Novel on the Edge of Times

Dr. Elisa Sparks, in her entry on Woman on the Edge of Time for Masterplots in Women's Fiction, describes WET as combining

"a counter-cultural critique of authoritarian institutions with one of the first and most fully realized feminist utopias." According to Sparks, the protagonist's journeys into other worlds "map out humane alternatives to the abuses of power she suffers... These fall into three interrelated categories... 1) a Marxist/ anarchist critique of economically based power hierarchies; 2) a feminist critique of sex roles, gender inequities, and child-rearing practices; 3) a humanist critique of scientific ignorance of and technological disregard for the ecological unity of the human mind and the natural environment."

Piercy's attempt at such a comprehensive treatment is an ambitious one, fraught with some notable difficulties. One example is the attempt to show as "illogical" the "logic" of the oppressive system that reduces and totalizes persons according to the systems own diagnosis of said persons.

M. Keith Booker, in "Woman on the Edge of a Genre: The Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy," highlights this particular difficulty:

"By attacking the mental health system through what appears to be a transparent, 'rational' narration of its treatment of Ramos, Piercy runs the risk of subtly reinforcing the ideology of rationalism that makes it possible safely to contain Ramos's potentially subversive energies simply by declaring her mad."

Booker notes that Piercy overcomes this obstacle (and others) "by presenting explicit defamiliarizing alternatives." Booker here indicates the larger elements at work in Piercy's topias, but I would say that she also overcomes obstacles on a smaller scale by the "obtuse" language use of her characters. Per, fuse, grasp, worming, etc. are wonderful defamiliarizing elements, working on an aesthetic level, with socio-political overtones.

P.S. As an additional note, I appreciate Luciente's support of my in-class comments from last week. I voiced my discomfort with a system that has a "set canon" of books that are "good" - leaving the ex-cluded books, by their segregation from the list, to be declared "bad." I question whether such an "establishment" of such views by a Republic of Scholars is not a "closing" of learning, inasmuch as it declares some matters "settled." Luciente agrees as she explains to Connie: "The Powerful don't make revolutions."

When I was seven(not)teen, it was a very good year...

Photo from Mathias Degen, Cologne, Germany
(Wikimedia Commons)

The Novel of the "sixties?"
In his study guide to Dispossessed, Paul Brians identifies Dispossessed as a product of the sixties: "All of these are values much promoted in the counterculture of the "Sixties" (which lasted from approximately 1967 to 1974); and the novel is clearly a product of its time. In many ways, Annares is an idealized hippie commune." (http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/dispossessed.html) I mention this quote here, because, curiously enough, the novel was published in 1974, (the end of this era,) and the concurrent theoretical reading was from Michel Foucault's speech given in 1964, (the beginning of this era.) That Dr. Sparks is a clever one to arrange such readings, yes?

There is so much material in the readings to cover, but let me touch on a few items regarding (ana)chronisms that were of interest to me.

Michel Foucault in 1967 - a couple of anachronisms and a flash of prescience:

**The pressing problem is, not time, but space?

"In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important.... In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time."

The sixties were replaced by the seventies and eighties with the "greed is good/time is money" age that saw the invention of the fax machine, the portable phone, and the ubiquitous proliferation of the DayTimer. Seems like the concern for time outweighed the concern for space, just as the concern for personal wealth outweighed the communal concern for the planet Earth.

**Before systematization of deconstructive/postmodern theory:

"These utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society..."

Note the use of the words "real" and "unreal." Ah, deconstructionist/postmodern theory in its infancy, before its theology had become systematized. No self-respecting quoter of Foucault would reify social constructs with such terminology today.

**Prescience? The exclusion of the "other?"

"Heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and ... retirement homes...."

Wow, Michel - the marginalization, exclusion, and expulsion of the different in favor of reifying the status quo of the dominant system. Hit that one right on the head!

Dispossessed, published in 1974, a recurring anachronism, and a flash of prescience:

**Why can;t we get away from Led Zeppelin and the Goodyear Blimp?
The "airship" or dirigible makes an appearance here, just as it does on so many SciFi works from H.G. Wells to C.S. Lewis to Jules Verne to late 20th-century "steampunk" SciFi. But, even with catastrophes like the recent New York stories, we can;t seem to get over "the humanity" of the Hindenburg.

**The ansible - an idea whose time has come!
Since the dawn of (Star Trek) time, we have yearned for teleportation - or what Le Guin's Shevek calls "transilliance." But, alas, what with the tragedy of Jeff Goldblum's failed experiment in The Fly... So, we have settled on a transference, not of physical bodies, but of ideas. The problem as explained in Dispossessed sounds like the pre-telephone era of Earth history - but it's different. Whereas the telephone can carry voice, and the telegraph words, and the fax a duplicate copy - or at least a reasonable facsimile - of a document - we are now using different means than that to communicate. Not quite the transilliance of the physical person from one place to another - but an increasingly media-rich connectivity that includes video, voice, presentation graphics, collaborative real-time tools, and other interactive features. This new connectivity approaches the "ansible" in ways that might have been hard for Le Guin to have imagined in 1974.

The Golden Arches of Good and Evil

In his introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau sees consumption as “another production” at work in society. Even within capitalist, colonizing, totalizing, authoritarian systems – consumption is (almost invisibly, but nearly ubiquitously) an active “making” by the “other” within the dominant system. As de Certeau observes:

For instance, the ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers' "success" in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians is well known. Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. (xiii)

From this observation, I point to the arches. Golden ones. Evil, colonizing, oppressive emblems of capitalist consumerism. And yet… A Business Week book review of Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause paints an amazing picture of contradiction during a scene that resembles post-apocalyptic mayhem:

During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, vandals caused tremendous damage to businesses in the area. Yet not one of the 60 McDonald's franchises there was harmed. McDonald's executives attributed this good fortune partly to its Ronald McDonald Houses, which provide support for families of children with cancer, implying that what a company reaps is ultimately connected to what it sows. (December 3, 2008)

John Hood, in his book Heroic Enterprises, more finely details this incident to the specific area of South Central Los Angeles:

There are some thirty McDonald’s franchises in south-central Los Angeles, but none were torched and few were damaged at all that fateful week in April 1992. Rioters avoided the restaurants, except perhaps to eat in them (along with the police and firefighters) everyday after curfew was lifted. “We were spared – if we can use that term – because of our involvement in the community,” says franchisee Leighton Hull. “The folks know we’re involved in the community. To them, we aren’t just the guys who take the money and leave town.” (pp. 93-94)

What does this mean in relation to de Certeau’s ideas on consumption as production? First, south-central Los Angeles did not invent McDonald’s. Presumably, there no petition for a McDonald’s to be established there. McDonald’s franchises came there via the same commercially imperialistic wave of invasion that McDonald’s franchises go everywhere. And for the same culinary colonizing purposes. But, a funny thing happened as the billions and billions of burgers were being bought by the colonized. The consumption made something new out of the “product.” The consumers (re)created the culture of the producer. (see the two video clips below.) The consumers re-framed the franchises as “ours” rather than as “theirs.” By making the franchise through their “use” of the product, the consumers brought over the franchises into an associative identity of otherness.

McDonald's commercial circa 1986

McDonald's commercial circa 2008

It is also from this same observation of de Certeau that I wish to interrogate another poesis (making) factor in the mis(dys)topic world of John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up. Let us assume the (postmodern) stock casting of business/capitalism (a la Prosser Enterprises) as the colonizing, dominant, oppressive power – which is a reasonable read for Brunner’s book. I propose that we look within the ranks of the producers themselves for more consumer/makers. I propose that individuals within this dominant system may be viewed as “other” than the producing system itself – indeed, that they may be viewed as a “consumer” of the dominance as a product. I illustrate here by showing the “heart” of the colonizing capitalist employee as voiced by Alan:

Know what I like about my job, Phil? They talk all the time about the businessman, the entrepreneur, being an ‘enemy of mankind’ and all that shit, and it is shit! I mean… I got my chance to be fat… and do I have to be ashamed of how I do it? I do not. Here I am offering a product that people really want, really need, and into the bargain creating jobs for people who’d otherwise be on relief.

Alan may be viewed as a producer, but isn’t Alan also a consumer? A consumer of entrepreneurism as a “product?” Is he any less a cog in the works of the dominant system? Is he any less disposable than the other “consumers?” It is interesting that the individual within the system finds ways to rationalize, justify or otherwise mediate his position as “producer/colonizer” in relation to “consumers/colonized.” Perhaps this betrays his innate understanding of his tenuous position as producer.