With Tooth and Nail/ Tongue and Cheek: The Humanity of Robert Browning’s Bishop

27 June 2006

“He who sits in the heavens will laugh. The Lord will have them in derision.” Psalms 2:4

This Bishop in Browning’s poem “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed Church” (Browning 2031) is a ridiculous character that expels both typed pious and zealous men the Church. Browning reveals the Bishop’s contrary guise when he changes his tone in line 15. From immaterial matters, the Bishop adopts a different persona when he talks about the material world. As the change in tone reveals, the Bishop’s character is bifurcated when he moves from Godly things to earthly matters suggesting his imperfect yet vital humanity.

His speech heightened by iambic pentameter suggests that he pains to compose a perfect articulation of his requests. The ninth line begins “And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream” and he proceeds to question life. In spite of his vocation, the Bishop’s intelligence leads him to ponder the unknowable nature of existence. His language in lines nine through 13 is saturated with long vowels as light as clear yet immaterial air, which suspends the light of God. Through said diction, the Bishop soundly projects the tranquil voice of a preacher while layering redemptive human questions of existence.

More interesting does this story become, starting with line 14. Saint Praxed’s Church exists in honor of a woman’s charity. Our Bishop reminds the reader of this fact to prelude the story of his tomb. He continues speaking with vulgarity about his efforts to reserve a prized spot where his body will eternally lay. A reverie for an esteemed position on earth when, by vocation, this man has reserved a favorable spot in heaven: this is a striking depart from the iconic Bishop. Line 15 intercepts his reserve for existence because he reminds the speech that the tomb was the award for his justly fights. His tomb, inside the church of peace (line 14), is the symbol for bifurcated character of the Bishop. At once, the tomb is a material shell that envelops the Bishop’s shell eternally once God reclaims his spirit; however, honest about the vanity of the material world when compared with the afterlife, the Bishop takes on unrefined diction to speak of the tomb. The Bishop’s honesty is justified by his vocation. He has made peace with God and, “With tooth and nail to save my niche,” he absolves making peace on earth.

The complexity of the Bishops contradictory halves echoes his humanity. His unrefined language suspended in iambic pentameter, suggests a conscious separation between God and man. The name God is the futile representation man gives to the metaphysical power that precedes him. Man is separate from god because he made of flesh, which dies; however, man secures immortally by creating art that in turn creates his undying reputation as artist. Browning immortalizes his Bishop when endowing him with a story within the body of poetry, crystallizing both the physical body with the spirit. By weaving vulgar language through poetic diction, the Bishop’s humanity is achieved.

This Bishop is startling and ridiculous but a careful eye will understand his morality. The Bishop acknowledges that Gandolf cheated him when he imposed on our Bishop’s reserved eternal niche. At least ridiculous, the Bishop speaks about his competitor suggesting haste. However, the iambic pentameter requires Browning’s dutiful embellishment to the Bishop’s character. “Shrewd was that snatch from the corner south—He graces his carrion with;” as much as such language strikes readers as sign posts for ridicule, the Bishop is wise enough to use unrefined language appropriate to the vain business of Earth.

His tomb is cramped by the “carrion” of his colleague but at least it can be seen as church visitors approach to read the Epistles. The Bishop reserves a plot where he can forever be associated with sacred texts. This amusing but honest expostulation is a component of the Bishop’s fight to obtain peace on earth. He willingly embodies his acknowledgement of human vanity and secures comfort by struggling with pragmatic business. That which imposes his goal is grounded with fleshly words because it is a matter on the level of his own desires. Browning organizes the Bishop’s existence appropriately by creating iconic perfection through ordered humanity. The Bishop’s story is weaved with contradicting human imperfection that materializes his character.

The sacred language of the New Testament is appropriately paired with the Bishops legacy. The language is immortal but the Bishop represents the imperfect mortal. By juxtaposing these two metaphors, Browning unifies both Earth and sky. He paints the sacred form of divine texts with the colorful Bishop resulting in perfect marriage of the two. He also combines the opposing personas of the Bishops in such a way that conflict is realigned to form humanity. The Bishop is virtuous because cares about life so much that he makes this passion immortal. His death becomes an art for him as he hopes to inspire visitors with a virtuous story through his elaborate tomb. He must secure this rich plot to have agency in the story told of his life once he is no longer alive to tell it. This is obvious as he ridicules Old Gandolf. He acknowledges that the living choose to tell any story of the dead with little consequence. The Bishop is wise enough to control his immortal story while God has granted him capable. He may appear comic to consumers of his story who are startled by cunning crudeness but, like the laughing heavens, the Bishop ridicules Gandolf and any mortal who dares to ignore their vulnerable reputation.

A man that asks for ridicule with his conflicting tone within lines 9 through 21, is exactly redemptive example of the Bishop’s humanity. Browning has successfully both explored and exploded stereotypes of churchly men with his Bishop at Saint Praxed’s church. Familiar to the collective conscious is the pious figure of Christianity. The Bishop is excluded from such a despised convention because he is self-consciously artificial, thus admirable. Such hypocrisy is certainly here but portrayed by Browning’s Bishop in a way that readers and the Bishop can mutually delight in ridicule thus grounding himself in humanity. Religious zeal is also weaved into the atmosphere of the Bishop’s speech because of its poetic form and his refined diction with regards to spiritual topics. The zealous specter of churchly figures is both created with the artifice of poetic diction and destroyed by the Bishop’s character as it champions grotesque language when packaging the topic of human vanity. Browning’s Bishop is at once an aerial man of God but speaks with the pulsing language that acknowledges human experience because, “dying by degrees,” the Bishop is not dead but the eternally vital character in this poem.

Browning, Robert. “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 7^th Ed. W.W. New York: Norton, 2001. 2030-2033.

YOU'D TAKE TO BED THE WHOLE WORLD… A discussion of Charles Baudelaire from The Flowers of Evil

YOU'D TAKE TO BED THE WHOLE WORLD…

You’d take to bed the whole world as your prize,

You slut of sluts, by boredom brutalized!

To exercise your jaws at this rare sport

each day you must be served a fresh-killed heart.

Lit up like shop-windows in vulgar blaze

or street lamps glaring on public holidays,

your insolent eyes with borrowed power burn.

Their beauty’s proper law they never learn.

Oh blind and deaf machine, rich in torment—

drinker of the world’s blood, wholesome instrument,

how can you not feel shame, how can you not

blanch at each mirror from which your charms look out?

This hideous wrong in which you feel secure,

has it not made you shrink one step in fear,--

that nature, strong in her concealed designs,

makes use of you, oh woman, queen of sins,

vile animal! to mould a genius?

Oh foul magnificence—sublime disgrace!

The speaker is expressing his or her disgust with society’s desire to objectify the beautiful or sacred and use reifying them for use and later disposal when a new want is created; “each day you must be served a fresh-killed heart.” ‘You’ refers to the society under the narrator’s scrutiny and the ‘fresh-killed heart’ as a metaphor for the sacred or beautiful being transformed into the profane or a “wholesome instrument”. The prostitution of society refers to the exchange of authenticity for money, or the commercialization and abuse of the revered. Every previously untouchable item, idea, or person is at the hands of industry if it can be transformed into profit, therefore making it vulnerable to harassment of the consumer, or utilized in consumption to later be thrown away like a used condom rather then revered and respected as unique and sacred.

The world “wholesome” is ironic in this frame of prostitution [you slut of sluts] but revealing because the narrator is in awe of how society is working. “Oh foul magnificence”. This grotesque aspect of life is inspiration for the narrator who thrives within this strange context. Baudelaire is almost doing with this poem and The Flowers of Evil as a whole what society does as it drinks the “world’s blood”. Baudelaire, because he is “rich in torment” like the “blind and deaf machine” of society and also in response to this machine, he shamelessly drinks the blood of the vampire himself in order to produce this work. Society is like a machine because it works efficiently and automatically to reduce everything into an abstract and marketable value. The grotesqueness of society is his inspiration to create; the “sublime disgrace” moves him.

The problem of boredom is one in which The Flowers of Evil aims to thwart. “By boredom brutalized” or the attack of boredom has trapped society into this endless cycle of creative destruction; production of commodity, creation of need at the disposal of fulfillment, then consumption until a new need is produced again, the golden spiral. This poem expresses the desire to destroy boredom by stimulating the senses. Awaking the spirit to the genuine feeling of despair. The language of the poem resurrects the sacred beauty that is lost in commercial utilization, “Their beauty’s proper law they never learn”. Baudelaire wishes to seduce the reader, much like a consumer being seduced by a new product made especially with their comfort in mind, by reminded them of the beauty of life in order to manipulate them to leave their weary state and feel again. “To mould a genius?”: A question, or perhaps a suggestion, Baudelaire poses to connect the individual to his container, or environment. He wonders if a genius could be the result of just a society. At the same time, he wonders if his attempt to break the cycle of boredom by inspiring passion and consciousness will mould a genius of the consumer to crave beauty and redeem or channel the sacred.

Exiles from Being: Writing Indian Identity in Cloud Chamber, “Assimilation,” and Ceremony

11 April 2006

“Okay/ go ahead/ laugh if you want to/ but as I tell the story/ it will begin to happen (Silko135).” Storytelling is participating in an act of creation. Storytelling gives birth to new and unique texts that serve as a window through which meaning can be viewed. A story comes alive when it is passed on from one mouth or set of eyes to another and therefore the story’s meanings are as multiple as the those who capture them. As a female Euro-American, with “no stake in First Nation Ideology” (Keenan 179), it may be said I am trespassing in a space where only Indians may enter by attempting to write about Indian identity. My affinity with this topic, however, is not geographical or historical but as complex as the authors I will discuss in this paper. Coming from a European immigrant family, I’ve grown up with the perception that all Americans are natives and I am the cultural outsider. My story in a sense, contrasts the relationship to the homeland that Indians have because outsiders have exiled Indians from the earth that raised them. Our identities parallel one another because we are two examples of an American minority defined by the majority culture and as a result, we tend to be dependant on notions of identity developed or imposed by the outside (Larson 53). In order to unify the identity imposed upon us by the outside and the identity we strive for and internalize, as a minority, an author, a member of a culture must create identity through the ceremonial act of storytelling, therefore Native American Literature, identifies or actualizes the meaning of being Indian. I’ve selected Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, Cloud Chamber by Michael Dorris, and Sherman Alexie’s short story “Assimilation” to demonstrate three examples of Indian identity crystallized through the act of storytelling.

Outsiders distinguish “us” from “them” by sketching cultural boundaries. The very concept of minority is contingent upon the majority. Humans define each other as other in increasingly creative ways. Woman, feminist, neo-feminist, feminist-only-on-the-weekends; as long as moments change, so will those living within them.

But it’s my choice. All this bluff is an act depending on some kind of unstated agreement between us. I make them them, allow them to be them, and in return they make me me. Is it a fair exchange? Without them, their opinions, rules, shocked reactions, free, who would I be? (Dorris 311)

The ambiguous process of defining the other and being defined either by oneself or by another is a hallmark question across Native American Literature as Rayona demonstrates in Cloud Chamber. Leslie Marmon Silko gives an interesting perspective on the act of categorizing humanity through Ceremony. “It was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place” (132). The Indian prophesy which foretold of the white man’s arrival (Nabokov 5) was a theory that immediately came to practice when it was spoken out loud. The words planted the seed for distinguishing and fearing the foreigner, which sets the rhythm for the ongoing battles between “us” versus “them. ”

To make an understatement, the European Americans did beyond their share of identifying, scrutinizing, and destroying the Indians throughout the history of the United States of America. Not only was this process a physical one by means of geographical whitewashing, but it worked on a cognitive level as well. Euro-Americans imposed values and belief systems on Indians consciously or otherwise. For example, reformers attempted to “teach” Indians how to plow and sow the land on which the Plains Indians, specifically, have been tending for centuries (Nabokov 233). Silko gives an example when Tayo receives instruction from white doctors. He is criticized by thinking in terms of “we” and “us” because his individual health will never improve if he doesn’t focus on it. Tayo, on the other hand, wanted to yell at the doctor to tell him that his medicine won’t work because the world doesn’t work in this way (125). According to Gray, to read contemporary Native American novels exemplifies an ideal process of active reading and equally misreading (148). I would argue that reading a culture from an outsider’s perspective is a similar ideal process.

Unfortunately, life happens whether we criticize it or not and historically, the unsympathetic and power-craving Europeans have granted Indians their identities since the word “Indian” escaped Columbus’s mouth. The label “Indian,” “Native American,” and the various politically correct and otherwise terms have survived history and signify thousands of Americans today. To understand oral literature, it is necessary to understand that today’s Indians could be traced back to the time when over 300 different cultural groups, each with a distinct language located north of Mexico when Columbus mistook the Azores for India (Ruoff 327). Anthropologically speaking, the concept of a homogenous Indian culture is false and super-indigenous. With that said, generalizations across Indian groups that distinguish Europe from Native culture can be made, however. One of these generalizations would be the communal lifestyle. Colonization attempted to remove this theory from practice in favor of individuality through a divide and conquer method (Larson 57). The white policy of assimilation like the General Allotment Act of 1887, as Roosevelt eloquently stated, was a “mighty pulverizing engine to break up tribal mass” (57). Clearly the history of identity was growing in complexity during these early times as the sacred communal land was stolen and later reified, measured, and redistributed. The Bureau of Indian Affairs could allot 60 acres of tribal land to the head of the household and 40 to minors, which would remain in their trust for 25 years. Later, the Burke Act of 1906 allowed the land to be transferred to “competent” Indians and the competency commissions were established to determine the degree of Indian-ness, thus the fragmentation of being Indian begins (57). In 1924, Indians, whether they internalize this identity or not, were legally American citizens. However, being too American was later problematic for some tribes. Land-claim lawsuits in the late 60s and 70s proved to be another Indian identity negotiation as the east coast Mashpee tribe was put on trial to determine if they were indeed a tribe and deserved tribal rights to land (53). The case was made that the Mashpee were in fact too American to be Indian as they had been historically surrounded by white culture and had assimilated too much to be considered aboriginal (56). There were no historical archives to “prove” in written form to the American courts that the Mashpee were Indian enough (57).

Words can make a big difference. According to Vizenor in Powell (396) stories are more than a survival, endurance, or response—they have the power to make, remake, or unmake the world. Authors find themselves descendants of Indians, Romanians, immigrants, or colonized peoples by coincidence but through their strategies of “narrative remembering,” they can capture an indigenous identity through transgenerational address (Allen 101). Dorris’ Cloud Chamber works in this way as he traces the history of Rayona all the way back to her familial Irish roots. In a sense, Dorris had conjured Rayona’s ancestor through the “magic of words and names” (103) explicitly when Rayona takes Rose’s name in her naming ceremony. A writer is a scientist as he or she excavates the past through storytelling. A writer also works in a way that resembles the imagination of a child. Powell quotes N. Scott Momaday from The Man Made of Words, “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, that that we are” (399).

Leslie Marmon Silko’s work is an example of identity making. The name of the title is a reflection of the nature of storytelling. Ceremony. Silko takes part in this ceremonial act of naming, of creating an identity through the act of storytelling. “Stories are all we have” (2). As the very first page reminds us how the universe is made. “…and whatever she thinks about/ appears./…She thought of her sisters,/…and together they created the Universe/ this world/ and the four worlds below./ Thought-Woman, the spider,/ named things and/ as she named them/ they appeared.” This opening poem frames the rest of the story and, I argue, speaks to the ceremony of writing and creating identity through the means of storytelling. If the primary goal of the United States was to destroy the “Indian” and the memory of it, good advice could have been aim towards their mouths (Powell 402).

An argument against the notion of identity writing could be argued from a postmodern perspective. According to Harvey from The Conditions of Postmodernity, anything written has its own life as a text because it conveys meaning, unintended or predictable by the author. The more readers means the more readings, therefore we can never say what we mean (49). So writing one’s identity could be just writing a farce according to Harvey because words cannot capture a single being or one unite identity.

It’s shouldn’t come as a surprise to scholars of Native American Literature who find identity searching as a common aesthetic across the board. Harvey discusses the present situation in respect to identity. The postmodern character is confused by the very world in which they live and how to react or respond to it. The “labyrinth of selves” inspires a struggle to unify the forgotten past, the bewildering today, and the unpredictable future (41). The multiple local struggles for liberation occur across the postmodern landscape for Havey, and to universalize “Indian” or “Indian Literature” would be an absolutely illegitimate master discourse (47). Momaday might fall under the postmodernists as Harvey discusses as exemplified in his 1970 address to the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars (oddly enough), quoted in Allen, “An Indian is an idea a given man has of himself” (98). In this statement, Momaday seems to admit that being Indian is a personal self-idealization and to talk about a universal “Indian” might be an over simplified and false genetic narrative.

Whether identifying the Indian is false or a severe oversimplification, Native American Scholarly works thrive as more Native Americans writers perpetuate the discipline. The western storyteller is in a unique position as the outsider looking back into his or herself and the systems surrounding them. Silko distinguishes the tradition Indian way of communal storytelling, “Stories about the Creation and Emergence of human beings and animals into this World continue to be retold each ear for four days and hour nights during the winter solstice… Traditionally, everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest person, was expected to listen and be able to recall or tell a portion if only a small detail, from the narrative account or story. Thus the remembering and retelling were a communal process. Even if a key figure, an elder who knew much more then the others, were to die unexpectedly, the system would remain intact.” The individuals die out but the story is immortal. According to Gray, being Native American today means either metaphorically or literally being a mix blood (148). This can be seen within the discipline of Native American Literature. Unlike the communal storytelling process Silko describes, authors have assimilated into Western forms of writing. Being Native American takes on a new meaning as one who of American identity and Native identity simultaneously as though to form a third autonomous identity.

Mary Lynn in Alexie’s “Assimilation” struggles with these competing ideals: being Indian as a separate identity as being upper-middle class American. In the end of the story, Alexie writes about this dramatic experience where Mary Lynn looks at her husband from across a bridge and realizes she loves her marriage for its structure and stability. Mary Lynn’s problems come from the ideal identities she thinks she should have internalized. She operates completely on stereotypes. Her failed attempts to be “Indian” are exemplified in the beginning of the story as she hastily seeks out an Indian looking stranger to have casual sex with. When she suspects that the dependable and boring life that sparks this rash attempt to become Indian is in danger, Mary Lynn calls the whole Indian thing off and decides to hide her affair from her husband. She is seduced by the ideals while keeping them at a distance. Mary Lynn cannot identify herself with her husband’s white upper middle class world, nor is she Indian enough. Mary Lynn, like many of the characters in Alexie’s book, is in this vague in-between space of identity. Not a part of the whole, but one of those who don’t quite belong. Assimilation is impossible for these characters.

Mary Lynn and her husband were not in love with each other because they spited the ideals associated with the other but loved the ideals of the marriage institution. Storytelling is the bridge between Mary Lynn and her husband and the bridge between two contradicting identities. “The boundless capacity of language which, through storytelling, brings us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time” (Gray 148). Another example of characters suffering from identidy idealization is Rocky in Ceremony. Rocky is the only full blooded Indian in the book and he disguises this identity by cladding his body in the American soldier uniform only to suffer a horrific death as a result of enlisting. The war ends and so does the respect for Indians (42). Like Mary Lynn, Rocky functioned on idealistic stereotypes of being a respectable soldier.

Tayo is an example of this third autonomous identity. Not only is he literally mixed blood, but he suffers from discrimination in both Indian and American worlds. Even his own family discriminates against Tayo as the product of his mom and “that white man” (30). Krupat distinguishes Native American Literature as that which results from interaction of local, internal, traditional, tribal or “Indian” literary modes with the dominant literary modes of the various nation-states in which it may appear (214).

Colonization set this process of change in Native American literature as authors were forced to create a new space between Indian and American culture (Larson 60). “Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things” (Silko 126). As U.S. policy attempted to destroy Indians, they acted more as a catalyst for the flourishing Native American Literature discipline as authors picked up their pens, participated in the storytelling ceremony, and created the simultaneously Indian and American individual and community. “The destroyer will try to stop you from completing the ceremony” (125), thus the destroyer is not the American Government or the European Colonizer, the destroyer is silence.

Alexie, Sherman. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.

Allen, Chadwick. “Blood (and) Memory.” American Literature 71(1999): 93-116.

Celi, Ana. “The heritage of stories: a tradition of wisdom.” American Studies International 40(2002): 57.

Dorris, Michael. Cloud Chamber. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1997.

Gray, James. “Mediating Narratives of American Indian Identity.” Contemporary Literature 39(1998): 146-154.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1990.

Keenan, Deirdre. “Trespassing Native Ground: American Indian Studies and Problems of Non-Native Work.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33(2000): 179-189.

Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkley: University of California Press, 1989.

Larson, Sidner. “Native American Aesthetics: An Attitude of Relationship.” MELUS 17(1992): 53-67.

Nabokov, Peter. Native American Testimony. New York: Penguin Group, 1999.

Powell, Malea. “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing.” College Composition and Communication 53(2002): 396-434.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. “American Indian Oral Literatures.” American Quarterly 33(1981): 327-338.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.

Death Lives in DeLillo’s White Noise and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation

In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard contends that simulation was once a false representation of the real but, unlike a representation that relies on the equation between the sign and its reference (the real), it has managed to defeat all references and become a self-contained system. He asserts that the sign becomes “the reversion and death sentence of every reference” (6). Baudrillard’s distinction between representation as disguising the essential or a utopian principle, and simulation which “envelopes the whole edifice for representation itself as a simulacrum,” is supported by Don DeLillo’s White Noise throughout the novel as seen in Jack’s understanding of death leading to his realization that death is the ultimate end to all meaning.

Baudrillard finds a critical difference between a representation of the real and a simulation. In Simulation and Simulacra, he argues that there has been a distinct change in the world marked by a new arrangement of meaning. To pretend is to imply a presence of something that isn’t, whereas, to simulate implies a negation of something that is (3). To use Baudrillard examples, an icon of Jesus recognizes the character’s faith in God and ethnography of a tribe is material to be used as reference for the science community. However, these images negate the meaning of Jesus’ faith or the tribe’s ancient practices because they are themselves a simulacrum. This is important to Baudrillard because creating images in today’s world is dangerous. The image replaces God and the tribe because it reduces the signs that constitute the real into simulated parts that then enter a network of signs upon their creation. Without its image, an idea is dead because it cannot have agency in the system. It’s precisely the creation of the image that resurrects this idea and gives it meaning because it then has a point of entry, marked by the image, into the preexisting network of meaning that knows only how to interpret the image and not the idea of the image.

This “murderous power of images” (5) is brought about because the image, or simulation, does not preserve the real because it does not succeeded it, like a representation does. Instead the simulation replaces the real itself because it regenerates “an operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (2) thus destroying the real. Unlike a representation, a simulation assumes reference is dead because the images have killed them (6) which leads to another danger: unmasking the image reveals that there is nothing behind it (5).

This revelation of image without meaning becomes the conclusion to a primary plot strand in White Noise. DeLillo punctuates Jack’s personal understanding of death at three turning points within the novel signaled by Jack’s speech about the death sentence of every plot (26, 199, 291). His first encounter with death is the moment a student asks him about the plots against Hitler. Jack “finds himself saying” that “…All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots” (26). Jack surprises himself because he gets caught in an exchange of meaning he did not anticipate. Jack has entered and taken agency in a network of preexisting meaning at the expense of his own logical rhetoric and experience. This moment puts Baudrillard’s point to play. Death is the simulacrum that envelops Jack’s personal system of reasoning and memory becoming its own self-contained system of meaning as channeled through Jack.

Another crucial encounter with death for Jack takes place when Babette reveals that she has taken the potentially dangerous drug, Dylar, obtained by deceiving Jack and discrediting her marriage to him. Her tragic conclusion begins with her hope to understand her condition “by reducing it to its parts” (192). This is supposed to advert her fear of death because, from her own experience, making lists and analyzing them solves any problem (191). She then finds the quasi-medical ad for Dylar and agrees to become the subject in exchange for the possibility of destroying her marriage and her body. Jack’s response to Babette is an account of the enormous damage she’s done to their marriage. He conjures the image of death again: “All plots move in one direction” (199).

Baudrillard’s understanding of simulacra is resurrected throughout this moment. Babettes inclination to classify and reduce her fear of death into parts threatens to destroy her. If she dies as result of the experiment, Baudrillard is wins the game because death enters the world of simulation, as no longer in representation form as myth or fear, which the medical system cannot translate into a diagnostic, but an actual chemical component in Babette’s brain, while destroying what it replaces: Babette. Jack brings this plausibility of destruction into reality when he reminds Babette of the irreversible damage she’s done to the marriage. Her infidelity has introduced death into Jack’s network of meaning. Jack has encountered the death of his “simple pleasures” (199) and understanding of Babette playing the role of his confiding wife. These immaterial pleasures and emotions are lost because they represent the edifice of Babette and because they have been defeated by infidelity, which has more weight in the system of simulacra. Babette has become a cheating wife and Jack attempts to reverse this reality by destroying the process that, he thinks, caused this reality to surface.

Jack recalls death a final time as he confides in Murray. Contrary to his former prophecy that death is the goal of all plots, Jack reveals that his own death feels completely artificial (283). Murray convinces Jack that “to plot is to live… You whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram… to plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control” (291-292). Murray supports Baudrillard’s claim of simulacra because the plot or the simulation is the translation of body into the network of meaning, or life. Contrary to Jack’s earlier understanding of plots as death sentences to meaning, plots become the door for meaning because, as Jack admits, death feels shallow, unfulfilling, and artificial (183).

Death is the ultimate end of meaning because it is the affect of simulation and not a simulation itself, as Baudrillard would argue. A simulation is complete only when it takes on agency and therefore meaning in a system. Jack and Mink, or Mr. Gray, both come out alive in the end because plots cannot simulate death. Death is the ultimate end of meaning and the negation of simulation. To represent death as fear, like Winnie Richard’s story of the bear in the forest introducing a horrific experience of mortality (229), rather than attempt to simulate it is to keep the idea or myth of death alive.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Pynchon's and McLuhan's Coy Pessimism: Marching Towards the Age of Technological Mass Communication

In his popular "cult" book The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan writes, "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" (8). Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 takes on a cynical tone as it grapples with this new age of technological media. Pynchon's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is the executor of her wealthy late boyfriend's will. As she takes on that role, she stumbles upon an international conspiracy all seemingly signifiers of her ex Peirce Invararity's alleged master plan.

Oedipa becomes immersed in history and connections which captivate her. Inclined to find some deeper meaning or solution, She travels California with faith that she will solve the supposed mystery of the conspiracy with the aid of the quirky people she encounters. Oedipa's cause is motivated not by the content of the media, the history of the symbols for example, but by her own interpretation of the content so long everything lines up with an assumption she holds about the content; that it is all in some way related to her ex. However, as we discover more and more while the novel progresses, the content is not decipherable. The more "clues" she finds, the more complex her search becomes. Potential conclusions, not the fragmented content, push her forward. Oedipa's demise is brought about because she does not accept that there is no single conclusion. Only possibility and overlap; eternal intertextuality like hyperlinks on the internets. Her paranoia transforms to schizophrenia precisely due to the content of media having no apparent connection or unifying master narrative.

To bring McLuhan back into the picture, Oedipa's journey is shaped by the nature of media because she feels like she is on to something, slowly piecing together a myth that she herself invented. "We march backwards into the future" (75). Oedipa is navigating backwards during her journey to uncover what may or may not be a worldwide conspiracy, the plan of her late boyfriend Peirce Inverarity, or symptom of her own paranoia. Her eyes are in the past as her body moves forward through time, just like the rear view mirror image in McLuhan's book. Serge's Song in chapter 6, in reference to Nabakov's Lolita offers commentary on Oedipa's situation:

And the older generation/ Has taught me what to do--I had a date last night with an eight-year old, And she's a swinger just like me.

The song is a sardonic parody of generational inheritance. The Paranoids, cloaked with the venerable pop-rock Beatles look, cynically point out the redundancy of cultural ailment passing on through the generations. We are romantically linked with the idea of youth just as our predecessors but rather than our desires translating into hope and eventually progressive and adaptive results, our ideals again and again, create dysfunctional situations for ourselves. Oedipa's mystery is really all in her head. The outdated tools she brings to the situation are intended to create order from disorder but since the chaos that surrounds her is completely out of her control, she of course breaks down. Her will to bring order to the chaos can be understood as inherited from Pynchon's fictional original settlers of America. "Nothing ever happen by accident for the Scurvhamite, Creation was a vast, intricate machine" (155). Pynchon provides his reader with the fictional historical narratives so that the reader can draw parallels with past and present. We can surmise that Oepida's world is not conducive to thriving in the narrative's present environment.

It is clear that Oedipa knows no other paradigm other than the ontological. For this, Pynchon punishes his protagonist with her mental breakdown, leaving the reader with absolute possibility: "Oedipa settled back to await the crying of lot 49." Pynchon is clearly telling a story of extreme skepticism towards the age of technological communication as it relates to the generation from which the novel is born, unlike McLuhan who takes on a very coy and playful posture. "Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions" (McLuhan 8). Oedipa embodies social angst in a time of transition. She takes on "today's jobs" with "yesterday's tools" (McLuhan 9) with her insistence upon the existence of a single meta-narrative to organize all of the chaos she encounters then falling prey to the unnamed omniscient narrator's insistence upon entropy, rather than embracing the confusion.

As with most open endings, however, I am always inclined to feel that the author wishes to convey some questioning or doubt of the total pessimism we get up until this last sentence. The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon's period piece that leaves us feeling that the 60s cannot handle the new media transformation but over time the tensions of "cultural transitions" fade as the fire of technological revolution eventually cools down and the changes become the everyday.