time and Again
85
time is a linear movement, making a return to the past impossible, which causes her
desire to abandon her body in the presentShe wanted to disappear in Reys smoke,
be dead, be him.13
She begins to watch a webcam image of Kotka, Finland, in her effort to organize
time until she could live again.14 Yearning for a stable sense of identity, she is intrigued
with the clear-cut spatiotemporal frame of the screen: It was the sense of organization,
a place contained in an unyielding frame . . . with a reading of local time in the digital
display in a corner of the screen.15 The image of Kotka functions as part of her effort
to negate her bodily presence and connect with this foreign, organized space-time.
It is part of the fantasy of disembodiment. . . . The illusion of being able to leave the
body at will and reappear elsewhere.16 Lauren becomes fascinated with the Euclidean
experience of Kotka as a flight from her current self.
All this changes when she finds a strange man in the house, whose words seem
totally fractured. Contrary to the pragmatic deficiency17 or a failure of language,18
the man she names Tuttle shows a peculiar use of language which, with its suspension
of the communicative and signifying functions, defies Laurens linguistic assumptions.
The question is not what language is but what effect Tuttles use of language, a linguistic
outside, generates in relation to Laurensthe two linguistic modes or regimes of
signs19 encounter and collide with each other.20
In their conversation, Lauren repeatedly pins herself down to her identity in the
present, specifying her current position in her effort to decipher who the man isI
am here because of Rey, who was my husband, who is dead. I dont know why Im
telling you this because it is surely unnecessary. But I need to live here alone for a
time.21 Thus her position moves from negation to affirmation of the present identity.
Her linguistic system always sets up I in the present; it works as an anchoring point,
in relation to which every utterance is measured and defined. On the contrary, none of

15

16

17

18

Ibid., 36.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid., 40.
Grosz, Architecture from Outside, 83.
Osteen, Mark. Echo Chamber: Undertaking The Body Artist, Studies in the Novel 37.1 (2005): 71.
Nel, Philip, Don DeLillos Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist, Contemporary
Literature 43.4 (2002): 744.
19
20
In The Body Artist, the voice is not the ground of presence; on the contrary, it is thoroughly an
impersonal event, an indicator of its primary desire to be persistently away from presence
(McCaffery, Prior to Meaning, 162). As Tuttle reproduces Rey and Laurens voice, the voice in the
novel is often unmoored from the body and floats freely. The nature of voice as impersonal entity
appears in the initial scene of the breakfast, when Lauren takes up Reys voice: She . . . was only
echoing Rey, identifyingly, groaning his groan, but in a manner so seamless and deep it was her
discomfort too (DeLillo, The Body Artist, 11). Here, the voice belongs neither to Rey nor Lauren,
but appears as an incorporeal event taken up by any body. A similar conception is found later, when
Lauren, in her conversation with Mariella Chapman, abruptly switches to another voice (ibid.,
111) of a man. I can almost believe, Mariella writes, she is equipped with male genitals (ibid.).
Those moments illustrate the fluid nature of bodily subjectivity.
21
Ibid., 49.
13
14
86
Outside, America
Tuttles utterances refers back to the speaking I. He speaks of the coming rain in the
past tense, and reproduces the past utterances of Rey and Lauren like a passive recorder.
In his case, personal identity in the present does not function as a stable ground of
being. Even when he utters the word I, it does not fix him in the centerI said this
what I said,22 or I am doing. This yes that. Say some words,23 for instance. In these
sentences, the privileged position of the linguistic subject collapses as the predicates
contradict each other; as Yve Lomax holds, the verb-predicate is not attributable to
the subject of a proposition.24
Repetition is another notable characteristic in his speech. The word for moonlight
is moonlight25 is one among such repetitive phrases. This self-referring phrase
reveals the sheer existence of the word moonlight itself, its nonsignifying aspect. It
was logically complex, Lauren feels, and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and
true.26 These utterances are more than simple reproduction: the repetition of the
same word or two words of similar meaning implodes the signifying function while
engendering a different working likened to musicit was song, it was chant.27
Bereft of any communicating possibility, Tuttle does not function as the You in a
dialogue, which designates the person one is addressing, but more importantly, a
point of subjectification on the basis of which each of us is constituted as a subject.28
By bringing Lauren into contact with this man, the narrative begins to question the
composition of her subjectivity.
Into the outside

Spending her days with Tuttle, Lauren is faced with the outside. This leads her to
question her spatiotemporal experience that, together with her linguistic practices,
grounds her inside, namely her identity in the present. To Lauren, initially, the outside
is simply defined as external space that does not belong to her personal territory. In the
description of the breakfast, everything in and around the house is divided according
to the logic of personal property, while she notices a hair in her mouth with disgust
The phone was his. The birds were hers, the sparrows pecking at sunflower seeds. The
hair was somebody elses.29 The hair is an intruder from outside, a foreign body to
be expelled from her system. Our perception, Elizabeth Grosz notes, carves up the
world, and divides it into things.30 Yet, the narrative gradually exposes her interiority
Ibid., 58.
Ibid., 64.
Yve Lomax, Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 142.
25
26
Ibid., 84.
27
Ibid., 76.
28
29
30
Grosz, Architecture from Outside, 135.
22
23
24
Time and Again
87
to a different idea of the outsideIn place of an imagination of a world of bounded

space we are now presented with a world of flows.31
Lauren assumes that a system of language presupposes a specific spatiotemporal
experience that the body inhabits. Hence the different reality that Tuttle signals to
her: There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with
our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words
or bearings.32 Following Deleuze and Guattaris assertion that the regime of bodies
and the regime of signs . . . are still in reciprocal presupposition,33 Tuttles language
points to a corporeal mode totally different from hers:
Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there,
before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of
collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated
toast she watches him eat.34
This world, a continuum in which the past and the future coexist without any anchoring
point, is totally foreign to Laurens experience. Thus the mode of temporality Tuttle
inhabits is at first considered nonnarratableShe thought maybe he lived in a kind of
time that had no narrative quality.35 For Lauren, the human experience of time is tied
to the linear flow of narrative, which is moored to what we call the Now.36 In other
words, the linear temporality is the succession of the present that grounds identity. On
the contrary, Tuttle suggests an outside to this stable world of identity. At this stage,
the narrative introduces this idea of exteriority as an imminent yet threatening topos:
There was something raw in the moment, open-wounded. It bared her to things that
were outside her experience but desperately central, somehow, at the same time.37
Tuttle drifts helplessly in the torrent of this continuum, which passes through him
at random. This is why Lauren imagines that Tuttle has no protective surface,38 the
boundary that secures the human identity.
Her linguistic habitsThe future comes into being, and Time unfolds into the
seams of being,39 for exampleconsolidate the surface of her bounded self. In such
expressions, the into composes the contours of the interior realm through which time
passes. In a straight current of time, the future and the past stay outside the present:
Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us
to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it. But not for him.40

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

31
32

Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 645.
Ibid., 92.
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 94.
88
Outside, America
Her grief presupposes this temporality: death and grief always come into being with
the linear movement of narrative-time, which also guarantees that those moments will
pass out of the present.
Tuttle defies this promise of time. Whereas the human experience presupposes
the principle of self-identity based on the linear understanding of time, this formula is
not applicable to him. It is in this sense that she feels that he violates the limits of the
human.41 Lauren tries to reject such an idea, but the narrative irreversibly entices her
toward a limit-point where exterior and interior meet:
The words ran on, sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to
follow her out of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement.
And some terror at the edge, or fear of believing, some displacement of self, but this
is the point, this is the wedge into ecstasy.42
This is the point, the edge or limit where her subjectivity touches upon the exteriority
Tuttle suggestsit is here that she reaches a threshold.
The narrative itself practices the idea of threshold: as Mark Osteen notes, the anonymous
narrative voice slides in and out of Laurens idiom,43 and later it takes up one of Tuttles
phrases, Being here has come to me44 as its own. Therefore, it constantly moves into and
out of Laurens perspective, which is made clear by the use of the second-person you.
As Osteen relates the second person to the very pronominal signifier of self-division
and permeability,45 the appearance of the you functions as an indicator of the narrative
fluctuation; it appears when Lauren reflectively addresses herselfSink lower, she
thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you46and also when the narrative
addresses her objectively, as is seen in the opening paragraphs of chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7.
The you speaks from Laurens interiority yet at the same time it often distances itself
from her; instead of establishing the speaking I, this oscillating movement makes the
narrative voice an interface.47 Where the protective surface meets the outsidethe novel
pursues this idea, and presents corporeality itself as an ontological interface.
The art of membrane

Tuttle suddenly disappears, leaving Lauren in the thoughts of the outsideMaybe
there are times when we slide into another reality but cant remember it, cant concede

44

45

46

47

41
42
43
Ibid., 102.
Osteen, Echo Chamber, 66.
Osteen, Echo Chamber, 66.
The political nature of The Body Artist lies in this profound redesign of subjectivity. Its affirmation of
the body as the site of mutation undermines the assumption of corporeal stability that supports the
state-model: the body can never be completely incorporated within the semantics of the nation-state
and its body-politic (Manning, Politics of Touch, 65). The resistance to the normative body carried
out through the narrative concerns ontological difference, rather than discursive parody.
Time and Again
89
the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.48 This sliding into
another reality is distinguished from Laurens initial experience of injecting herself into
newspaper stories and the Kotka image. Contrary to those feelings of disembodiment,
the idea of the outside demands a profound redefinition of the present-time body as a
threshold, where interiority constantly interacts with its exterior: the bodily surface is
the hinge-plane not only between senses, tenses, and dimensions of space and time,
but between matter and mindedness.49 The surface is not a wall but a membrane.
The notion of the outside involves both spatial and temporal dimensions. Tuttle
reproduces not only Lauren and Reys past remarks but also their gestureshis body,
characterized by fragility or even utter insubstantiality,50 is a passive receptor for those
external events. The narrative distinguishes between this mans access to the past-future
continuum and the workings of Laurens memory: It did not seem an act of memory.
It was Reys voice all right . . . but she didnt think the man was remembering.51 In
contrast to Tuttles media-like repetition,52 the narrative emphasizes the opposite
nature of memory inseparable from the body, describing the you who hears the
sound of a dropped paperclipNow that you know you dropped it, you remember
how it happened, or half-remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else.53
Shortly afterward, the narrative discloses that the paperclip is not there. Rather than a
misperception or the word/thing dichotomy that can only lead to an idea of the desert
that stretches the sound and the retrieval of the sound,54 it attests to the mutational
nature of remembrance, which goes through the body-membrane: the external sound
caught (the past) is repeated and transformed into the memory-image of the paperclip
(the present), and there is a point of mutation between them (membrane). The body
as the receptor of the sound is located at this intermediary fold in experience.55
Corporeality, the medium of exterior and interior, actively repeats and transfigures the
past to express its present. Instances of such misperception abound in the novel: the
sound of birds,56 the smell of soya,57 and so on. More than indicators of human error or
failure of representational languagethe process of difference, Gilles Deleuze argues,
. . . is primary in relation to that of the negative and opposition58these moments
reveal the existence of the sensing body as a differentiator that keeps perceiving and
converting the external events to different ones in its present.
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP,
2002), 190.
50
Mikko Keskinen, Posthumous Voice and Residual Presence in Don DeLillos The Body Artist,
in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, ed. Alain Philippe Durand and Naomi Mandel (London:
Continuum, 2006), 38.
51
52
Keskinen, Posthumous Voice, 35. Katsuaki Watanabe also offers a more detailed analysis of this
characteristic in the novel.
53
54
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (London: Routledge, 2006), 219.
55
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 182.
56
57
Ibid., 1718.
58
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 207.
48
49
90
Outside, America
It is this membrane function that crucially distinguishes Lauren from Tuttle.

Past-future events pass through Tuttle, who remains totally passive against them. He is
unable to induce any change in the outside events because he lacks a body-as-threshold
to regulate the outside/inside interaction. To have an active body in the present is
to activate the transformative membrane that opens itself to the continuum of the
already-past and the yet-to-come and keeps mutating the outside to form an interior
realm. Her performance called Body Time unfolds through this corporeality.
Body Time is an exploration into the threshold-dimension; it enacts the production
of difference through Laurens body. Her performance, which evokes the past
memories and presents them anew, is not a reproduction of her past experience but
its reorganization; instead, it focuses on the transformative aspect of the membrane.
Like Reys suicide, Laurens performance is explained in an inserted textan article
written by Mariella Chapmansuggesting a gap between the narrative voice and the
article. If Body Time is understood from the reporters perspective, critics are right in
relating Laurens performance to Judith Butlers notion of parody.59 By distinguishing
itself from the article, however, the narrative adds the mutational dynamism of the
body to this view.
Rey once told Lauren that you are making your own little totalitarian society
... where you are the dictator.60 In fact, the first aim of her bodywork is to keep her
corporeality under her subjective control, expelling the foreign out of her body. Yet her
art now throws light on the bodys exposure to the outside. Corporeality ceases to be
a stable ground of her identity, and reveals itself as an impersonal site through which
different states pass. In Lomaxs words, it is a performance without a performing
subject; or, at least, the subject performing was not the one that was already made
before the performance.61 Laurens art foregrounds the body as the interface that
expresses the past in mutated forms.
On the back wall, the video image of Kotka is projected: this organized space-time
forms the background against which she enacts and makes visible a different
temporality. Hartkes piece begins with an ancient Japanese woman on a bare stage,
gesturing in the stylizedmanner of Noh drama, Mariella recounts, and it ends
seventy-five minutes later with a naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately
to tell us something.62 What the writer fails to notice here is that these figures are
based on her past encounters with a Japanese woman and Tuttle, and that both of them
are expressed differently by her body that incorporates those outside events. Thus the
notion of futurity is implicated in this bodily dynamism, which opens the present to
the potential for the future production of difference: The inside condenses the past ...
in ways that are not at all continuous but instead confront it with a future that comes
from outside, exchange it and re-create it.63 The distance between the narrative and
Anne Longmuir, Performing the Body in Don DeLillos The Body Artist, Modern Fiction Studies
53.3 (2007): 59.
60
61
Lomax, Sounding the Event, 22.
62
63
59
Time and Again
91
the article highlights the workings of the body as a membrane that enacts a loop, not a
straight line, and that alters the outside to move toward the future.
Narrative loop
The post-performance narrative leads Lauren back to the time of grief, but it does not
suggest a simple return to the past; once the outside in her performance has been
explored, that exteriority is infused into the narrative, so that the landscape of grief
undergoes a significant change. The final chapter repeats the past scenes that described
Lauren just after Reys suicide, but it also weaves into itself the expressions that appeared
in her days with Tuttle. In this sense, the narrative itself constitutes a circle, but it is
rhythmically re-fused, in a way that always brings something new and unexpected into
the loop.64 Undermining Laurens assumption of narrative as a succession of the Now, the
decentered loop produces a forward-moving temporality. The conclusion of the novel,
Laurens acceptance of her corporeality, is unthinkable without this narrative dynamic.
Lauren is back in her house after the performance, keeping her old routines and
watching the image of Kotka. The narrative lures her back into grief, saying, Why give
him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?65 Thus
the narrative repeats Laurens initial reluctance to accept her loss, but at the same time, as
critics note, it refuses to specify which heRey or Tuttleit speaks of. This con-fusion
produces the mixture of two temporalities: the narrative moves Lauren into the linear
conception of time, which regards the past as forever lost (Why shouldnt the death
of a person you loved bring you into lurid ruin?),66 while at the same time making her
face the idea of the outside that imperceptibly subsists (Is the thing thats happening
so far outside experience that youre forced to make excuses for it, or give it the petty
credentials of some misperception?).67 Therefore, when she walks down the hall into
his time,68 its equivocal nature signals the confluence of the two modes of time.
The narrative affirms this mutation of temporality when it repeats one of Tuttles
enigmatic phrases, Being here has come to me,69 as a crucial expression of Laurens
self. In this statement, I am here no longer assumes its primacy; instead an anonymous
event of being here precedes her subjective I. The narrative voice then unfolds the
same idea in a different tenseShed return to the house and mount the stairs . . . and
walk along the hall on the second floor, in chanted motion, fitting herself to a body in the
process of becoming hers.70 This passage resonates with an earlier scene that takes place
after Reys death, when she moves in the house hearing the sound a person makes.71

66

67

68

69

70

71

64
65

Ibid.
Ibid., 124.
Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 35.
92
Outside, America
Both refer to her indoor movement, but the distinction between a person and a
body points to a profound difference in the two moments. Whereas a person works
as the splitting of Laurens self in the time of mourning, a body effectuates a doubling
of the self, expressing the impersonal dimension as an integral part of her bodyas
the tense of the sentence suggests, a body is a future event that serves to expand her
corporeality. Moreover, the chanted motion echoes Tuttles nonsubjective speech that
enchanted her, so that when the narrative mentions that His time was here,72 this
merged expression enfolds the outside in the reality of grief. By these expressions, the
narrative intervenes in the grieving present and opens it to the outside, which now
forms a continuum with Laurens physical present.
Nevertheless, Lauren has to overcome her hope that the whole past is preserved in
the present in its corporealityThey are two real bodies in a room. This is how she
feels them73which is emphasized by the shift of the narrative to the present tense.
Confronting the empty bed, she realizes the past does not subsist as a corporeal entity:
Shed known it was empty all along but was only catching up.74 The past is the incorporeal
event that her body in the present can only express in mutated form, as is evident in Body
Time. Although the narrative subsequently refers to who she was, this phrase no longer
functions to ensure Laurens identity after her exploration of the outside:
She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She threw the
window open. She didnt know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted to feel
the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.75
This conclusion recalls one of the first passages of the narrative, You know more
surely who you are on a strong bright day,76 but with a crucial difference. In contrast
to the self-awareness of identity at the beginning of the narrative, it is time in her body
that defines her in the endTime becomes a subject because it is the folding of the
outside.77 Though she appears as the subject of every sentence in the concluding
paragraph, the narrative has already constituted her bodily existence as an interface,
always open to the process of difference, which Lauren reaffirms by opening the room
to the outside. It is a gesture that declares her detachment from the linear temporality.
The style of The Body Artist practices a mutational temporality. The narrative loop
revisits the past in order to renew it, and to extract from it a future-oriented movement
that overcomes Laurens grief. The past is doubled by the repetition, but this dynamic
is not so much an expansion of identity as a break from it. Unlike Smiths argument
that the novel succumbs to the narrative temporal requirements of the novel form,78

74

75

76

77

78

72
73
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 124.
Ibid., 126.
Ibid., 126.
Ibid., 9.
Rachel Smith, Grief Time: The Crisis of Narrative in Don DeLillos The Body Artist, Polygraph 18
(2006): 102.
Time and Again
93
the narrative constitutes the time in which everything recommences in a new mode.
Thus the novel reaches an idea of beginning in its end; it is located at the point where
the looping narrative intersects with the line of the past and produces a movement of
mutationthe flow of time in the body makes the world happen again, irreversibly.
Thus The Body Artist enacts the unhistorical temporality, itself an interface between
the investigation of postwar American history in DeLillos preceding novel, Underworld,
and a later exploration of time in the desert in Point Omega. While history presupposes
a linear mode of timewhat is there to history but contexts falling progressively into
order?79the time of the body-membrane in The Body Artist is irreducible to such
temporality. The narrative of beginning constitutes a break from history: the narrative,
once started, activates a temporality that produces the new.
79
WWDD (What Would Disney Do)?: Cinematic

Field and Narrative Act in Richard Powerss
Prisoners Dilemma
The narrative design of Richard Powerss second novel, Prisoners Dilemma, set in a
small American town in the Cold War era, centers on the dilemma in game theory.
As the 1988 novel unfolds, it touches on various aspects of the twentieth-century
American social landscapethe 1939 World Fair, World War II, Walt Disney and
his films, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the Cold War society. The key
concept connecting all those elements is the idea of cinematic world, as is seen in
Wright. Powerss novel, throughout its several narrative layers, describes the nation as a
film, in which American citizens can exist only as actors who perform predetermined
roles in the shared condition of mutual distrust: hence the dilemma. There is no
outside room or position that escapes this collective framework; everyone is caught
inside this national cinema. The photography-history relationship explored in Powerss
first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, now expands to a cinema-history
connection.
The 1988 novel starts as a typical American family drama. Somewhere, the narrator
begins in an idyllic tone, my father is teaching us the names of the constellations.1 In
1978, the Hobson familythe father, the mother, and four grown-up children, the
18-year-old son being the youngestcome together on Thanksgiving holiday in De
Kalb, Illinois. Then the father, Eddie Hobson Sr., faints, and has to be helped to bed.
The family problem demands a solution; according to the clich of American culture,
the restoration of the ideal familial order always awaits in the end: the family members
cooperate and overcome the crisis, and they all live happily ever after. Yet, Powerss
novel defects from this expected plot, for the fathers illness reveals a deeper problem:
the family, as well as the entire American society, is caught in the dilemma, so that
every member is a prisoner in the cinematic field. Then, the question arises, where is
the possibility of freedom or the outside?
Richard Powers, Prisoners Dilemma (New York: Harper, 1988).
96
Outside, America
According to the game theory of Prisoners Dilemma, there are two strategies
available to both players: cooperation or defection. Four possible combinations of
strategies are available, but all presuppose the overriding importance of the individual
self-interest; in Robert Axelrods words, it is an investigation of individuals who
pursue their own self-interest.2 Simply put, the options given do not solve the paradox
itself: they are strategies only available within the framework of the dilemma. The
prisoner-player is still caught within the wallsthat the individuals remain fixed
in their locations3 remains an unquestionable condition. Individual freedom in the
cinematic field thus seems like a paradoxas one of the favorite sayings repeated by
the Hobsons goes: Tell me how free I am.4
This is where the idea of the narrative act enters the picture: in Powerss novel, the
act questions and overcomes the fundamental presupposition in the dilemma, the self/
other distinction. Several characters appear as narrators in the novel, and each act
of renarrating the past cancels the boundaries of the individual; instead the narrator
triggers the mutation of self. In his story of Hobstown, the father fictively recomposes
the portrait of Walt Disney and blends his own past in the story, thereby calling the
very condition of his self in the cinematic world into question; then, the children
recount their memory of the father, as well as their past, in their effort to mobilize their
own subjectivity. For Eddie Sr. and the Hobson children, the narrative is a break or
defection from the present of their predetermined roles. In the vocabulary of game
theory, the idea of narrative act in Powers is a strategy of cooperative defection; through
narrating, they defect from their given locations in the postwar cinematic world,
and cooperate to form a new collectivity, thereby undermining the framework of the
prisoners dilemma.
The cinema-clich world of the Hobsons

Throughout its several narrative layers, the novel explores the cinematic nature of
the setting in which the family drama unfolds. It likens the familys hometown to a
film-set: when Lily, one of the two daughters, strolls into the town, De Kalb looks
more movie-proppish than ever to her eyes.5 The stage of their lives, the house
identical to dozens of others, is a reality studio. However, this analogy to cinema does
not stop at the level of the small town. In the Hobstown story narrated by the father,
the whole nation is conceived as a gigantic movie-set; each individual is situated in this
cinematic field.
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2006), 6. The ideas
of cooperation or defection in discussions of the dilemma revolve around the question of how the
players can secure their maximum benefit in the given condition, leaving the boundaries of the
individual or the self/other distinction unquestioned. Powerss novel, on the other hand, tries to
undermine the very basis of the dilemma.
3
Ibid., 159.
4
Powers, Prisoners Dilemma, 153, 251, 312, 348.
5
Ibid., 52.
2
WWDD (What Would Disney Do)?
97
The novel also explores the predetermined nature of the characters. The main
character in this set, Eddie Sr., is a man of clich, who speaks to the family only in
favorite sayings.6 To the childrens eyes, Pop is a cynic who has abandoned his hope in
the world and instead utters paradoxical maxims. We sometimes need coaxing to act
on our own,7 Suppose the world were already lost. Suppose it is, because it is8those
clichs, all of which cancel out voluntary individual action, abound in the childrens
words as well. Such overused maxims9 constitute their subjectivity devoid of the
capacity to act; it is the reign of clichs internally as well as externally10 in Gilles
Deleuzes words.
Hence the familys reaction to the fathers illness: the fathers fit has a long history,
and has already become another clich or old refrain11 in the family. The children,
having witnessed the fathers illness from their childhood, just wait and see, which
is a typical attitude handed down in the family: the hope that everything would still
come clean if you only sit still, understate everything, and make yourself as small a
target as possible.12 Discussing the fathers reluctance to see a doctor, Artie, the elder
son, and Lily also repeat the paternal gesture of resignation. They unknowingly situate
themselves in the familiar/familial plot. This, Joseph Dewey argues, . . . is the Hobson
claneach casketed like Snow White, each self-imprisoned, each a solo nation.13
The story of Hobstown, which the father has dictated into a tape recorder since the
1950s, is significant in this regard, for it reveals the ontological condition of characters
in a cinematic world. Unable to know the exact details of the fathers narrative, the
children regard Hobstown as another clich, a utopian project. Thus the reality-fantasy
distinction is establishedHer father had lost hold on Here14which only highlights
his despair over reality. It is in the fictitious place, the children assume, that Pop can
achieve a sense of meaning. Nevertheless, juxtaposed with the life of the Hobsons, the
fathers story gradually questions the stage of their lives itself.
Eddie Hobsons narrative begins in 1939, when 13-year-old Bud Middleton is
overwhelmed by the spectacle of the World Fair in New York. The narrator further
reveals that Bud is not exactly a visitor from outside but a role produced by the Fair
itself. This fictitious American boy completely belongs to the Westinghouse sethis
situation is no different from a character in a film. The fathers description of Bud
raises an ontological question; the boy does not exist outside the fair, being unable to
question his world: Who built this place? What put us here? And how to get out again?
Bud has no answer, being just thirteen and himself a creation of that same fair. He has

8

9

10

6
7

14

11
12
13
Ibid., 153.
Ibid.
Ibid., 154.
Ibid., 153.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 209.
Powers, Prisoners Dilemma, 19.
Ibid., 19.
John Dewey, Understanding Richard Powers (Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2002), 41.
98
Outside, America
just the degree of insight the fair gives him and no more.15 A cinematic character, Bud is
forever bound to play his part in the Fair. In the fathers recorded story, this condition
also applies to another boy of 13 who visits the 1939 Fair, the father himself in New
Jersey. This time, Eddie the boy is a visitor from outside, but the same principle applies
to him: he is also only as insightful as the world that made him.16 The Fair defines
Eddies perspective on the outer world, so that he is another pure product of this years
Worlds Fair.17 In Hobstown, the spectacle-reality distinction is blurred.
When the narrative of Hobstown introduces another significant character, Walt
Disney, it becomes clear that the escapist spectacle is in fact closely connected to war;
in Paul Virilios words, War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its
very purpose is to produce that spectacle.18 Once the United States is involved in World
War II, the initial distance between war and cinema vanishes: movies are now part of
the battle already called the Home Front.19 Disney and his Burbank studios participate
in the sweeping tide of war; Eddie Sr. the narrator describes Disneys conversation
with Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, in which the filmmaker promises to turn
his studio into one of the most powerful weapons for winning the home front.20 A series
of propaganda films follow: In 1943, as Thomas Doherty points out, 94 percent of
Disneys Work was war-related.21
Eddie Sr. further elaborates on the war-cinema continuum: though his films win
acclaim, Disney worries cartoons alone may not be enough to win the war, and plans
a tour de force that shows just where they are in Time, just how urgent, critical, real,
and present the present is, just how central each of them is to the large picture.22 In
other words, the film-image would make spectators recognize their roles in the times
of war: the military-industrial cinema took up this heap of signs and information to
compound not only the unity of the nation but the personality profile of each new
citizen.23 Therefore, the reality-image opposition is totally untenable: Disney films are
part of the enterprise that turns the whole wartime society into a cinematic space.
The paternal narrative touches on the value of the individual in this space of clich:
before the massive social dynamic, a single person stands totally powerless, as in the
Foucauldian view of the subjectthis individual is . . . a fabrication by an anonymous
technology that turns individuality into an instrument of domination and subjection.24
Hence the repeated question: How much can one vote count?25 Fathers apparent

17

18

15
16

21

19
20

24

25

22
23
Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 467.
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso,
1989), 5.
Ibid., 133.
Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York:
Columbia UP, 1999), 68.
Michael Clifford, Political Genealogy after Foucault: Savage Identities (London: Routledge, 2001), 6.
99
cynical attitude toward this issue is demonstrated in the Voting Fallacy he introduces
to the children: No matter which candidate I like, the fallacy goes, my vote itself will
not alter the outcome. . . . So why should I swelter for a virtuous but impotent ideal?26
Inaction becomes his personality in his childrens eyes. Faith in the importance of the
individual and active engagement are simply negated.
Why we fight versus You Are the War

The morning after the fathers breakdown, while the rest of the family discusses and
ponders what to do, Eddie Sr. suddenly refers to The Prisoners Dilemma, the paradox
of game theory, in the following terms: two men are summoned to Senetor McCarthy
who tells them, Fellas, we know that you are both Reds. . . . Lets make a deal. If either
of you comes forward with the dope on the other, the man who talks will go free and
the other will fry. If neither of you spills the goods on the other, youll still suffer public
humiliation at the very least.27 For each, the way to freedom lies in betraying the other
man; on the other hand, should both choose to defect, they would suffer a penalty
heavier than the one shared silence would bring them. What to do, then? Defect or
cooperate?this is the question the father asks the family.
The other Hobsons offer their own solutions to the fathers question. The two men
simply have to trust each other, his wife insists, not be intimidated, and realize that
theyre in the same boat.28 Cooperation is her answer, which Lily challenges, saying,
But they cant be sure the other can be trusted.29 Later, when Eddie Jr. proposes the
idea of Tit for Tat, the most successful strategy, which cooperates on the first move
and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move,30 the game theory
touches on the very question of war. To the younger son the father points out the
possibility of perpetual revenge: they defect, so we defect, which triggers further
defection. . . Still another problem with TIT FOR TAT is that it is subject to echo
effects.31 The story of Hobstown then explores the dismal aspect of game theory in
World War IIthe most effective strategy in the theory led to concentration camps.
The theory and its effective strategy are actually grounded in wartime reality. The story
of Hobstown recaptures this dynamics, and then tries to mutate it.
As the war against Japan begins, the fathers narrative continues, a massive
reorganization of American society occursWar now spread not just territorially but

28

29

30

31

26
27
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 6970.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 72.
Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 20.
William Poundsrtone, Prisoners Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and The Puzzle of the
Bomb (New York: Anchor, 1992), 243.
100
Outside, America
to the whole of reality.32 In reacting to the defection of the Japanese force, the whole
society is charged with enthusiasm for the war:
Two months after the sneak attack, it seems as if we were itching for it, daring
the enemy to do it. Now we set out on a global enterprise, ebullient, charged
with energy. . . . The war is about righting wrong with unprecedented industrial
production. Tit for Tat.33
The logic of game theory pervades this wartime society: the construction of the
cinematic world of war proceeds on the principle of Tit for Tat. Everyone plays his or
her part, however small, in the gigantic film called World War II, in which Hollywood
is just another cog. The interment of the AJAs or the Americans of Japanese Ancestry
belongs to this enterprise: as the narrator points out, The mass imprisonment is one
small and mostly overlooked step in the largest and finest mobilization the world has
ever seen.34 The war reshapes the visible world of the nation by driving their internal
enemy into the invisibility of inland camps. The strategy of defection is adopted
inside American society.
Here the Hobstown story takes an unexpected turn. As the fathers story progresses,
the story of Disney deviates from the historical facts: the filmmaker is of Japanese
descent, and when he finds his Japanese staff gone, the animator realizes his world is
involved in the domestic practice of Tit for Tat. Yet he plans to act upon this situation
without resorting to the same strategy. Disney as narrated by Eddie resists the plot of
Tit for Tat, trying to defect from the dynamics of war.
The filmmaker visits the secretary of war and proposes his idea for the feature-length,
revolutionary motion picture You Are the War.35 In his negotiation with the secretary,
the fabricated Disney uses the political nature of his identity as an AJA: He informs
Stimson that if he cant get the ten thousand bodies out, he will publicly demand to be
arrested.36 As a result, he is able to free 10,000 Japanese Americans from the camp as
the staff of his tour de force. The set called World World is secretly built inland, where
the production begins; the wartime film combines the animation character Mickey
with a real central actor to be named. The introductory version of You Are the War
presents Fairy Dust, which has the power to bleed goodwill across their condensed
countrys borders,37 so that the film, confronting the logic of war, deviates from its
expected role as propaganda. The film resists the cooperation/defection alternative by
combining both options: Disney and his staff cooperate to defect from the war.
When the boy Eddie Hobson is singled out to star in You Are the War, the animator
explains his task to the boy: to set free as many as possible, to coax them to act on their

34

35

36

37

32
33

Ibid., 132.
Ibid., 177.
Ibid., 180.
Ibid., 214.
101
own.38 Here one of the cynical fathers favorite paradoxes, Sometimes we need to
be coaxed to act on our own, changes its function: no longer a nihilistic impasse, it
becomes a principle of Disneys resistance to the war. From propaganda to You Are the
War Disney now aims to mutate the wartime cinema clich.
In World War II, it is the internal other who is forced to become prisoner, but
Disney in the Hobstown story foresees an expansion of this logic in the postwar era.
The principle of imprisonment will penetrate every aspect of the world, as Disney
explains to the boy.
We have reached the point where we imprison ourselves by the hundred thousand,
commonly agreed to be in the best collective interest. . . . The world is now so
treacherous and immense that the private citizen in the postwar world will lock
himself up rather than face the prospect of prison.39
Self-imprisonmenteveryone locks him/herself inside the film of fearwould

be the basis of individual freedom in the postwar era. As in Giorgio Agambens
Foucault-inspired argument, Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the
fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.40 The fathers story thus touches on
the very foundation of the Hobsons lives.
The warTo be continued

In De Kalb, to everyones surprise, Eddie Sr. agrees to go to the hospital, pointing the
family crisis toward what seems a desired ending. Yet, intertwined with the story of
Hobstown, another problem reveals itself for the Hobsons: their lives are based on the
continued wartime logic of war, which subsists as the generalized feeling of fear. As
Brian Massumi maintains in his discussion of the founding role of fear in contemporary
American society, What society looks toward is no longer a return to the promised
land but a general disaster that is already upon us, woven into the fabric of day-to-day
life.41 Every life participates in this fear and mutual distrust, which breeds and nurtures
the postwar obsession with security, as is evident in Lilys letter to her neighbor, Mrs.
Swallow. Lily describes her neighbors fear-driven routinechecking and rechecking
the door is lockedand concludes, You could not live without this routine. It orders
your remaining days, lends them a motive they would be pointless without.42 Without
Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 265.
40
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998), 181.
41
Brian Massumi, Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear, in The Politics of Everyday
Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 11.
42
38
39
102
Outside, America
any concrete basis, the fear grows and maintains itself; the interlude of peace only
doubles fear.
As long as society is mobilized in the system of war, the fathers story goes on, the
period of actual warfare is but a part of it; it hits Disney that the war is the first round
of a permanent Peoples War.43 Everyday life is the site where the war is fought. As Eric
Alliez and Antonio Negri claim, everything happens as if peace and war were so tightly
enmeshed that they no longer form anything but the two faces of a single membrane.44
World War II passes into the Cold War, and the social mobilization continues. The
secretary of war, Stimson, demands that Disneys film be repeatable in future wars:
Film it for the future, so that a national switch in enemies will make no difference. . . .
Dont be too concerned with this little scrap were having with the Germans. Or even the
Japanese, for that matter. They are only todays enemies. This too will pass.45
The cinema of war maintains itself, changing its foil: Japan will be replaced by the
communist forces, ad infinitum. Stimson himself realizes its lasting natureWe have
given birth to the world of the permanent threat46putting the whole nation in the
prisoners dilemma, endlessly engendering the distrust of the other and obsession
with national security, which is not separable from budding hatred.47 The culture of
security is saturated with Tit for Tat.
In You Are the War, the story within the fathers story, Eddie as an innocent American
boy foresees this situation, in which people surrender all event, all involvement in
the common project of being alive.48 The only principle of community is self-interest,
underwritten by constant fear of the other. In such a society, the individual only exists
in self-imprisonment: the traditionally assumed space of freedom has evaporated.
Disneys resistance thus necessarily raises the question of freedom. Every individual is
cast in the Big Picture of warwhere, then, is the exit?
One of the film staff, Ralph Sato, questions Disneys project, insisting another exit
from the camp: You said it was either the concentration camps or this, he tells his boss.
But theres a third place. Another way out.49 Sato chooses to join the war, to play a
part in the national film of destruction: Enlistment: the draft boards offer of freedom.50
One escapes the camp, only to be cast in the gigantic cinema of war. Doherty notices
that the formation of Japanese-American combat units in 1943 and their sterling
performance under fire in Italy and Germany the next year were chronicled with
Ibid., 217.
Eric Alliez and Antonio Negri, Peace and War, trans. Alberto Toscano, Theory, Culture & Society
20.2 (2003): 110.
45
46
Ibid., 179.
47
Ibid., 218.
48
Ibid., 310.
49
Ibid., 271.
50
Ibid., 273.
43
44
103
appreciation and wonderment in press and newsreel reports.51 They become actors in
the national cinema, failing to reach the outside of the cinematic world.
Two of the Hobsons, Artie and Rachel, also encounter the question of resistance
and freedom. Their complaints, when they are caught and fined by a policeman for
exceeding the speed limit, reflect the American tradition of individual resistance;
Artie throws the ticket away, saying, thats just civil disobedience act number one.52
He begins to list his future acts of resistance, including the refusal of TV ads and
Muzak, the latter of which gains Rachels agreement. As they admit to themselves, it
is not an act of resistance but complaint, another clich of modern life: Our only
common culture is complaint. Antisocial small talk. Complaint is the last tool society
leaves us for feeling we belong.53 The attitude of inaction runs through them, which
they attribute to the cynical father: the children repeat the fathers [d]iscontent as
an art form.54 The children remain caught in a cinema based on the automation
of the state (clichs of history and action),55 still playing the role of harmlessly
frustrated citizens.
The defecting father: Narrative repetition

At this point, suddenly, the father disappears from the Chicago hospital, thereby
escaping from his expected roleThere was more to him than anybody suspected.56
This familiar clich reveals an unforeseen aspect in the fathers character. The fathers
defection, far from inducing the act of Tit for Tat of the remaining family, leads to
the crucial transformation of the Hobsons. The children discover the fathers narrative
project, which triggers their own act of narrating the memory of Eddie Sr.the
children cooperate with the fathers project of defecting from the dilemma, repeating
the paternal gesture. In the process, all the clichs in the family change their functions:
they no longer constitute cynical self in the cinematic field, but are now employed in
the production of a new subjectivity. The defection from the clich-cinema is attempted
by the narrative act that works on the given contours of the family and the individual.
On the road, Eddie Sr. phones the family from near St. Louis, then from Amarillo,
Texas. The children at home try to figure out his destination.57 To them, the question
Doherty, Projections of War, 1467.
Ibid., 169.
Ibid., 171.
Gregg Lambert, Cinema and the Outside, in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of
Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), 270.
56
57
This route follows the lyrics of Route 66, in which the road stretches from Chicago to Los Angeles.
In contrast to the optimistic appraisal of the westward movement, the fathers travels come to a halt
in New Mexico, at the test site of the first atomic bomb. The reversal of road narrative is at work
here too.

53

54

55

51
52
104
Outside, America
is how to restore the familiar/familial plottheir initial goal is to make the father
cooperate with the clich: Pop was on the loose; what could we do to reverse the
situation?58 Yet, without an appropriate plan, they can only wait, until the youngest
Hobson, Eddie Jr., decides to find the father. Inspired by the father, the son rents a car
and goes on the road. The former clich, We sometimes need coaxing to act on our
own,59 changes its function, now effecting an action.
Waiting at home, Artie discovers the tape recording of Hobstown and notices
the event in the fathers life that decisively transformed the eager youth into a cynic.
Transferred to an inland desert at the end of the war, the father had witnessed the
crucial event of modern history, the explosion of the first atomic bomb: Too fast, too
sharply, too bright, it grows into a light more luminous than noon. The desert blooms.60
His long illness was caused by the exposure to this first glimpse of the ultimate weapon
of mass destructionDads sickness, from day one, came from his being the last
man in the Northern Hemisphere who refused to think of the past as over.61 The past
continues in the present: the fathers suffering body is a testimony to this simple fact. It
is now made clear that their fathers narrative has persistently explored the past-present
relation through which his existence has been conditioned. The history of war and fear
is not so much a detached legacy as the ground of the presentWe are the presents
war62of which the children have been unaware.
The internment of Japanese-Americans is a historical fact, Artie learns, whereas
Disneys involvement is a figment. The son is faced with the transformative nature of the
story; in his narrative of Hobstown, Disney is transformed into a figure of resistance;
moreover, by involving his own past in the story, Eddie Sr. tries to detach himself from
the ready-made cinematic world of war. As Gregg Lambert argues, the past itself
cannot be determined outside this possibility of being scrambled and entering new
combinations with the present.63 Much more than a mere escape, it is an exercise of
the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform himself, and to
attain to a certain mode of being.64 Narrative is the production of the transformative
subjectivity by which the father mobilizes himself to resist the simple continuity of the
present condition.
Listening to the fathers tape, the children realize the true problem: their selves are
the silent battlefield of the war. Since the prisoners dilemma presupposes a walled
subjectivity formed in a community of fear, the matrix can be broken by a different
practice of self: in Judith Butlers words, Critique is not merely of a given social
practice or a certain horizon of intelligibility . . . it also implies that I come into question

60

61

62

63

64

58
59

Ibid., 305.
Ibid., 225.
Ibid., 325.
Ibid., 245.
Lambert, Cinema and the Outside, 286.
Michel Foucault, The Ethic of the Concern of the Self As a Practice of Freedom, trans. P. Aranow
and D. McGrawth, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press,
1997), 282.
105
for myself.65 Eddie Sr. tries to trigger the transformation of the Hobson community
through his story: The man was fighting for his life: that much was obvious. And more
than his life.66 The fathers narrative blurs the boundaries of self and other, thereby
inducing a new form of community. Artie is struck by the fact that, The only way
out was to release the us-and-us that was trapped inside the you-versus-me,67 but
this is not a return to the ideal We in the past: a new collectivity has to be freshly
constructed out of the clich of the nuclear family.
When the fathers tape ends, and Artie rewinds it and starts to record his own
narrative: Somewhere, my father is teaching us the names of the constellations.68
Then the sisters take over, so that the plural voices are recorded on the tape: Around
they went, all in single file.69 Another clich now offers a glimpse of the communal
narrative act.70 It is important, therefore, that the fathers story is always renewable
through other voices. In Prisoners Dilemma, the lack of finality in the fathers story
functions as potential for a continually new narrative: there is more to any given story.
The Hobstown story, which the father kept renewing for two decades, is now taken
up by the children. The childrens narrative acts, the beginning of which corresponds
to the initial passage of the novel, thus envelop the story of Hobstown. They pick up
the fathers lone vote to start their own story, in which they constitute a space where a
single voice is connected to a new collectivity.
Thus the clichs in the family are redeployed so as to eventually engender the
childrens action. Accordingly, the family transforms itself: instead of reaffirming one
of the blamelessly median houses where they raised blameless median family,71 the fathers
narrative act triggers others interrogations of their own selves. In these overlapping
narratives, the principle is to mutate the familiar form of self: the patriotic Disney, the
cynical father, and the indifferent childrenall are called into question through the
narrative act. Several layers of narrative become indistinguishable, making the novel
the place where voices collectively transform themselves, without being subjugated to
the father as the Great Dictator or the writer himself.72 The we that narrative activates
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 23.
Ibid., 313.
Ibid., 344.
Ibid., 344.
This interaction of plural voices found in Prisoners Dilemma is close to the view of M. M. Bakhtin,
who argues that [e]very novel, taken as the totality of all the languages and consciousness of
language embodied in it, is a hybrid (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 366). More precisely,
Powerss novel expresses the process of hybridization, in which a given narrative always awaits
other voices to renew it; the novel exists in this temporal dimension.
71
72
This dynamic does not allow room for a transcendent narrator who stands beyond narrated events.
In the inserted section called Calamine, another narrator, supposedly Powers, appears to explain
the conception behind his narrative. The narrator is the middle son of a family in De Kalb, whose
father recently died, which clarifies his similarity and difference from the Hobsons: Therefore, the
subjectivity of Powers, a narrator who speaks of his father in such sections as Tit for Tat, is also
involved: the author is another voice that changes through the narrative act.

67

68

69

70

65
66
106
Outside, America
is a transformative timenamely the outsidewhere the individual voices of the

family members are opened to their mutations. Fabulation, as Massumi puts it, is
the attraction of deviant singularities into a new constellation, the crystallization of a
new collectivity.73
The concept of the individual, which lies at the basis of the dilemma, is thus
necessarily redefined. Rather than a bounded entity, the individual is opened to future
transformation; as the fathers single narrative induces the childrens questioning
of their own being, the importance of the individualhow much one individual
can countlies not in the humanist idea that the most promising solutions to our
problems can be found within,74 but in the capacity to mutate and be mutated by
others. Therefore, the individual is connected to the collective dimension through its
transformative potential. Singular and plural at the same time, the narrative act undoes
the presupposition of the bounded individual in the prisoners dilemma: the possibility
of another place, the other persons story,75 no longer an escapist fantasy, becomes a
practice of connecting the self with the new collectivity.76
The transformative force of the fabricating act also illuminates the conundrum
of freedom. In Prisoners Dilemma, freedom does not lie in the options available
to individuals, as in game theory, but in the act of subverting a given situation by
renarrating the past. It is not a right or property, as one of the oldest American clichs
holds; rather, freedom is the capacity for transformation: the freedom opened by
counter-memory is a freedom of permanent transformation, of always being able to
become other than what we are.77 The act of freedom in Prisoners Dilemma lies in the
transformative act that changes the composition of the individual. Narrative produces
the outside in which the clich-subjectivity is opened to its transmutability.
The news of Hiroshima breaks at the end of the Hobstown storyWorld War II is
about to end, and the Cold War is set to begin. You Are the War is left unfinished
Disneys project of influencing the whole nation is a failure after all. In the deserted
studio office, Eddie finds the filmmakers dictaphone. Lets start again, from scratch,
he begins his story. Let us make a small world, a miniature of a miniature, say an
even half-dozen, since we screw up everything larger.78 Eddie is still cooperating
with Disneys plan to defect from the war film, but on a smaller scale: the future
Hobson father envisions his family as a community where resistance to the war will
Massumi, Everywhere You Want to Be, 34.
Scott Hermanson, Just Behind the Billboard: The Instability of Prisoners Dilemma, in Intersections:
Essays on Richard Powers, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 2008), 62.
75
76
The blurring of the boundaries of individual voices in Prisoners Dilemma always activates communal
moments. However, this indeterminacy does not constitute a labyrinth where the sense of reality
is thoroughly negated; it causes the interaction of the transforming voices, in which they detach
from the domain of clichs. It is important, therefore, that the fathers story is always renewable
through other voices. In Prisoners Dilemma, the lack of definitive finality functions as potential for
a continually new narrative: there is more to any given story. The fathers story recorded on the tape
is an indicator of such a possibility.
77
78
73
74
107
be carried out. At the end of the tape, he describes a future family sceneIts one of
those unrepeatable days in mid-May, and all those who are still at home sit down to
dinner79which is repeated in the beginning of the final section of the novel, 1979,
in which the father-less Hobsons gather at home. By reenacting the paternal words,
his family appears as the embodiment of their fathers story. Yet, the transformative
narrative undertaken by the children has already begun, so that the repetition takes
up the movement of detachment from the reign of clich-subjectivity. Eddie Sr.,
supposedly already dead, abruptly appears at the family table; with his sudden return,
the clichs also return to the scene, but now their workings have been changed:
What? the specter demands. What am I? The trademark, sardonic, challenging
smile. It occurs to them all that there is more to any of them than any of them suspects.
But sometimes we need coaxing to act on our own accord. At last Artie masters the
apparition. Tell us how free we are, Pop, he says, through the side of his mouth. Tell
me how free I am.80
There is a potential for the transformation in any given subjectivity (there is more),
but the act that activates the potential is preceded by the other (we need coaxing to
act), and that act is itself a response to the preceding narrative acts (tell me how free
I am). Once indications of total resignation, now the clichs are deployed in a new
constellation. The clichs and the familial relations enter into a different community.
By cooperating with his narrative, the family defects from the cynical father and from
the clichs of the cinematic world.
While Powerss novels take up various subjectshistory, genes, computer science,
and the human brainthe idea of mutation or variation always accompanies his work.
His third novel, Gold Bug Variations, is an exploration of the idea of mutation, already
seen in the Hobson children who are variations on a theme.81 In Prisoners Dilemma,
every characterDisney, the father, and the Hobson childrentransforms his/her self
in the overlapping narratives. The novel is designed as an interactive space-time where
the narrative acts echo and involve each other in the processes of mutation in their
effort to break the prisoners dilemma.
The only satisfying solution to the prisoners dilemma is to avoid prisoners
dilemmas, Poundstone concludes,82 but that is not a simple task for those who find
themselves already in the dilemma: the prisoners must invent the outside in which
their selves can be reshaped. The choices given are insufficient in this regard; referring
to the narrative strategy of the novel, James Hurt argues that we must act cooperatively
to survive,83 but this view is still caught in a paradox: cooperation for survival does

82

Ibid., 333.
Ibid., 348.
Ibid., 29.
William Poundstone, Prisoners Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and The Puzzle of the
Bomb (New York: Anchor, 1992), 278.
83
James Hurt, Narrative Powers: Richard Powers as Storyteller, Review of Contemporary Fiction 18.3
(1998): 34.
79
80
81
108
Outside, America
not question the fundamental presupposition of the self/other division posited by the
dilemma. On the contrary, the act of narration, in its attempt to mutate the workings
of the clichs, forms an unexpected continuum of variation inside the paradox. The
novel turns the walls surrounding the prisoners into membranes, through which voices
affect each other in the process of mutation. As the dilemmas basic assumptionsthe
bounded individual and his/her self-interestare transfigured by the act of narration,
the values of the individual and his/her freedom are formulated anew. The self and
community are questioned and reorganized by the narrative act.
Thus the novel ultimately questions the idea of America. In Powerss novel, the
idea of the narrative act invents a new terrain inside the confines of the cinematic
world. We move, we uproot. We rebuild slowly in a strange place. We tear ourselves up
and move again, for reasons only he understands. We strand ourselves, weave between
Atlantic and Pacific, a moving target,84 one of the Hobson children says. This statement,
seemingly another repetition of the American historical clich of settlement and
expansion, in fact functions as the transformative version of the national experience,
by which the Hobsons cooperate in their defection from a dilemma-enclosed cinematic
world. Narrative is a movement, an uprooting from the role-subjectivity assigned in
the gigantic cinemathe prisoners escape from the cell, because, to quote the father,
there is always more to any of them than any of them suspect.
84
Writing from a Different Now:

Question of Ahistorical Time in
Contemporary Los Angeles Fiction
In 2000, in his study of the architectural design and urban development in Los
Angeles, William Alexander McClung wrote that L.A. is better understood as existing
in a perpetual present, having interrupted the culturally induced sense of linear
progression in time and appropriated the past to present uses.1 Four years later, the Los
Angeles-based essayist D. J. Waldie used the very same expression to define the city:
Perhaps, Los Angeles is better understood as existing in a perpetual present where we
are always tourists.2 This coincidence between the two authors points to the peculiar
experience of time the city offers, namely the overwhelming presence of the now.
This insight into L.A. Time is not confined to McClung and Waldie. In fact,
many contemporary critics and writers agree on the ahistorical character of the citys
temporality, in which the past holds no significance. Joan Didion notes that the future
always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.3 In a different
vein, Norman M. Kleins investigation of the social imaginary in Los Angeles leads him
to maintain that the past is not the issue at all; it serves merely as a rosy container
for the anxiety of the present.4 Steve Ericksons 1996 novel, Amnesiascope, also refers
to a similar characteristic of the city: if there was ever a city where history counts for
nothing its Los Angeles.5 The common idea running through these commentaries is
that the idealized present has always defined the city as a utopia, producing the past
that obeys the current interest; in McClungs words, the past thus is created by an
architecture and landscaping of the present that pretends to revive what never (in
California) existed.6 As a result, the city has become an ahistorical utopia, free from
the burden of the past.
William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythology of Los Angeles (Berkeley: U of
California P, 2000), 110.
2
D. J. Waldie, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City, 2004), 16.
3
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: FSG, 1968), 4.
4
Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso,
1997), 11.
5
Steve Erickson, Amnesiascope (London: Quartet, 1996), 41.
6
McCung, Landscapes of Desire, 99.
1
110
Outside, America
Fiction from Los Angeles is inseparable from this temporal dynamics. In fact,
L.A. Time has always been a powerful framework in the tradition of LA literature:
the critical view on the prevailing sense of time is found in its every aspect, which
is practiced in the narrative design of many texts. In other words, fiction from the
city constitutes a dystopian place where the reign of the present is countered or even
denied. On the other hand, a group of contemporary LA writersSesshu Foster, Kate
Braverman, and Steve Ericksonshow a different attitude toward the ahistorical time
of the city. Their texts affirm the existence of the now to seek its transmutability, thus
exploring the outside of LA Time.
LA literature: Against the present

LA literature has formed itself in reaction to the prevailing temporality of the perpetual
present in such a way that negates the idealistic image of the city. This literary attitude
derives from the fact that many L.A. writers are actually not native to the place: as
David Ulin points out, L.A.s literature has been one of exile, the work of expatriates
who arrived grudgingly, lamenting lost histories, lost landscapes, dreaming of the past.7
Shared by those writers is a recurring notion that the city is located at the geographical
limit of American expansion, so that the dream of new possibilities is blocked at the
edge. In David Fines words, Where the continent runs out, the dream runs out with
it.8 LA fiction has developed mainly as resistance to LA Time, which permeates its
four major genresthe fiction of immigration, noir, the Hollywood novel, and disaster
fiction.
The crucial significance of the past, both in ethnic fiction and in LA noir, is evident
in many narratives. In the city where the past is given little value, novels with an
immigrant theme claim that histories of peoples do exist, thereby establishing the
historical sense of time that defies the force of forgetting. A similar idea is found in
LA noir, from Raymond Chandler to Walter Mosley. The detective novel revolves
around the criminal who enjoys a fresh start due to his having attempted to conceal
a murder or conspiracy of some kind. The detection process, excavating the past, ...
recovering memory and past time,9 undermines and criticizes the current state of
things. Consequently, the existence of the past in these genres works as an objection to
the reign of the present.
This attitude is clearly articulated in Nina Revoyrs Southland, published in 2003.
The novel tells the story of Jackie Ishida, whose Japanese-American grandfather has
recently died and left part of his legacy to a black boy, who had been killed during the
Watts Riot in 1965. Jackies personal investigation unearths the past of her familythe
hardships Japanese immigrants have faced in Californiaand the fact that the black
David L. Ulin, Introduction, in Another City: Writing from Los Angeles, ed. David Ulin (San
Francisco: City Lights, 2001), xiv.
8
David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Reno: U of Nevada P, 2000), 82.
9
Ibid., 1718.
7
Writing from a Different Now
111
boy was murdered by a corrupt LAPD officer. Thus the history of immigrants and the
elements of crime fiction are combined in the narrative. In addition, with the episodes
of the past and Jackies investigation in 1994 constantly alternating with each other,
the narrative structure of Southland aims to establish a sense of continuity between
past and present. As one of the characters claims, the past never stayed in the past.10
Revoyrs novel, beginning with the statement that history is useless in Los Angeles,11
finally arrives at the protagonists realization of the crucial significance of the past: the
memories made her feel connected to something again, and it was more a reclamation
than a loss.12
A different method is found in the Hollywood novel. Here, the literary effort
reveals the illusory nature of the everlasting now of entertainment. An apt example
comes from Bruce Bauman, whose short story, Day Time, describes a film producer
walking out of his job. The protagonist defines Hollywood as the shiny, ever-altering
face of America, which refuses to accept linear time. It refuses aging and death13
the motif of the perpetual present reappears. This experience of time produces the
fantasy of controlling time, but, as he continues, it is a lie as movies are a lie.14 The
story, opening with the protagonists remark that This is how it ended,15 reverses
and defies the beginning-end sequence; consequently, it characterizes the present as
nothing more than a dead end. The narrative negates the promises of Hollywood,
namely the denial of old age and mortality, the suspension of time and history,
and a decidedly un-Tithonusian celebration of an ever-present now of sensuous
pleasure.16
The most notable genre, disaster fiction, is an extreme reaction to the citys present.
As Didion points out, ever since Nathanael Wests The Day of the Locust, the city, as
depicted in fiction, has been accompanied by a sense of doom. The city burning,
Didion writes, is Los Angeless deepest image of itself. . . . Los Angeles weather is the
weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.17 This perception has been widely shared in
literary and cinematic imagination: as of 1996, Mike Daviss research shows that the
destruction of Los Angeles has been a center theme or image in at least 138 novels and
films since 1909.18 Whether they are attacks by foreign forces or natural catastrophes
like earthquakes, these disasters function as violent disruptions of the status quo. The
Nina Revoyr, Southland (New York: Akashic, 2003), 265.
Ibid., 12.
12
Ibid., 337. A similar narrative design is found in another contemporary writer, Aimee Phan, whose
collection of stories, We Should Never Meet, describes Vietnamese orphans adopted by American
families in Los Angeles. As in Southland, stories describing the characters orphanhood in Vietnam
are constantly inserted into those that depict their teenage days in Little Saigon. With this narrative
architecture, the characters present lives always refer back to the history that defines their identity;
as one of the characters realizes, Whoever raised you, wherever, youre Vietnamese (Aimee Phan,
We Should Never Meet, 40).
13
Bruce Bauman,Day Time, in Another City: Writing from Los Angeles, ed. David Ulin (San
Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 206.
14
Ibid., 208.
15
Ibid., 203.
16
Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, 166.
17
Didion, Slouching toward Bethlehem, 2201.
18
Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage, 1998), 276.
10
11
112
Outside, America
destruction of the continuity of the present is another form of fantasy produced by the
rule of the now in Los Angeles.
LA literature as resistance to LA Timein contrast to the citys popular image of
itself as an ahistorical utopiahas often described the city as a dystopia, where the
past haunts the current landscapes and the violent disruption of the unreal present is
always imminent. Therefore, the promise of a fresh start and the stability of identity
are undermined: as McClung puts it, LA writers have found in LA a convenient
mechanism for producing the alienated citizen of modern literature.19 Those literary
texts refute LA Time through their motifs and narrative architecture.
On the other hand, contemporary fiction from the city tries to overcome the
confines of this tradition. Waldie is unequivocal in this regard: The former literature
of Los Angeles is nearly finishedthe literature of Anglo unease with race in our
ruined paradise.20 Though he goes on to say that literature to come isnt here yet,21
a close look at the LA fiction of the twenty-first century reveals its new attempts.
Defying the literary tradition, three Los Angeles-native contemporary writers, Foster,
Braverman, and Erickson, treat the ahistorical sense of time as a springboard for their
writing, not as something to be negated. Each writer borrows from the major genres
of LA literatureFoster takes up immigration and noir motifs, Braverman rewrites
the Hollywood novel, and elements of disaster fiction are evident in Ericksononly to
transform the temporal notion in those genres and explore the outside of LA Time.
An unusable past: Sesshu Fosters Atomik Aztex

Sesshu Fosters 2005 novel, Atomik Aztex, revolves around the condition of the
everlasting present. The Japanese-American writer offers a cynical reworking
of immigrant fiction, with the parallel universes motif. The narrative alternates
between realistic descriptions of an immigrant worker, Zenzon, in contemporary
East Los Angeles, and the fabricated past of an Aztek socialist nation, where
Zenzontli, the immigrants double, lives. This narrative architecture, juxtaposing Los
Angeles and Technotitlan and thus embodying Guillermo Gmez-Peas assertion
that Los Angeles simply cannot be understood without taking Mexico Cityits
southernmost neighborhoodinto account,22 nevertheless exposes a crucial gap
between the past and the present: while the days of labor in contemporary Los
Angeles continues, the fictive past fails to provide a stable identity for Zenzon, leaving
the endless repetition in the plant as his sole reality. Like the city itself, Fosters novel
produces an ahistorical sense of time, but it turns the citys perpetual present into
a dystopian experience.

21

22

19
20
McClung, Landscapes of Desire, 230.

Waldie, Where We Are Now, 123.
Ibid., 123.
Guillermo Gmez-Pea, New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the
Century (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996), 178.
113
The meaninglessness of the past, an idea typical of Los Angeles, sets the tone of the
novel. An immigrant from Mexico, Zenzon has abandoned his former life: I crossed
deserts to get here, he says. I traversed the mountains of the Rumorosa & the Coast
Range, skirting secret borders of forgotten history & identity. I sacrificed the Past,
relationships & dreams of community.23 This separation from the past self, a variation
of the myth of a new beginning, defines his present.
Without the continuity with the past, his routine work at the meat-packing plant on
the east side of the city dominates Zenzons experience of the present:
The line moves all the time. . . . Big hogs swinging at you, one after another,
hour after hour, you had to swing with them, like a dance, a rhythm you cannot
break, you cant stand around or daydream . . . four signs on the wall say, THIS
DEPARTMENT HAS WORKED 154 DAYS WITHOUT LOST TIME. AVOID
ACCIDENTS ON THE JOB. SAFETY BEGINS HERE in English, Spanish, Chiu
Chow & Vietnamese.24
In the factory, wasting time is a serious problem for the workers. Max, the foreman,
accuses Zenzon when a slight delay in the production lines occurs: Thats thousands
of dollars delay in the operation of the smokehouse, Max growled, an unscheduled
interruption, a delay in the whole operation of the smokehouse, FIFTEEN, 20
MINUTES! Why?25 In order to make up for the loss, Zenzon and his colleagues
are forced to work for 16 hours a day. The endless labor in the sweatshopa satirical
description of Taylorismis a bleak experience of the perpetual present that
characterizes his life in the city.
In this situation, the immigrant desires a break in the rhythm of his everyday life.
This longing is at first expressed in a violent vision borrowed from disaster fiction:
Certainly in L.A., where weve seen riots, fires, earthquakes, epidemix [sic],
crack wars and the disaster of our everyday lives, we would not be too shocked
if somehow the entire City of Vernon was removed from the map over the
weekend. . . . But every Monday there it was, the blue mass of Farmer John rising
above the L.A. River like a fortress . . .26
The promise of disaster, a disruption of current conditions, remains unfulfilled, and

Zenzons everyday life continues as usual. This sense of endless repetition haunts and
punctuates his life, even outside the factory. On returning home one day, Zenzon
suffers a sudden feeling of dj vu: What was the source of the sudden difference I was
feeling? . . . This was my old place, the place Id lived in some time ago.27 The repetitive

25

26

27

23
24
Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005), 40

Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 50.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid., 30.
114
Outside, America
rhythm in the present produces the hallucinatory sense of past, which leads to the
appearance of the fake past of the Aztek nation.
Zenzons first-person narrative runs parallel with another narrator, Zenzontli, who
speaks from Technotitlan, the capital of the Aztek nation, in the year of 1942. The Aztek
Socialist Emporium has defeated the early Spanish conquistadors, and is now engaged
in the war against the Nazis, helping the Soviet Union. As is indicated in the reshuffling
of the number 1492, the history of colonization is reversed in this narrative, as Azteks
hold Spaniards and other Europeans as their slaves. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House
of Darkness, explains the cause for this subversion of history: we have altered the
space-time continuum of the universe through our Aztek sciences.28 At the outset,
this past seems to provide Zenzon in East Los Angeles with an ideal world: the current
situation of exploitation is overturned in the alternative Aztek universe.
This counter-history, however, does not offer a utopian place. From the beginning,
the excessively aggressive nature of Aztek culture is emphasized in Zenzontlis
first-person narrative. He proudly declares that the Council of Tlatoani of the Party
of Aztek Socialism determined we must Defend & protect our way of life thru War,
our standard of living (war), our freedom of religion (War) (1000 hearts per day
minimum).29 War, together with the sacrifice of human hearts, defines every aspect
of Aztek life, making it clear that this past is not an ideal to return to. The Aztek world
does not function as a secure origin of identity.
The narrative alternates between the somber reality of exploitation at the
meat-packing plant and its inversion of history, practicing what Carlos Fuentes calls
the perverse Mexican time: Both submerged times came back perversely, the Indian
time as sentimental nostalgia, the modern time as exploitative capitalism.30 The
discrepancy between these two temporalities is explicit in Atomik Aztex. On the one
hand, the Taylorized factory-time captures Zenzons life with its logic of production;
on the other, the Aztek past offers no solace to the ailing protagonist in the present.
The Aztek world is an unusable past, pointing to a fundamental difference between
the actual world and the merely possible ones31 that only highlights the dead end for
the immigrant worker.
Toward its end, the narrative begins to slide into the noir genre. One of the workers
at the plant, Weasel, confides to Zenzon that he once attempted to rob the bank and
killed his girlfriend accidentally. Just like Zenzons former life in Mexico, this past holds
no significance for the criminal: He shook his head in remembrance of that terrible
misfortune. Weasel raised his voice a notch, Thats all behind me now.32 This noirish
episode predicts a coming turn of events: the sadistic foreman Max disappears, and
two LAPD detectives come to the protagonist to interrogate him with blows and kicks.
Though he does not disclose any information on Maxs whereabouts, Zenzons inner
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 11617.
30
Carlos Fuentes, A New Time for Mexico, trans. Marina Gutman and Carlos Fuentes (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1996), 17.
31
Marie-Laure Ryan, From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics,
Narratology, and Narrative, Poetics Today 27.4 (2004): 645.
32
Foster, Atomik Aztex, 175 (Italics added).
28
29
115
monologue during the violent interrogation makes it clear that he killed the foreman
and dumped his body in a huge meat grinder, so that the victim has been processed
and distributed all over the city:
I keep a stash of packages of hot dogs dated to the exact date they say Max disappeared,
which I may consume with relish & lick my fingers. You may kick me repeatedly in
the face behind the dumpsters of a diner on Monday & Tuesday too but if I dont
know what happened to Max I dont care if you found his shoelace dangling from the
mouth of a toddler choking in Barstow. I dont have all the answers, please would you
stop kicking the face.33
Zenzon is not arrested as the mans body is never discovered; meanwhile, the LAPD
investigation continues. The unending work at the production line is eventually
replaced by ceaseless violence from the police. The immigrants experience of the
perpetual present becomes more somber.
Fosters is a world of dystopia; however, it is not so much a flat denial of the citys
temporality as its exaggerated inversion. The narrative magnifies the everlasting nature
of the present to show its dismal side through the powerless past and the noir mode.
The alternative past of Aztek is incapable of grounding Zenzons everyday life in
East Los Angeles, and his crime, which leaves almost no trace of the victim, remains
unexposed. In this process, the novel deviates from the gravity of the past that defines
immigrant fiction and LA noir. As a result, the past does not form a continuity with
the now. Without any sense of history, Zenzons present in contemporary Los Angeles
goes on.34 Foster affirms the absence of history in Los Angeles as the real experience
of time, in which the past is utterly useless. Atomik Aztex testifies to the intolerable
underside of LA Time.
The accidental Now in Kate Braverman

A different idea of LA Time is found in Kate Braverman, whose work has devoted
itself to the exploration of Los Angeles landscapes where the transformative nature of
the self is revealed. In her fiction, this indeterminate subjectivity in the city is closely
linked with the question of historyher protagonists often discover temporalities
outside history in their process of detachment from given identities. Los Angeles
in Bravermans work appears as a locus of ahistorical temporalities that enable the
33
34
Ibid., 200.
Therefore, the novels deliberate failure to constitute the historical continuity between past and
present results in a sense of split identity. Whereas Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth argues that historical
time is supported by traditional formulation of subjectivity (Ermarth, Sequel to History, 44),
Fosters novel ends with the unbridgeable separation of two temporalities, leaving Zenzon(tli) in a
state of confusion: I truly feel I am a man, and sort of a monkey too (Foster, Atomik Aztex, 201).
116
Outside, America
mutation of the self.35 Deeply rooted in the prevailing urban time and its promise of
a new beginning, Bravermans text goes further: rather than a mere appraisal of LA
Time, her work practices the temporality of metamorphosis, in which the present
constantly opens itself to the outside.
This principle is also at work in her 2006 memoir, Frantic Transmissions to and from
Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir. Its autobiographical premise necessarily involves
the possibility of fixing the writers identity, as Roland Barthes, in his autobiography,
warns himself that you constitute yourself, in fantasy, as a writer, or worse still: you
constitute yourself.36 Bravermans narrator, however, maintains an opposite attitude
from the beginning. Memory is not static, she declares. Its in flux, mutating through
time and accumulation.37 Rejecting a definitive form of memory, the narrator instead
speaks for the fluid nature of the self, which leads to the crucial passage in the first
section: Do we not reinvent ourselves from our personal rubble? Is the human drama
itself not that of inspired nonlinear transformation?38 In other words, Bravermans
memoir aims at achieving an ahistorical relationship between the present and the
past.
The important point in the memoir is the narrators insistence that this process of
self-invention is not confined to the personal realm. Doesnt mythology demonstrate
human metamorphosis as intrinsic and the forms of civilization to be in constant
transition?39 she asks, implying that the world surrounding her is in constant change.
Thus the narrator defines her fluid self as the citys double: We have lived like our city,
as flagrant works in progress.40 No longer a stable now, LA Time in the memoir is the
ground for the process of mutation.
This notion finds a striking expression in the section titled The Collective Voice
of Los Angeles Speaks: Marilyn Monroe, an imaginary interview with the legendary
Hollywood star. Partly based on the actresss actual interview and biography,
Bravermanss Monroe nonetheless frees herself from the stereotypical perception
of the star; with her nonlinear reinvention of self, Monroe embodies the idea of
metamorphosis, thereby practicing a different mode of the Hollywood myth. The
interview redefines LA Time as a radical opening to the outside.
Bravermans reimagining of Marilyn Monroe marks a clear contrast with the last
interview the actress actually gave, published in Life magazine in 1962. In this actual
interview, Monroes attempt at establishing her identity as an artist is perfectly clear.
Bravermans exploration of temporality is typically expressed in her short story, Histories of the
Undead. Erica, a researcher in history in West Los Angeles, unintentionally comes to realize that a
temporality different from history inhabits herit occurs to Erica that what she wants to research
is not history as it actually is or was, but some more fragile peripheral version. . . . It would be a
history of the undead, the flickering partials and the almost (Kate Braverman, Histories of the
Undead, 128). Instead of historical time defined by cause-and-effect relationships, she is gradually
attracted to another kind of time.
36
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), 82.
37
Kate Braverman, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (Saint Paul,
MN: Graywolf Press, 2006), 11.
38
39
Ibid., 245.
40
35
117
She constantly speaks of herself as a natural-born actress, whose creativity conflicts

with the conformity the studio demands. I am not an actress who appears at a studio
just for the purpose of discipline, she maintains. This does not have anything to do
with art. . . . After all, Im not in a military school. This is supposed to be an art form.41
Monroe here repeatedly mentions her devotion to the art of acting and constitutes
her current self as an artist. In course of this self-assertion, her personal past is briefly
mentioned, only to serve her present interest. Monroe reveals several memories from
her childhood, all of which are related to movies and acting. When I was 5I think
thats when I started wanting to be an actressI loved to play,42 she says. This is the
first episode she offers, followed by her teenage memory when she began to draw
everybodys attention. Thus the familiar formula of myth-making reappearsjust as
Los Angeles constantly appropriates its past to construct its utopian present, Monroe
refigures her past to consolidate the current, ideal form of self. In this sense, Monroes
is a classic voice of the city.
On the other hand, Bravermans Monroe decisively deviates from this image of the
Hollywood star. Early in the fictive interview, she begins to subvert the personal myth
found in the Life interview. Asked about her childhood, Monroe replies, Everyone
knows about the uncles who fondled my breasts. They kissed my seven-year-old
nipples, and they got hard like marbles. . . . Then I knew I was a bad girl. I would always
be a bad girl.43 This dark side of her past, never mentioned in her actual interview,
resists the idealization of her present identity: it belongs to what Bravermans memoir
calls personal rubble.
Monroe then emphasizes the accidental nature of her present position: she
maintains that her secret is the divinity of accident.44 Contrary to the continuity
between her childhood and identity as an actress established in the other interview,
this Monroe plainly expresses a discrepancy between her past and present. You take a
bus to Hollywood and become a star, she says. Anyone can do this.45 From an abused
child to a Hollywood starthis past-present relationship defies the logic of linear and
chronological causality; instead, Bravermans Monroe insists on a series of unforeseen
leaps that have led to her present.46
This idea of a nonlinear progression further leads Bravermans Monroe to dream
about yet another leap toward the future. Expressing her dissatisfaction with the
studio, which keeps giving her the same scripts, she envisions her future days as a
mother: I would be a mother who eats feathers and flowers. Thats whats at the end of

43

44

45

46

41
42
Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe Speaks out, Life 33.4 (1962): 54.
Ibid., 52.
Braverman, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, 158.
Ibid., 159.
Ibid.
In this fictive interview, the interviewer constantly tries to clarify Monroes personality. The most
explicit question is: Are we really seeing you through biography? (Braverman, Frantic Transmissions
to and from Los Angeles, 159). These enquiries function as an attempt to render the actresss identity
recognizable. Monroe, on her part, constantly eludes any such grasp with her enigmatic answers.
In this effort to escape any definition of the self, the interview displays Monroes detachment from
her current identity, the moment of her becoming-other.
118
Outside, America
time.47 Monroe here tries to detach herself from the film industry, to discover a new
role in life. Saying that your name is an act of fraud,48 she remarks that I could have
a new name, classy, like Emily or Anne, with an e,49 so that the Hollywood star tries
to transform herself, shedding her present identity once again. The text reenacts the
concept of nonlinear transformation.
This imaginary figure of Marilyn Monroe reiterates Bravermans idea of ahistorical
temporality by rewriting the Hollywood myth. The memoir practices the process of
self-mutation, in which the current identity is affirmed, not as a solid form of self in the
perpetual present, but as a phase in transition. Yve Lomax maintains the same idea
as followsshe differs with herself and becomes involved in a new mode of existence,
and this is what offers the most effective resistance to and the critique of the present.50
Through reinventing the citys collective voice, Braverman reimagines LA Time as a
process of mutation that grounds the transformative subjectivity.
To the other side of history: Steve Ericksons Our Ecstatic Days

The Los Angeles-based interrogation of history and the practice of a different
temporality take a more distinctive form in the work of another LA writer, Steve
Erickson. Like Braverman, the question of history occupies an integral place in his
oeuvre, which is essentially rooted in the urban experience of time. His 1993 novel, Arc
dX, describes the city as assimilating the Twentieth Centurys dislocation of memory
from time into its own identity,51 attesting to the ahistorical nature of LA Time.
Ericksons interrogation of history is fully developed in his 2005 novel, Our Ecstatic
Days. Borrowing from the convention of disaster fiction, the novel traces the quest of
Kristin Blumenthal for her lost son in twenty-first century Los Angeles, where a lake
emerges out of nowhere and submerges most of the city.52 This disaster, unique among
the quake- and fire-laden fiction from the city, is the product of another disaster in
New York which, in Ericksons novel, defines the character of the century. Therefore,
Kristins personal experience is involved with the whole century, and Our Ecstatic
Days pursues the possibility that the framework of history can be mutated through
the protagonists quest. The age commenced in New York reaches the other side of

49

50

51

52

47
48
Ibid., 163.
Ibid., 164.
Ibid., 165.
Lomax, Sounding the Event, 161.
Steve Erickson, Arc dX (New York: Poseidon, 1993), 224.
Kristin Blumenthal is also the protagonist in Ericksons 1999 novel, The Sea Came in at Midnight.
Kristin, running from a religious cult, comes to Los Angeles to be enslaved by a nameless man who
privately works on the Apocalyptic Calendar, his version of the twentieth century: The dates on
the calendar were not sequential like on an ordinary calendar but free-floating according to some
inexplicable order (Steve Erickson, The Sea Came in at Midnight, 46). Kristin is viewed as the
chaos factor in this calendar, so that preoccupation with the relationship between the individual
and the whole century is already evident in this novel.
119
the continent to go through a fundamental change; Los Angeles in Erickson is the

counter-historical city where the whole age can be reimagined.
The lake begins to attract attention in the summer of 2001. In the novel, this
phenomenon is essentially linked with one of the most notable events of the century,
namely the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York: One man stands before a line
of tanks. Another crashes an airliner into a building. One ends an Age of Reckoning,
the Age of the Sky; the other begins the Age of Chaos, in which the sky melts to earth
and becomes a lake.53 The first incident mentioned is Tiananmen Square protest
in 1989, when a man, presumably Wang Weilin, confronts the tanks of the Peoples
Liberation Army. In Ericksons novel, this event stands for the end of the twentieth
century, and Wang, as one of the characters, emigrates to New York to witness the 9/11
attacks, namely the beginning of the Age of Chaos. The lake in Los Angeles emerges
out of this violent crash that commences the new century.
The novel crystallizes this idea of the age into a young single mother, Kristin. To her,
the lake in Los Angeles is nothing but a threat to her son, Kierkegaard.54 Once a fearless
girl, Kristin is now full of worry over Kierkegaards safety. Sometimes Im paralyzed by
my love for him, her first-person narrative begins. . . . In my heart he opens the door to
this vast terrain of fear. Its a fear stretching out beyond these young years of mine when
mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable.55 The expanding lake, in her view, is a
visible sign of danger, and Kristin realizes that it tries to take her son awaythe lake
is coming for him.56
This personal fear is, in fact, inseparable from the nature of the new century. At
one point, she recollects that she gave birth to her son at the exact moment when
the twenty-first century began. This is a ten-year, the doctor tells Kristin in labor
on December 31, 2000, . . . in another hour and a half it will be a one-year, and
thats the true beginning of it.57 Born on January 1, 2001, Kierkegaards life parallels
the development of the new century. Therefore, the mothers fear that the lake may
claim her son is clearly connected to the larger contextthe chaos may rule the new
century. To abate this fear, Kristin tries to make a deal with God: She offered God a
deal. Whatever good things might be in her future, she would trade them all just for
her boy to be all right.58 This idea of the divine as insurance against the threatening
lake presents the binary opposition between order and chaos, which also defines the
character of the century.
Steve Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days (New York: Simon, 2005), 272.
The name of Kierkegaard is an explicit reference to the Danish philosopher. Given the obsession
with the ideas of repetition and recollection in Ericksons novel, the most appropriate frame of
reference is Sren Kierkegaards Repetition. Kristins quest is expressed as a movement into the
lakes birth canal (Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days, 83), so that she goes through a second birth in the
novel, echoing Kierkegaards protagonist who claims that I am born again to myself (Kierkegaard,
Repetition, 75).
55
Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days, 3
56
Ibid., 43.
57
Ibid., 166.
58
Ibid., 77.
53
54
120
Outside, America
Kristin is determined to stop the expansion of the lake itself. Down in the hole of
the lake, down in the opening of the birth canal where the world broke its water, lurks my
sons doom and I must stop it,59 she insists, and goes into the water, leaving her son on
the gondola for a moment. When she comes back to the surface, however, Kierkegaard
is nowhere to be seen; her effort to eliminate the chaos factor from the century results
in a complete failure.
After losing her son, she lives on the lakeshore for five years under the new name
of Lulu Blu, renouncing her past. Here, the citys peculiar motif of a new beginning
and separation from the past reappears. Yet the novel pursues a different idea in the
parallel universes style. One day, looking over the lake, it suddenly dawns on Lulu
that, when she went into the water and came back to the surface five years ago, she
actually reached another lake: That she wasnt turned around. That she was pulled
through the opening from one lake into another just like it.60 With this idea, the world
itself is doubled. On Lulus side of the lake, she is forced to go on without her boy;
but on the other side, three-year-old Kierkegaard is still on the boat, waiting for her
mothers return.
Lulu decides to dive into the lake one more time, in order to reach the Other Lake
on the Other Side.61 When she rows a boat off the shore, Both Lulu and Kristin appear,
strengthening the sense of doublenessThe last vision the lake shows her is a vision
of herself again, except shes changed places with it. . . . Lulu raises her hand in farewell
and Kristin nods in farewell back, continuing to push herself out into the water with
the pole.62 There is Lulu at the shore, as well as Kristin moving toward the center of
the lake; her self diverges, and after Kristin dives into the water, the text itself is divided
into two narrativesKristins journey through the birth-canal of the lake and Lulus
life without her sonthat develop simultaneously. The former narrative, in which the
mother attempts to undo the loss of her child, consists of a single, one-line sentence
stretching over 200 pages: it is defined as a passage without time63 that traverses the
rest of the text that narrates Lulu and other characters lives in the Age of Chaos.
These two narratives are not separate from or opposed to each other; rather,
they frequently intersect in terms of expression and motif. The narrative of the
Age of Chaos, covering from 2001 to 2089, is filled with parents who have lost
their children, just like Kristin, and orphans. Moreover, in those stories of loss,
phrases that characterize Kristins story reappear to describe similar situations of
other characters. For instance, the section titled 20292031 depicts the story of
Barbrasita, who gives birth to a boy and consequently becomes frightened by the
chaos of the world: In her heart, her nameless little boy has opened the door to
a vast plateau of fear, stretching out beyond her young years when mortality is
supposed to be so inconceivable.64 This passage repeats Kristins frightened mood

62

63

64

59
60
61
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 801.
Ibid., 93.
Ibid., 259.
121
at the beginning of the novel. Other numerous repetitions in the narrative, echoing
Sren Kierkegaards observation that life itself is a repetition,65 demonstrate that
Kristins timeless passage constitutes an underside of the Age of Chaos. Unhinged
from a specific timeline, her quest is a matrix that generates and affects the history of
the twenty-first century. In this sense, it is akin to the diagram formulated by Gilles
Deleuze: there is an emergence of forces which doubles history.66 The Age of Chaos
is, in this sense, a double of Kristins journey.
As the timeless passage proceeds, Kristins quest begins to change its tone. She
speaks of her pregnant days in Tokyo, when she miscarried Kierkegaard but somehow
the boy made his way back into her womb. Shortly after this episode of reclamation,
Kristin realizes that she is now moving upward toward the surface of the lakeI rise
up up and up to break the surface of the water . . . and can no longer be sure to which
lake Ive returned67to see a gondola on the water, in which she left her son five years
ago. With this shift in Kristins quest, the Age of Chaos also goes through a significant
change: Lulu finally sees her son after being separated from him for 27 years. The
narrative of loss in the Age of Chaos witnesses the moment of reunion, which leads to
the final chapter of the novel.
The concluding part of Our Ecstatic Days, 2XXX, opens with a dream of a nameless
girl in New York: The night before it happened, she had a dream about her father . . .
The Age of Chaos is here, she woke thinking, What, its just arriving now?68 With this
opening, it can be assumed that the date is September 10, 2001. The next day she visits
the apartment of her dead father and tries to go back to her hometown, Los Angeles,
only to find all the flights have been canceled. As the transcontinental train she boards
goes westward, the girl loses her sense of time; finally, reaching Los Angeles, she finds
half of the city is covered by the newly emerged lakethe girl bears witness to the
beginnings of the Age of Chaos in the two cities. When she runs to the lakeshore to see
Kristin breaking the surface, the diverged narratives converge.
The Age of Chaos and the timeless passage, having experienced the changes in their
mode, merge with each other. This narrative design integrates the protagonists divided
self, as Kierkegaard notes in the concluding section in his Repetition: The schism
in my being has been removed. I am whole again.69 This narrative self-convergence
brings a significant change in the novel: Kristin, with her eyes still closed, is now faced
with the boat she left five years ago, not knowing whether her boy is still there:
In the dark cathedral of her closed eyes, she summons her best prayer, promises her
best promise, to never be paralyzed again by her love for him, to leap blindly into
hope, to stride boldly the border between terror and beauty. She reconciles herself to
the whim of God or chaos or both, she finds a way to just be . . .70

68

69

70

65
66
67
Kierkegaard, Repetition, 3.
Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days, 2969.
Ibid., 305.
Kiekegaard, Repetition, 74.
Ibid., 316.
122
Outside, America
Then she opens her eyes to see her son. At the beginning of the novel, Kristins paralyzed
state generated her fear of chaos; this time, however, she tries to act on the principle of
hope. In this crucial move, the God-chaos opposition is nullified. Her way to just be is
a place beyond the simple binarity of order and disorder. Kristins journey reaches the
other Los Angeles, where the character of the century is fundamentally altered.
Thus the Age of Chaos, commenced in New York, finally sees the moment of its
mutation in Los Angeles, the last city of modern imagination, where even God and
chaos could be reimagined.71 The initial framework of the age is that the disaster
in New York brings about the collapse of order and the reign of chaos; accordingly,
Kristin in Los Angeles also follows this formula at first, in her fear of the lake and
the deal she offers to God. However, Kristins timeless passage, while generating the
whole century as its double, eventually goes ahead of history to bring its fundamental
transformation. The final paragraph of Our Ecstatic Days refers to the age as a century
of rapture,72 so that the framework of history is mutated to give birth to the other
century, namely the outside of history. Ericksons Los Angeles, in the final analysis, is
a counter-historical city where the reconstitution of the age is always possible.
The three texts from contemporary writers are doubles of LA Time. Each narrative
begins in a place deeply rooted in the temporal dynamics of the city, and eventually
deviates from itFoster, Braverman, and Erickson thus reconstitute LA Time from
within. Fosters Atomik Aztex embraces the perpetual present in its most dismal mode:
the temporality forecloses the immigrants return to the past and hope for the future.
Braverman, on the other hand, affirms the importance of the now, only in the process of
mutation that constantly surpasses the reign of the present. Finally, Erickson explores the
citys ahistorical dimension in a radical way that transfigures the history of the century.
These writers do not deny or accuse LA Time so much as actively explore its outside.
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth argues that postmodern narrative language undermines
historical time and substitutes for it a new constitution of temporality.73 And indeed the
question of temporality and history is widespread in contemporary American writers.
Don DeLillo explores the nature of time and body in The Body Artist, set in a small,
coastal town in New England. Richard Powers, in his Prisoners Dilemma, describes a
nuclear family in the Midwest, where the Hobsons begin to interrogate their subjectivity
formed in the post-World War II era. The history of another small town in the West
occupies a central place in Colson Whiteheads Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), in which
the project of renaming the town summons the forgotten past of early black settlers.
When this line of query reaches the city at the edge, it encounters an LA Time of the
perpetual presentand the works of the three LA writers are located precisely at this
point. Rather than turning to the force of the past to counterbalance the citys ahistorical
dynamics, they pursue the potential inside the dominance of the present for showing its
unforeseen faces. Their style, the mutation of LA Time, sets a new tone in LA literature,
as well as in American literature, opening a fresh field to be explored.
Ibid., 11516.
Ibid., 317.
73
Ermarth, Sequel to History, 14.
71
72
Conclusion
Since Outside, America has declared itself an open system of connections, its concluding
part would betray the project if it is meant to be conclusive. The end of this book
should be a membrane, not an exclusive wall, which retains contact with the outside.
Therefore, what follows is a relaying point where the ideas mentioned in the previous
chapters are picked up again in such a way that they could reveal the possibility of
further connections to other literary texts and questions; then, as one of those many
potential connections, this chapter will try to link the idea of the outside to a new
generation of writers in this century. Consequently, American literature today will
reveal its de-Americanized mode.
Identity and outside

The first two chapters on Paul Theroux and William T. Vollmann argue that the American
identity, particularly the masculine subject, is formed in relation to the idea of outside
space. The two novels critically examine this majority identity to find the relentless power
relationships at the heart of itthere is no innocent space with no strings attached, and
instead, the American self is constituted by asymmetrical relationships with the other.
Outside is just a component of the current mode of self.
This insight can also illuminate the central idea of Jeffrey Eugenidess first novel,
The Virgin Suicides (1994), in which the narrators, a group of middle-aged men, look
back on a series of suicides of girls in their high school days. Their narrative act is a
practice of self, formed in the relationship with the enigmatic girls as their outside. The
narrators, while pretending to be investigators of the case, need the mystery to remain
unsolved, in order to maintain the past that grounds their current subjectivity. The
outside, in fact, is always already appropriated as an integral part of their identity: it is
a hall of mirrors where the American encounters his double.
The double
The motif of the double haunts American literature from its beginning, not to speak
of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Gordon E. Slethaug examines its
postmodern versions in Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Raymond Federman,
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Outside, America
among others, highlighting their linguistic concerns. The double becomes a linguistic
artifact, he argues, stripped of psychological or dualistic significance, used to explore
the signifier itself.1 But whereas Slethaug assumes the purely linguistic nature of
the double, William T. Vollmann and other contemporary writers seek to locate the
question of the double in the place where the act of narration touches on the historical,
political, and temporal questions. A similar idea is found in Stephen Wrights 1994 road
narrative, Going Native: a man escapes from his everyday life in the Midwest to move
westward, only to find that he is just another traveler reenacting the same American
rolethe man is a double of the American impulse to move, just like the Vollmannian
traveler, who is caught in the self-repeating national clich of starting over in a new
place. Consequently, he finds himself stranded in a beach house in California, only
daydreaming, in his unmoving car, of another exit out of the situation.
This somber view is altered with the idea that narrative can activate another mode
of time, in which the double functions differently. The figure of the double grasped in
the temporal dimension, as is seen in The Body Artist, is not an expansion of identity: as
Gilles Deleuze argues, the double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary,
it is an interiorization of the outside. . . . It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a
repetition of the Different.2 Examples of this transformative double are also found
in Denis Johnson, Richard Powers, and the Los Angeles writers. Moreover, Rebecca
Browns The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary (1998) and The Incantation of Frida K. (2001)
by Kate Braverman also describe the body as occupying the space-time of change
through the double. In these novels, too, the act of narration produces the double,
which mutates the given contours of subjectivity.
Repetition and time

The use of the double inherently entails repetition. The narrative accumulation of
power relationships frames the travelers self in Vollmann, and, in Erickson, the same
drama of power is endlessly repeated at the heart of America. Repetitions of these
situations constitute the world of clichs. On the other hand, narrative repetition as a
temporal dynamics works as a principle of metamorphosistypically seen in Powerss
Prisoners Dilemma, clich-identity can change their functions in being repeated in a
new narrative mode. To introduce a different function in the circuit of repetition: the
decentered loop of narrative form is aimed at this effect. Carole Masos fragmentary
style can be understood in this vein. AVA (1993), for example, is made up of a set
of fragments that surface to the protagonists mind in her deathbed. The same, short
sentences keep reappearing, constituting a rhythm of life now freed from the constraints
of a linear mode of time.
Gordon E. Slethaug, The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois UP, 1993), 29.
2
1
Conclusion
125
Counter-memory
The attempts at transfiguring the self necessarily involve the question of how to narrate
the past, for the linear past-present connectiona cause-effect relation being its typical
formis at the basis of the stable sense of identity. Again, the pragmatic principle in
Johnson, Wright, and Powers shows that how to connect the past and the present is an
open operationinstead of the linear linkage, by which the past sets up the identity
in the present, narrative act can achieve other forms of connection in which the shape
of the current self mutates itself. Already Dead pursues the possibility of releasing
the reactive past; Meditations in Green practices the rearrangement of past-present
fragments, while Prisoners Dilemma reveals that past clichs can change their
functions in being renewed in a narrative act. The Foucauldian counter-memory is a
pertinent notion that describes those practices of transformation of the past through
narrative. Vollmanns ongoing Seven Dreams seriesthe seven novels are to describe
the underside of the history of North America, and the narrators present self is always
questioned in the course of narrativecan be understood among such efforts.
Outside today
These ideas are part of the overall question of What is America? The preoccupation
with the national character still subsists, but the practices of the outside project an
image of America, not as an integrated whole, but as a collection of open-ended
connections that is fundamentally opposed to the idea of nation-state or its expansive
and inclusive impulse.3 This collectivity, always trying to elude collective identity
and the logic of historynamely, the workings of integrationis best described as
Outside, America.
This mode of American fiction is entering a new phase in the twenty-first century.
Indeed, the first decade of the century witnessed the appearance of writers who were
born outside the US borders. 20 under 40, a 2010 project of The New Yorker, features
20 young writers, seven of whom are from the outside regionsChimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, Daniel Alarcn, David Bezmozgis, Yiyun Li, Dinaw Mengestu, Ta Obreht,
and Gary Shteyngart. Salvador Plascencia is also qualified to be included and, without
the the age limit, the list could be even longer: Junot Daz, Ha Jin, Aleksandar Hemon,
Rawi Hage, Linh Dinh, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and so on. It should be noted that the
idea of the outside is also seen in the new generation of these writers; in particular,
Alarcn and Plascencias fiction shares the preoccupation with the narrative idea of the
outside, which also functions as the question of subjectivity and belonging. In Alarcn,
the narrative act reveals and defies the dynamics of the history of a nation-state, while
in Plascencia, the authors control over narrative progression is called into question. In
3
Keiko Nitta also warns against the abuse of the all-inclusive idea of America.
126
Outside, America
both cases, the concept of the temporal outside plays a crucial role in interrogating
the very nature of belonging. Their novels can be seen as a sort of crossroads where the
preoccupation with identity in Latino or ethnic writingas the conditions emerge in
the United States for a collective Latino identity, Marta Caminero-Santangelo points
out, we can begin to observe more narration of their identity in Latino literature4
encounters the temporal idea of the outside. Taken together with the attempts to
mutate the American space-time, these outsiders offer an opportunity to rethink the
future of American literature.
Alarcns first novel, Lost City Radio, published in 2007, questions the construction
of collective identity based on the dynamics of integration. The novel is set in a nameless
nation-state, modeled after Peru, where the nation is trying to rebuild itself from a
decade-long civil war. In this process, people are forbidden to speak of the war in
public, and all the place-names in the country, including the capital, have been erased
and replaced by numbers. Describing the resurgence of the erased past, his narrative at
once reveals and resists the workings of the nation-state and its construction of history,
instead exploring the outside realm within the time of the nation.
Norma, the protagonist, is a popular personality of a radio show called Lost City
Radio, which stages the reunion of separated families. The collective dynamics of
integration is most visible in this show; the reunited family reenacts a wider nationwide
process, in which the state tries to reorganize itself from the division caused by the
war. The radio show is, in this sense, the nation-states double. Nobody is allowed
to speak of the war on air, and the memory of the conflict is being replaced by new
history provided by the state that constitutes itself as a sociological organism moving
calendrically through homogeneous, empty time.5 Normas husband, Rey, has been
missing for ten years, accused of collaborating with the insurgent forces called IL. The
IL was defeated and disgraced; the country was now in the process of forgetting the war
ever happened at all.6 Any public mention of his name is also banned. The national
identity, together with its history, is constructed on this huge silence.
On the other hand, the novel itself creates a critical distance from this mechanism of
integration. In particular, Alarcns novel tries to defy the historical mode of narrative
by which the past and the present are integrated into a whole. Depicting Normas days,
the narrative goes back and forth between her present and past episodes in such a way
that those past memories continuously intrude into the present silence. The novel refers
to those memories as noise that, excluded and abandoned from history, nevertheless
subsist within the collective:
Ten years had passed, ten years that comprised a vast, inviolable silence, and then
these three days, of which, she suspected, she would remember only noise: the
chattering dissonance of many voices, sounds at once indistinct and pressing,
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity
(Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007), 26.
5
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 26.
6
Daniel Alarcn, Lost City Radio (New York: Harper, 2007), 10.
4
Conclusion
127
calling her urgently in different directions. Wounding her, certainly, but no worse
than the silence had.7
This style culminates in the novels ending. At the beginning, the novel presents Norma
ten years after the war, still waiting for her husbands return. Their reunion would
make a perfect ending from the perspective of the program of the show Lost City
Radio and the nation: the unity regained, past wrongdoings forgiven. Yet, the novel,
Lost City Radio, pursues a different direction: it depicts the betrayal of Rey, who has a
mistress and a son in a village in the jungle, and ends with Rey, who is caught by the
army and shot to death. The incident is described simply by three words: Rey died
instantly.8 There is nothing heroic or sentimental about his death; this terseness is a
deliberate strategy in the narrative, for the lack of any significance in death precludes
the possibility that the incident would contribute to the dialectic process of integration.
Without a cause or a hint of heroism, a death deprived of any significance falls outside
the formation of national history.
Alarcns narrative thus explores the outside of the collective identity and
questions the sense of belonging. Rather than presupposing or establishing a cultural
or national identity, his novel recognizes otherness within the time of the nation, and
practices the logic of the noise in its narrative design. The crowd of memories in the
text constitutes a fluid community of those who retain their individual memories of the
conflict without being integrated into a whole. Lost City Radio is a kind of membrane
through which the present and the past interact with each other, without giving in to
the force of a single temporality.
This question of narrative temporality and belonging is also seen in Salvador
Plascencia, native of Guadalajara, Mexico. His first novel, The People of Paper (2005),
adapts the metafictional style to examine the motifs of time and power, both of which
questions the identity of the authorial figure in the text, the planet Saturn. Built on the
tradition of magical realism and metafiction, Plascencias novel tries to constitute itself
as a multiplicity of time.
The story follows the life of Federico de la Fe, a Mexican farmer whose wife leaves
him for another man. The broken-hearted man immigrates with his daughter to El
Monte, a town just east of Los Angeles, where he works as a flower picker. All along his
journey, he suspects that something in the sky keeps watching him. In the American
town, he finds that it is the planet Saturn who watches his life unfold and even controls
the progression of the story. Then de la Fe recruits the gang of El Monte and launches a
military campaign against the ringed planet. As one of the characters says, it is a war
against the future of this story.9
The narrative goes through another twist when one of the characters in the
California town tries to find out who Saturn really is, and eventually reaches an
apartment in upstate New York to find the author of the novel, Salvador Plascencia,
Ibid., 238.
Ibid., 258.
9
Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (San Francisco: McSweeneys, 2005), 46.
7
8
128
Outside, America
who also suffers from a recent heartbreak. After this metafictional encounter, the text
becomes a battlefield where the author and characters fight over the control of the
narrative. While Saturn, the alter ego of Plascencia, tries to order all the elements in the
novel, other charactersBaby Nostradamus, Rita Hayworth, the marching Franciscan
monks, and so oncrowd the pages of the novel and try to elude his grip. The visual
design of page layout practices this polyphonic idea, with most pages of the book
divided into multiple columns or sections, each with its own narrator.
Accordingly, the sense of time in the novel is diversified. Saturn lives in the
contemporary United States, struggling to dominate and organize the other characters
into a single, coherent narrative time, whereas the others bring many different
temporalities into the text. Rita Hayworths imaginary immigration from Mexico to
Hollywood, the fictional history of El Monte, the affair between de la Fes wife and
Jonathan Smith who comes from Englandall the threads of time try to break loose
from Saturn.
This battle between the One and the Many is haunted by a sense of repetition, since
Saturns authoritarian gesture repeatedly evokes that of colonizers who have devastated
his homeland of Mexico. As the text itself alludes to Hernn Corts, the authorial figure
is aware of the problem of power in his effort to dominate others. The construction of a
linear, conventional narrative is seen as an insipid repetition of history, of which Saturn
becomes increasingly tired.
Saturn ends this tug-of-war by undermining his own author-ity. In the last chapter
of The People of Paper, he witnesses the future that he cannot control, and de la Fe and
his daughter walk out of the text:
And while Saturn thought about all these things, preoccupied with a future that
would never be, no matter his strength, Little Merced hepled Federico de la Fe
button his Pendleton shirt and pack his bag. Together they walked out of their
stucco. . . . They walked south and off the page, leaving no footprints that Saturn
could track.10
As a result, the author-figures attempt to bring all the temporalities under his rule fails,
and the multiplicity of time remains outside his control.
Plascencias novel thus calls the rule of an authorial temporality into question
through fusing different temporal modes into the narrative. His novel does not achieve
or seek any sense of stable identity; instead, characters inhabit Saturns worldnamely
his selfand reveals the internal otherness within it. The narrative invents a community
without a common identity or temporality; in contrast, the narrative points to the
existence of the outside of the sense of belonging.
Both Alarcn and Plascencia start their narratives with an ordered mode of
temporality: the rebuilt nation-state in Alarcn and the organized narrative in
Plascencia. Then they begin to seek the outside through practicing aberrant
temporalities. In the process, the collective identity in Lost City Radio reveals internal
10
Ibid., 245.
Conclusion
129
noise that escapes the workings of the state and its history, and the text of The People
of Paper becomes a multiplicity where Saturn encounters a number of temporalities
that escape from his rule. The concept of the outside also functions in Alarcn and
Plascencia, by which current temporality-subjectivity is questioned and replaced by a
fluid sense of time and self.
At the same time, the presence of writers like Alarcn and Plascencia points to
the outside of American literature itself.11 The experience of Mexican immigrants in
the United States is a significant factor in Plascencias fiction, though the novel goes
beyond the common question of cultural dilemma between the United States and their
homeland. In Alarcns Lost City Radio, not a single mention of the United States can
be found. Just like Alarcn, Ta Obrehts first novel, The Tigers Wife, unfolds in an
exclusively non-American setting of a nameless country in the former Yugoslavia.
Obrehts narrative alternates between two stories of the tigers wife, a realistic account
of an encounter between an escaped tiger and a deaf-mute girl in a village during
World War II, and the deathless man who keeps haunting the twentieth century of
the Balkans marked by a series of violent conflicts. The two stories are intertwined
with each other without forming a single or stable narrative whole that guarantees the
identity in the present. These texts are not to be seen as return to the writers roots, for
they consistently question the sense of belonging itself. In other words, the narratives
constitute memories without belonging, refusing to fall into existent categories.
It is here that these writers attempts intersect with the writers of Outside,
America. As if responding to those writers who try to transform the conventional
idea of America, the emerging literary outsiders also mutate the national literature
into a collection of outside memories without a sense of belonging. This connection
points to the nonnationalistic mode of American literature, in which the multiplicity
of temporalities and countermemories call for further mutations. Outside America,
instead of the expansion of American values into the globe, the century is witnessing a
new phenomenon that America is turning into a huge outside.
11
Koji Tokos view of fake American literature also inspired this discussion.
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Index
Agamben, Giorgio 17n, 101
Alarcn, Daniel 1259
Alexie, Sherman 34
Already Dead: A California Gothic 35, 43,
47, 49, 125
American Dream x, 378
Amnesiascope 109
Angels 47
Apex Hides the Hurt 122
Arc dX 62, 118
Argall 31n
Atlas, The xiii, 213, 26, 33
Atomix Aztex 112, 115, 122
Auster, Paul 34
Body Artist, The xiv, 83, 923, 124
Braverman, Kate xv, 110, 112, 115, 11718,
122, 124
Brown, Rebecca 124
Butler, Judith 90, 104
cinema 67, 69, 72, 81, 95, 98, 1023
cinematic field 70, 956, 103
cinematic world xiii, 68, 74, 957, 100,
103, 1078
clich xiv, 36, 38, 6973, 78, 95, 978,
1035, 1078, 1245
Cold War, the 3, 225, 34, 95, 106
counter-memory 68, 80, 106, 125, 129
Deleuze, Gilles xi, 37, 423, 67n, 70, 89, 97,
121, 124
and Flix Guattari xiii, 27, 84n, 87
DeLillo, Don xiv, 83, 93, 122
Didion, Joan 64n, 109, 111
difference x, 245, 33, 41, 45, 48, 57,
8990, 92
Disney, Walt 956, 98, 1002, 1047
Dogs, The 124
double xiv, 19, 212, 256, 31, 334, 112,
116, 1214, 126
Erickson, Steve xivv, 49, 623, 10910,

112, 11819, 122, 124
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds xi, 115n, 122
Eugenides, Jeffrey 123
Foster, Sesshu xv, 110, 112, 122
Foucault, Michel xi, 16, 19, 34, 67, 6970,
72, 76, 78, 80, 101
Frantic Transmission to and from Los
Angeles 116
freeway 636
game theory 956, 99100, 106
globalization 21, 33
Going Native 124
Gravitys Rainbow 67
Grosz, Elizabeth xi, 15, 86
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri ix, 23, 33
Interface 88, 90, 923
Johnson, Denis xiv, 35, 45, 47, 49, 1245
Jones, Thom 35
Kerouac, Jack ix, 1
Kierkegaard, Sren 119n, 121
Leviathan 34
Lingis, Alphonso 6n
Lost City Radio 1268
manhood xiv, 5, 1011, 16, 20, 356
masculinity xiiiiv, 56, 11, 1620, 357,
40, 446, 69
Maso, Carole 124
Massey, Doreen 22, 26
Massumi, Brian 10n, 18, 101, 106
Meditations in Green xiv, 68, 80, 125
membrane 8991, 93, 102, 108, 123, 127
metamorphosis 445, 75, 116, 124
140
Index
Monroe, Marilyn 11618

Mosquito Coast, The xiii, 56, 1617, 19
mutation 15, 44, 46, 48, 52, 55, 736, 78,
84, 89, 91, 93, 96, 1068, 116, 118,
122, 129
narrative act xi, 656, 83, 96, 103, 105,
1078, 1234
Nealon, Jeffrey T. xii, 36n, 40
Nietzsche, Friedrich 356, 40, 43, 46, 47
Obreht, Ta 125, 129
On the Road ix, 1
Operation Wandering Soul xiv, 63
Our Ecstatic Days 62, 118, 121
People of Paper, The 1279
perception 737, 7980, 867
Plascencia, Salvador 125, 1279
Postcards xiii, 1, 4
potentiality 16, 19, 49, 72
power relationship ixx, xiiiv, 4, 6, 13, 15,
21, 237, 30, 33, 36, 38, 4951, 53, 55,
578, 62, 76, 123
Powers, Richard xiv, 63, 956, 1078, 122,
1245
Prisoners Dilemma xiv, 95, 1057, 1245
Proulx, Annie xiii, 1, 4
Pynchon, Thomas 67
Reagan, Ronald 5, 18, 80

repetition xii, xiv, 27, 645, 76, 84, 86, 89,
92, 107, 11213, 121, 124, 128
Reservation Blues, The 34
resistance 6, 101, 19, 68, 713, 76, 81,
1014, 106, 118
Revoyr, Nina 11011
Ricoeur, Paul xi
road narrative xiii, 23, 18, 64
Rubicon Beach xiv, 49, 54, 59, 62
Shaviro, Steven 75
temporality xii, 10, 16, 44, 49, 623, 66,
689, 84, 878, 903, 10910, 11416,
118, 122, 1279
Theroux, Paul xiii, 5, 17, 20, 123
threshold 53, 57, 62, 8890
Tigers Wife, The 129
transformation 35, 41, 43, 467, 49, 52, 56,
81, 103, 1057, 116, 118, 122, 125
Vietnam War, the xiv, 19, 64n, 80
Virgin Suicides, The 123
Vollmann, William T. xiii, 21, 234, 334,
1235
Whitehead, Colson 122
Wright, Stephen xiv, 68, 81, 95, 125

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Part One Vanishing Space

1Journey to the End of the Father:Paul Therouxs Battlefield of

2THE American Travelers Love And Solitude: The Atlas, or

3Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity in

Part Two Time Will Tell

5A Man with a Green Memory: War, Cinema, and Freedom in

6Time and Again: The Outside and the Narrative Pragmatics in

7WWDD (What Would Disney Do)?: Cinematic Field and

8Writing from a Different Now: Question of Ahistorical

subjectivity, both in its individual and collective aspects, is transformed. Elizabeth

Map of the book

Proulx, Postcards, 147.

Journey to the End of the Father: Paul Therouxs

The rise: Thy father, Thy king

Journey to the End of the Father

Journey to the End of the Father

The fall: Cracks in the throne

Journey to the End of the Father

Theroux, The Mosquito Coast, 169.

The jungle, formerly regarded as a frightful and meaninglessness outside, proves to

Journey to the End of the Father

collapse of Jeronimo. Nevertheless, his resulting attempt at resettlement culminates

Journey to the End of the Father

Another rise: Charlie and the vicious circle

Journey to the End of the Father

However, when Emily Spellgood, the preachers daughter, boasts to Charlie,

Journey to the End of the Father

entanglement of political forces, which develops into a military intervention in the

THE American Travelers Love and Solitude:

THE American Travelers Love and Solitude

Into the atlas of power

William T. Vollmann, The Atlas (New York: Penguin, 1996), 3.

THE American Travelers Love and Solitude

Vollmann, The Atlas, 85.

Vollmann, The Atlas, 152.

THE American Travelers Love and Solitude

The weight of memories: The Atlas

Vollmann, The Atlas, 124.

THE American Travelers Love and Solitude

Seeing more doubles

I dont know why.49 Disappointed, he is deprived of the fantasy of the windnow he is

THE American Travelers Love and Solitude

I dont know, he murmured, suddenly resentful. I dont know where I am anymore,

THE American Travelers Love and Solitude

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of

A man who has come to an impassethis motif keeps reappearing in contemporary

The birth of tragedy

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity

accusation7of the nihilistic man. From Nelsons perspective, California appears as a

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity

The killer inside me

Johnson, Already Dead, 44.

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity

Johnson, Already Dead, 68.

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity

new worldhypnagogic phenomena. He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed.52

Johnson, Already Dead, 41718.

It is a fundamental metamorphosis of selfhood accidentally attained, dissolving the

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity

Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity

Part One Vanishing Space

1Journey to the End of the Father:Paul Therouxs Battlefield of

2THE American Travelers Love And Solitude: The Atlas, or

3Nietzsche, Crime Fiction, and Question of Masculinity in

Part Two Time Will Tell

5A Man with a Green Memory: War, Cinema, and Freedom in

6Time and Again: The Outside and the Narrative Pragmatics in

7WWDD (What Would Disney Do)?: Cinematic Field and

8Writing from a Different Now: Question of Ahistorical