Nations and Groups

“We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely...We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines...We don’t see any border” (Silko 216).

“Nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it” (Anderson).

Native American society, an example of a cultural system preceding Nationalism, is characterized by its lack of borders. “We know where we belong on this earth.” Native American society, unlike western, nationalistic society, is not defined by location. Land is understood, but not part of societies definition. Nationalism needs to be understood in light of this because it is defined by exactly this characteristic. Nationalistic societies are defined chiefly by their location. Native American society is defined by group bonds and ancestry and history. In “The Almanac of the Dead,” we can move about in space and time because the group is not limited by these dimensions. In a nationalistic society, leaving the bounds of the nation would take us outside its group. Therefore we can see how simply Nationalism relates to preceding cultural systems. Nationalism artificially created a bond within its society, creating a united group regardless of the actual connections of its members.

Waiting for Death

"As the title indicated, the book is very much bout the dead; it is set in the desert, an environment where 'the dead did not rot or dissolve' - a place where people are simply 'passing time' while they wait for death (64). In this context, the dead are both bodies that have outlived their social significance and ghosts of those who died before their agendas were complete" (Irr 225).

In The Almanac of the Dead, it seems that those around the dead and thinking of the dead immediately dissociate the corpse from the person that once was. The characters, and therefore the author, treat those who die as though their spirit or self immediately departs from their body. However, this death, though a seemingly large transition, does not particularly affect those who die and those around the dead. As Irr paraphrases, these characters are "simply ' passing time while they wait for death.'" And once they die, they are treated somewhat of a nonchalance where "the dead are [...] bodies that have outlived their social significance." Simple as that. Each of the deaths in the novel are announced, explained, reasoned, and then everyone moves on fairly quickly. With Seese's reaction to Eric's death, with La Escapia's reaction to Bartolomeo's death, and with Alegria's reaction to Menardo's death, the reaction time is consistently brief. When Alegria goes to see Menardo's body after his accidental death, Silko narrates, "Menardo was lying on his back covered now with his own shirt and suit coat. Alegria approached slowly. Poor silly man! [...] She wept for herself, not the fool Menardo. Menardo had been worth much more to her alive than dead [...]" (508). Alegria quickly comes to terms with her husband's death when she realizes what has happened and she recognizes her new dilemmas due to his departure even quicker. Everyone is solely concerned with themselves so much that close deaths do not barely affect them.
After Max Blue's accident, he lies in the hospital and reflects on his views about the death he has nearly succumbed to many times, "Max knew there was nothing after death. Nothingness and silence. The silence and the emptiness were darkness. Max had recovered consciousness after the place crash, but he had never forgotten the darkness and the silence that flowed endlessly. There were no devils or Jesus. Death was the dark, deep earth that blotted out the light of a vast blue sky Max called life" (Silko 353). His views on death are very matter-of-fact, simple, and final that he even goes on to say that he "believed killing a man was doing him a favor" (Silko 354). This view of death and its benefits is not at all unrelated with how other characters deal with the this same concept. In the desert setting Silko sets up, every character is forced to fight for themselves, whether it be a relationship, a career, or a lifestyle, until their "'passing time'" is over.

The Global Imagined Community

What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogenous, empty time,’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measure by clock and calendar.

(Anderson 24)

In this part of his essay, Anderson explains the concept of simultaneity-cross-time, the frame in which modern humanity operates according to man-made concepts of time and space. In an ever internationalizing world, this concept rings truer since people of one nation are more aware of, and affected by, the fact that citizens of another are moving about, living, much the same as they are living at the same time. Soon after this passage, Anderson uses an example of the reading of newspapers internationally, which particularly illuminated this concept for me: many of us wake up in the morning and read the newspaper (or at least encounter some form of global media with or without intending to via the Internet or the public), and are thus unintentionally brought in to the global imagined community. These forms of media connect us to the media-informed of other nations in our daily, ritualistic “imagining” of the world as we see it through news headlines – someone in China might be reading about Obama’s most recent stopover in Asia in Chinese and with a bias different from my own, but both of us have formulated an opinion on what this event means and are now connected in our understanding and participation in the global imagined community. This community may be imagined, or “marked not by prefiguring or fulfillment” since we do not always intend to create it, but it is nevertheless powerful in its ability to unconsciously link the world.

When one moves back and looks at the larger picture of the various stories in Silko’s The Almanac of the Dead, one can see the unconscious and inevitable connections Silko depicts across cultures, nations, and peoples. Sterling, for instance, is hired to protect the Laguna tribe from the prying of the American film crew that is constantly violating Native customs; but, it is a losing battle from the start as the tribe has overestimated Sterling’s knowledge of modern culture and underestimated the film crew, i.e. the pervasiveness of American consumerist culture. In the face of a younger generation with less interest in its own Native culture and an increasingly impeaching American culture, the Tribal Council exiles Sterling less out of reason, than out of a need of a scapegoat for the loss and doom of “the Indian way”. Sterling comments on the diminution of Native culture and ties it to the history of African tribes:

…Sterling had begun to realize that people he had been used to calling “Mexicans” were really remnants of different kinds of Indians. But what had remained of what was Indian was in appearance only – the skin and hair and the eyes. The cheekbones and nose like eagles and hawks. They had lost contact with their tribes and their ancestors’ worlds…Indians flung across the world forever separated from their tribes and from their ancestral lands – that kind of think had been happening to human beings since the beginning of time. African tribes had been sold into slavery all over the Earth.

(Silko 88)

It is interesting that Silko uses African tribes in comparison to these Native American tribes because it further highlights the brutality and effectiveness of American (presumably white) culture in disintegrating tribal, community and land-based lifestyles. The demand for slaves during America’s colonial period, another form of American consumerism, brutally eradicated, or weakened, many African tribal cultures because these cultures were easy to impose upon and exploit. Both examples demonstrate the negative effects of the global community Anderson described: the assimilation, which means to say eradication, of materially weaker cultures (those that are tribal or technologically undeveloped) into a greater, materialistic, pervasive Western culture.

Fences, Borders, and Artefacts

The first and most important matter in Almanac of the Dead were the examinations of suffering in the characters through vivid images, chopped up like it was splayed out on an editor's table ready to be montaged in a movie. The grandfather and grandmother figures of Sterling's tribe, Seese's dreams of her child, the syringes and pill containers in the kitchen. It reminds me of the passage in which "The creation of these artefacts...was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became 'modular,' capable of being transplanted... to a great variety of social terrains" (Anderson 4). These images for the most part are not in themselves the artefacts, but the result of them. Maybe the artefacts are the Native American lands, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the Drug War that gave birth to each character and their relation to what seems like a shared national suffering.

I was especially fascinated with Silko's style as she recounts Stirling's past. The anguish expressed was such a difference from a western, national view of Indian tribes' traditions as antiquated and foolish. Suddenly the sterile museum displays become atrocities, sacrilegious, and the soul is forcefully tugged from the elder who views this. The simple act of the item becoming the artefact is forcefully transplanted from the Native American culture into "modernity".

I also took this into account when I considered the criminals in Stirling's magazines as often being of Native American descent. That these people somewhat became museum pieces themselves as a representation of the borderlessness combating the "nation-ness" of the United States was almost like a more modernized image of the Native Americans themselves. If "is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson 6), then Silko's lack or presence of boders in Almanac of the Dead presents an interesting case study. There is the stifling of Tuscan, the Ranch, but the structure of the novel itself - with it's winding narratives outside of the Ranch, many different viewpoints, and jumping from one to the other fairly quickly juxtaposes this prison-like environment with another sort of spirit. I would very much enjoy exploring the possibility that the drug inclusion in the novel also served as a point to contrast another extension of the borderless principle.

Imaginary Boundaries

"These most precious sacred figures had been stolen. The museum of the Laboratory of Anthropology had received and was in the possession of stolen property. The white man's own laws said this. Not even an innocent buyer got title of ownership to stolen property" (Silko 33).

In Almanac of the Dead, Silko plays on the theme of people of European descent being nationalist thieves, stealing the land of the Americas from its native people and struggling (and failing) to live in harmony with the earth: "From their flimsy attachments to one another and their children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born... The ancestors had had called Europeans "the orphan people"... They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them" (258). White characters in Almanac have a propensity for insane drug addiction, murder, theft, and kidnapping. Seese's narrative is tainted and confused by her often-drug-induced state, as the reader is swept through her emotional responses without clear explanation or even a rational thought.

So what is Silko trying to say? It seems pretty clear that she is pointing out that through Europeans' attempt to create nations and draw up borders, dividing the earth that in fact belongs to all, they have lost any semblance of spiritual connection to the earth, and in turn, have fragmented the indigenous identity and forfeited anyone's chance of finding inner-peace. The fact of the matter is, as Silko and the Native American people see it, there are no national boundaries, only those that we create ourselves. Indeed, as Anderson points out with a quote by Hugh Seton-Waton, "Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no 'scientific definition' of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists" (Anderson 3).

Why does this phenomenon exist, though? Anderson goes on to cite Tom Nairn in order to explain that nationalistic inclinations are built, though pathologically so, into the societal-developmental mentality of humans, "as inescapable as neurosis in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world and largely incurable" (5). As humans flounder in the sea of doubt and ambiguity of locating ourselves, cognitively mapping our location in the universe, we naturally fall back on these somewhat primal habits of dividing and separating, creating borders and grouping into "nations."

Imaginary Lines and the Mediators between Heaven and Earth

In Anderson’s Cultural Roots, he explains the differences in the perception of society in the past and present. One of the cultural systems which he mentions is that of “The Religious Community”, which along with the dynastic realm held back the development of nationalism at an earlier date. Anderson sees the three main religions of Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism as creating a world, “imaginable largely through the medium of sacred language and written script,” (13). And further goes on to say that,

“The fundamental conceptions about ‘social groups’ were centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and horizontal. The astonishing power of the papacy in its noon day is only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, and a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven. (The awesomeness of excommunication reflects this cosmology)”

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, were are shown various Native American societies, that while at first glance seem to have embraced nationalist thought in the wake of Western hegemony, on closer examination, still exhibit either out right, or at least a yearning for the pre-nationalistic world explained by Anderson. Specifically we can look at the Almanac’s portrayal of Native Americans through the lens of Anderson’s Religious Community.

First of all, the idea of sacred language and script is shown by the representation of the Almanac itself, a collection of ancient Mayan codexes and latin translations that surely only the mysterious twins Zeta and Lecha can understand completely. But, the “sacred language” could also be the mystical powers possessed by the usually female, elderly, Native American women; Lecha’s connection to the dead, the Eskimo woman’s ability to crash planes, Zeta’s ability to communicate with snakes, etc. With these abilities, deeply rooted in the religious beliefs of Native Americans, they are comparable to the papal elite Anderson mentions, because like the medieval papacy, are able to mediate “between vernacular and latin”, or combining their mystical powers with modern technology and criminal schemes. The Eskimo woman uses the televisions to crash planes, and Lecha uses her abilities to make money on the daytime talk show circuit. These woman are shown to be at the top of the Native American society, or at least those garnered the most respect, fear, or awe. They truly do, “mediate between earth and heaven”.

Secondly, we are shown that the Native Americans of Almanac are not “boundary-oriented, and horizontal”. Calabazas says to Root;

“We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely...We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines...We don’t see any border.” (216, Silko)

The modern ideas of nationalistic boundaries hold no wait because in Calabazas eyes they are “imaginary lines.” What is important is ones place in the earth; that is what is real. Not the “horizontal” Western imperialist view, spreading out, gobbling everything flatly from all directions. Calabazas and other Native Americans prefer their “Vertical” view. They constantly have to be aware of their place among “the four worlds below this world.” (121), not only concerning themselves with the horizon.

Michael Randolph

I’m not really sure what it says about this class that the book that is closest to our true, modern-day lives is filled with incredibly dysfunctional characters. Nearly every character we meet is over-sexualized, emotionally distraught, whacked out of their minds, or mentally distant (if not a combination of two or three of those things). The interesting part about Almanac of the Dead is that though it is set in a world similar to true modern surroundings, everything about it seems to push readers away and create distance between the audience and the characters. The beginning of the book’s chapters are in a removed, distant third person limited point of view that enables readers to access the thoughts of the emotion, and yet still not be given access to their inner thoughts; the narrator still acts as a intermediary. Examples of these chapters include Exile and The Ranch, following Sterling, and TV Talk Show Psychic following Seese. The chapters switch from one point of view to another sharply, jumping into new characters without giving a background on them. In the beginning of the novel, we are both there, present in the time and minds of the characters, and removed, separated by unfamiliarity and abrupt introductions.

The style choice functions as putting audiences in the mind of Seese; as she begins to reclaim sobriety, so does the audience through improved clarity and detail in her thoughts and experience. Even after the novel begins to stylistically lighten up, the retold vignettes still describe incredibly removed behavior. For example, the retelling of Eric’s suicide and David’s reaction reflect an extremely impersonal and clinical approach to living.

The larger meaning of the distance between characters and their emotions imply a larger crisis in the realm of race relations. How can characters who are so extremely flawed relate to others when they can’t even understand themselves? When their own emotions are so alien, how can they appreciate or interact with people of drastically different backgrounds? Are Almanac’s drugged out characters even worth figuring out?

Truth-Language of the Almanac

In the passages from "Imagined Communities", Benedict Anderson describes the way that sacred languages held together classical communities of the sort that faded as nationalism rose to prominence. The power he ascribes to languages is illustrated and becomes an integral part of "Almanac of the Dead". Native American culture is characterized as a traditional community, where language plays a vital role in keeping the culture alive, particularly in the form of the novel's namesake, the almanac.

The almanac Yoeme passed down to Zeta and Lecha is in the form of loose papers and notebooks covered in writing and drawings. To an outside observer unversed in the Native American lore the sisters grew up with, the contents of the almanac would be nonsense. In this way, the text operates as a "truth-language" just like "Church Latin, Qur'anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese" in that it determines, in part, the membership of the group (Anderson 14). For example, Menardo chose to ignore his Indian ancestry and his grandfather's stories and so is not versed in the sacred language. In contrast, since Zeta and Lecha were very close to Yoeme, they learned the language and claimed their membership in the group.

It is also significant that the drawings of snakes were so important to Yoeme. According to Zeta, "the notebook of the snakes was the key to understanding all the rest of the old almanac" (Silko 134). Similarly, Anderson states that the vital difference between the sacred languages and other more modern languages was "the non-arbitrariness of the sign" and the belief that all the symbols were "emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it" (14). The snakes are important because the drawings themselves mean something and do not just stand in as representations for an unrelated idea. The power of the almanac requires its reader to understand the depth of meaning behind a seemingly simple drawing.

"Almanac of the Dead" also illustrates Anderson's idea that "the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven" (14-15). This explanation, when applied to the women in "Almanac" who used Native American languages to evoke a specific mystical occurrence, explains their power. Lecha discovered what happened to murdered people and exerted control over others' lives using what we are lead to believe are traditional Native American methods. When discussing their work on the almanac, Lecha tells Zeta, "once the notebooks are transcribed, I will figure out how to use the old almanac. Then we will foresee the months and years to come- everything" (Silko 137). Lecha truly believes in the almanac's power, the power instilled in mere pages by the words inscribed on them.

According to Anderson, "the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized" (19). This fall also applies to the language of the almanac. In the past, as described by Silko, the Indians of the Southwest United States and Mexico was divided into villages with similarities in culture. However, in the portions of "Almanac of the Dead" focusing on Menardo, the reader becomes familiar with the characterization of Native Americans as territorial revolutionaries, desiring an overthrow of the government to reclaim their land. While they may maintain their knowledge of traditional culture and lore, their mindset has become one of nationalism. They turned away from the power of their language to the power of guns and explosives, and in the process, lost a vital part of their culture.

The "Legitimate" Government

The modern governments of the world have existed for hundreds of years. People seem to take the existence for these governing bodies as givens in our society. However, what is it that gives these nations the right to be in power and control lands that they travelled to? In no nation is this more prevalent than in the United States. We are literally a nation of immigrants, who suppressed our native population almost out of existence.
Leslie Marmon Silko, in her novel Almanac of the Dead, writes “there was no, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the European’s definition and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had a clear title. … All the laws of the illicit governments had to be blasted away” (133). While this is blatantly a statement bashing America, it also raises a good point. While our government might disagree, according to this statement, which is said by a Mexican Indian living in Arizona, we have no right to the lands that we live on. According to this statement though, Europeans are entitled to the lands they live on and all other people are as well, just not any country of primarily European descendants in the Americas. This statement seems to validate the fact that other people displaced the natives in their homelands and took over the nation. This was common in the western world. The Romans displaced the Celts and other earlier European groups; the Romans were later displaced by the Goths, and the other Germanic tribes who organized the modern nations of Europe. The Aryans also displaced the natives of India and the Japanese displaced the Ainu in Hokkaido, the northern province of Japan. I am not stating this to say what the Europeans did during the era of exploration was good, but it wasn’t new and it wasn’t just limited to the Americas.
I believe that this claim can really be applied to all people living in almost every nation throughout the world. Evolutionary theory has all humans originating in Africa, and thus each part of world belongs to everyone. In essence, the fact that we moved to specific lands means that we stole the land from the other early civilizations. This begs the question, if our government has no right to rule because we stole the land, then who really has the right to rule. I would argue that the government that truly has the right to govern is a true people’s democracy, not one where we represent elected officials, but a world government where everyone is informed and understands how to govern. Ideally a democracy governs for the people, but if a “legal government” can’t be set up because the land doesn’t belong to the inhabitants, then a world government, set up around complete unification is the only government that could truly work. While some tribal lands are still controlled by the “original inhabitants,” the argument could be made that since the government doesn’t really represent the people, especially in a lot of third world countries, then no government, be it a monarchy or a representational democracy can be legitimate.
This also makes the notion that the government is a power in control of the land and not the people. In any land where people live, there will always be people living in it, and government is somewhat of a basic human necessity. Government is not formed by the land that the nation encapsulates, but by the people living in it. People make up a government. I feel that what Silko is arguing against is a government blatantly disregarding the minorities living in it; they must represent everyone. Thus, while a world government is a viable solution to this problem, another option is that we could truly represent all minorities in America equally.
The idea that there is no true government because we don’t really own the land brings into question the idea of nationalism. If there is no nation, can there be nationalism? Benedict Anderson, in his work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, “nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it” (12). This presents the idea that nationalism is dependant on the nation state. Thus, without a nation there is no nationalism. This does leave a slight window open for some form of nationalism. Nationalism is in essence a glorified love for ones nation and origins. I feel that while nationalism might seem to be dependant on a government, it might actually depend on a bond between the people who live in a region. It isn’t the government that creates nationalism, but the people. Since Silko doesn’t argue about religion or specific birthplace, I believe that religion would likely have replaced nations if there wasn’t a nation to begin with. No matter what, humanity will always be divided. We can never all assimilate and be the same. As was discussed last week in Snow Crash, the only time humanity was ever uniform is when we were practically controlled by a universal language. However, with language and geographic differences, comes basic human differences.
While I raised the idea earlier of a unified human government where every person was informed because no nation truly owns the land, the people will never be unified, and it might be nearly impossible because of basic human differences. I said earlier that it was basic human differences that create nations. I believe this is necessarily true for any nation, and thus, nationalism is one of these differences. In the case of Silko’s statement, the problem may be two different views of nationalism. The Mexican Indians do not feel any attachment to the United States, and thus don’t respect it. They feel that it is an illegal government because of nationalism. Their nationalistic impulses divide them between the white Americans. They can only see the differences between the America that they want and the America that is. They see themselves as oppressed in their homeland. This raises the question of what is the role of a government, if it is not to represent all people. The natives align with a different set of values and goals, because nationalism comes from the culture that precedes it, and thus, all people are inherently different, and to over come this and truly unify as a people, we will need to see each other as a common human form, rather than by racial and national differences.

Racial Nations of Communion

"In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of the fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson 5-6). This presented concept of nationalism and its members mirrors the impact of national heroes, legends, and public enemies on their distant audiences in both the present and the future. Although those inspired by these public figures cannot personally see, hear, or touch them, these people still maintain a belief that they are kindred spirits with these heroes and that they are related in some non-physical way. In Part One of Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, the character Sterling often looks "public enemies" such as John Dillinger and Geronimo for motivation and inspiration due to their Native American heritages and their rebellious, clever, and brave stories. He looks to figures like these for guidance because he believes he has similar morals to these legendary criminals that he has never and will never personally encounter. When reflecting on his past at the beginning of his new job with Lecha, Seese, Ferro, and others, Sterling remembers, "Sometimes the Police Gazette ran specials on famous crimes of yesteryear. These had been his favorites. He had been most excited the time they had the special on Geronimo. Geronimo was included with John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Billy the Kid. Sterling had often heard Aunt Marie and her sisters talk about the old days, and Geronimo's last raids, when even a platoon of Laguna "regulars" had helped patrol New Mexico territory for Apache renegades. Somehow Sterling had never quite imagined old Geronimo in the same class with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Geronimo had turned to crime only as a last resort, after Mexican army troops had slaughtered his wife and three children on U.S. territory in southern Arizona. Despite the border violations by the Mexican army and the murder of Apache women and children who had been under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of War, no U.S. action had ever been taken against the Mexican army. Geronimo had been forced to seek justice on his own" (Silko 39). Throughout this passage and other moments in the novel, Sterling discusses Geronimo as though he personally understands each of Geronimo's choices and therefore does not blame Geronimo for his criminal actions. A main trait of Geronimo and some of the other public enemies he admires is that they are, like him, of Native American descent. When Sterling first introduces his infatuation with these criminal legends, he lists his assumptions about their racial descents, concluding that each of them are either Native American or closely related to Native Americans. Through this determination, Sterling is able to relate to these figures not only on a racial level, but on a rebellious level, due to their emigration from Native American reservations, as well. He cannot "meet them, or even hear of them, yet in [his mind] lives the image of their communion" (Anderson 6).

Politics of Chronology

"Clinton believed it was important for the people to understand that all around them lay human slavery, although most recently it had been called by other names. Everyone was or had been a slave to some other person or to something that was controlled by another. Most people were not free, Clinton knew from experience, yet man was born to be free. The first slaves Europeans kept had been white. Slave keepers didn't care about color as long as the slaves were strong and stayed alive. The European kings had slaves called royal 'subjects' who worked obediently and paid their taxes to the kings. One kind of slavery had often been traded for another slavery as bad or worse. Slaves of past centuries had shelter and food. Yet today in the United States, so-called 'free' men, women, and children slept under cardboard on the street. White people wouldn't like being called 'slaves' by a black man, but Roy didn't think most radio listeners would know what color Clinton was except red, commie red" (Silko 411-2).

"Figuring the Virgin Mary with 'Semitic' features or 'first-century' costumes in the restoring spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the mediaeval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present.... He [Auerbach] rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present. In a such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real significance" (Anderson 23-4).

In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko plays intriguingly with the very notion of time, making the distant past extremely present, and building layers within the text. First, of course, it is an epic novel, which spans over 400 years in 800 pages, focused primarily in the American Southwest and Mexico. Yet, there is displacement even in this; the titles of books bear limited relevance to the temporal location of the novel, but instead to the ideological. This is how it's possible for Book 3, titled "Africa," to have three chapters set in New Jersey, Arizona, and El Paso.
The title object, the Almanac of the Dead, is a prophetic book recounting the history of the Laguna Pueblo people, a book which is missing pages, recorded only in notebooks, that Lecha is in the process of transcribing. In some sense, this act of transcription serves as a frame for the book itself, as Silko radically redefines and rewrites history, breaking down the existing framework and rebuilding in a new, nuanced, intense and personal way.
Benedict Anderson, in his treatment of time, contends that time is created in nation states, to allow the narration of a linear history, one that represents progress, rather than a wheel or spiral, that returns and circles a singular point or gyrates about a center. History, and therefore time, is additionally important because it allows a conception of future, as a continuation of something, rather than an existence which stays rooted in the moment, with no concern but immediate survival.
The passage from Anderson above discusses the mediaeval idea of simultaneity, which juxtaposes the past with the present moment, created out of a sense of impending doom, the continual possibility of doomsday. Such a story creates fear and removes any motivation for long-term planning, but also ties people much more closely to their ancestors, since the very notion of time is collapsed to the immediate. Distinctions of period and era no longer matter, because history as such doesn't compute.
It is exactly this notion of time which Silko places in Clinton's hands. He describes the history of slavery, but not as a process which ended, but instead one that continues into the present moment. Attention is paid to time: he notes the evolution of the form, and its representations, and perhaps in that sense, it strays from Anderson's model. Yet, instructively, the point of the collapse remains, as the juxtaposition of slavery with the present makes homelessness that much more visceral and immediate to the reader. It also creates a context of redefinition, as homelessness is no longer seen as an isolated condition, but part and parcel of a problematic history where people are deprived of agency on account of their poverty, their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, their gender, and so forth. Tremendous shock value comes from referring to the homeless as "slaves," especially since common perception sees them as dangerously free, outcasts of society who, as such, feel no compulsion to adhere to societal norms. In fact, though, as Silko makes exceptionally clear, they are the prisoners of a system who refuses to serve their needs, to help them find work, to include them within society.
The redefinition of time very effectively serves Silko's goal by bringing under inquistion the very capitalist notion of progress. By placing slavery in the present, in a rearranged form, she allows and compels the reader to question what other very human tragedies have been marked as past, but are really currently manifest. However, Clinton's image of slavery in the present is based on a notion of prescribed revolution as part of the Homeless Army. This is, actually, the formulation of a radio script to play after the revolution has taken control of the air waves. Thus, time is present. And Clinton acknowledges the possibility of a past, that these things may once be something that once was, instead of currently is. In a sense, this moment is poised on the creation of the notion of time, time in the historical sense. The passage seems to suggest that history as progress is possible only if one has agency. Time is collapsed for those without power.
So, simultaneity is also conceptually important as the presence of different ideas of time at one moment. Thus, Roy is conscious that white people may be uncomfortable with Clinton, a black man, referring to them as slaves because of a historical sensibility that puts slavery in the distant past, as something that only happened to black people. The immediacy of homelessness to slavery is not transcendentally imminent. Implicitly, the passage also implies the mainstream history of this progression as discontinuous and unrelated events, the story that Clinton is telling the counterhistory of, the notion of time as progress that he's fighting. Similarly, one could imagine the conception of time by mediaevel monarchs and peasants as dramatically different, as one might have need of calendars and clocks, while the others could rely on the sun and the seasons for their individual needs. Of course, attendant with these differing timekeeping uses, a different sort of history is presented.
The implicit question, then, becomes an investigation of our politics of chronology, by what we do when we attempt to understand events in a linear framework, perhaps losing sight of the truly important behind an aberrant curve.

Temporal Coincidence and Blindness

“The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous existence.” (Anderson 26)

“But that had not prevented Calabazas from giving the one of his sarcastic lectures on blindness. Blindness caused solely by stupidity...” (Silko 201)

“Mosca pretended to gag on Calabaza’s lecture, then he laid his head on the dashboard and went to sleep. But Root sat leaning out the truck window, catching the cool, damp smell of the summer desert night. Being around Mexicans and Indians or black people, had not made him feel uncomfortable. Not as his own family had. Because if you weren’t born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren’t born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.” (Silko 202)

Mirroring the rise of nationalism, there was a pervasive paradigm shift in the individual’s conception of temporality. Where before past and future existed simultaneously in a all consuming present, the new paradigm held the present as a temporal coincidence somewhere between the past and the future. In this, the present and more specifically, the individual’s experience of that present lost much of its significance. The present was no longer “the end of days” but rather relegated to a arbitrary measurement of clock and calendar. The moment was superseded by the infinite future.

With the present as temporal coincidence, society and the nation became ageless. The nation could live on indefinitely and each individual could hold onto this immortal entity to find some sort of perpetuity. This shift in thought process also carried an underlying faith in the normality of the system. That each individual in the society and state had full belief that every other individual in that “sociological organism” existed in the same “steady, anonymous, simultaneous, existence.” Having never even encountered the vast majority of Americans, an American citizen will yet assume that all other Americans are living, breathing, toiling, through the day as well. To this point, these assumptions seem wholly logical but the side effects of such assumptions can be irrational.

In believing every other person in a nation lives in the same present, individuals often conclude that most other people exist in a similar way to the them. This fanciful communal lifestyle is imagined as the norm, the normal. Individuals within majority groups especially fall prey to this line of thinking. the individual project himself onto society as a whole. Such attitudes lead to a dual blindness, the blindness of the other and the self. Groups are singularly categorized. Each individual turns into a type and carries all the baggage of that type.

In Almanac of the Dead, the reader is forced “to explore the world of the different.” There is a nothing mainstream about the multitude of characters in the novel. Arms runners, drug dealers, assassins, vietnam vets. Initially, a reader might try to place each characters or group of characters at the fringe of the sociological organism. However, there is not enough space on the edge. Like the narrative, nothing is easily boxed and everything shares a connection. As well, each character suffers from a mild to severe case of racial blindness (or prejudice). In this, a unique perspective is given to the reader. Just as the prejudices and blindness of a coked out blonde gets comfortable, the reader is thrown unapologetically into the mind of a exiled old Laguna Pueblo.

Embodied in the character of Root is the exploration of the different. He has lost his ties with the conventional ideas of society when he becomes physically crippled. He leaves the world of white America and is instead accepted into the world of Calabazas. Although he has not lost his blindness, Root is able to recognize the blindness that all the other characters are afflicted by. Yet where Root is limited by his inability to enter other consciousnesses, the reader is not.

The reader is denied blindness. No single perspective is allowed to dominate. Each gets a fairly detailed sorrowful and sordid past. Temporal concerns thrown out the window, the reader even gets to live these pasts. Old grudges and hates get built up by one character only to be demolished by the plight of another. So many lives and fragments are poured into this unforgiving and brutal text (of epic proportions) that personal assumption are steamrolled. Reader literally sees too much. Four hundred plus pages in, the reader must attempt apathy lest nightmares about corrupt Mexican police officers with cattle prods deny any sleep. One message is burned into the consciousness, individuals are not simple or similar.

The origins of nationhood

Benedict writes that the loss of 3 concepts that were once the basis of human existence, gave rise to a need to find a new concept to give our lives foundation, which he proposes to be nationhood. In the theoretical text passage below, it shows how the loss of the old, religiously influenced concept of temporality leads to the desire for the concept of the nation, and the extract from Almanac of the Dead shows how one character, La Escapía, exemplifies this desire.

Benedict writes that the “conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essentially identical...rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence (above all death, loss and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption from them”. This concept’s “slow, uneven decline...under the impact of economic change...and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history...the search was on....for a new way of linking fraternity, power, and time meaningfully together”. This new way is nationhood.

We have lost that idea of simultaneity, the idea that we are steadily marching towards something, in a biblical sense, that things are a fulfillment of something previously predicted. The present and the past and future are no longer linked for us by religion. Thus, we need nationhood to replace that certainty, that link, as Benedict writes, so as to once again “[root our] lives firmly in the very nature of things]”.

The following passage shows how La Escapia finds this simultaneity, or rather, where she finds it. “Then in the fourth week, the lazy Cubans had begun to read directly from Das Kapital. For La Escapia it had been the first time a white man ever made sense. For hundreds of years white men had been telling the people of the Americas to forget the past; but now the white man Marx came along and he was telling people to remember. The old-time people had believed the same thing: they must reckon with the past because within it lay this present moment and also the future moment”

She has come to believe, not only in the simultaneity of the experience of the thousands of her fellow Mexicans, but also of the simultaneity of the past, present and future. However, it is as Benjamin writes, a simultaneity that differs from the simultaneity of the past. It is a simultaneity of the nation; in the words of Debray “but after all, France is eternal”. It is the idea that previous exploitation should not be forgotten by those suffering now, and those suffering now have a responsibility to those that come after to end this exploitation. All because there is something bigger than the individual, and that is the nation to which all of them as individuals belong to.

In addition, the fact that La Escapía is fighting for the cause of the poor, and is poor herself, makes her a prime example of someone searching for something to replace the certainty of religious temporality in her life. After all, one of the uniquely desirable qualities of religion is described by Benedict is its “imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering”. It responds to that, in a sense, by providing the certainty that there is a purpose to life, that the present, past, and future are inextricably linked. La Escapía and the poor she fights for need such a concept more than anyone, and thus they need nationhood to give them back their footing in an increasingly secular world where this concept is beginning to disappear.

Franchises and Alliances

Snow Crash imagines a world in which every organization or social group has the power to franchise itself and declare itself sovereign. In this world, every "burbclave," a mix of the suburban ideal and a gated, turret guarded community, has its own laws and rules. In Snow Crash, some burbs allow only whites, some only blacks. Many franchises are racially divided as well. There is the Italian american Mafia, Asian American Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and Hispanic Narcolumbian franchise. Each of these groups represents a single racial group, and although some are open to dealing with others, they are essentially closed to other races. We know for example, that the Mafia and the Narcolumbians are at war, and that some in the Mafia refer to citizens of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong as 'Nips' and obvious slur against the Japanese. Although we seldom encounter straight racism in the novel, there is one scene in which Hiro is confronted by citizens of New South Africa, a burbclave which enforces Apartheid style regulations, because of his Blasian ethnicity. This is actually one of the few times Hiro's African American identity is referenced.

Interestingly, the worst represented ethnicity in the novel would have to be African Americans. Although Hiro is himself half Black, he much more closely follows Asian stereotypes than Black ones. In addition, there is no powerful Black franchise in the novel, and only one black burbclave is mentioned. To build off Mark Dery's essay for last week, one might conclude that Stephenson does not imagine Blacks as easily in his technologically futuristic world.

Despite the poor representation of Blacks in the novel, Snow Crash certainly emphasizes the importance of diversity. Parallel to the battle between Lagos' team and Rife's is a battle between conformity and homogeneity, and sub-culture and diversity. Rife though he gathers his power from all over the world, refugees from Asia, weapons from Russia, and Raven from Alaska, seeks to homogenize them and brainwash them into Me following slaves. Lagos' team, on the other hand, is made up of hackers, thrashers, the Mafia, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, and of course Ng's robot dogs. There is no attempt to force them to conform, but rather each element's specialties are integral to their success as a whole. Hiro represents this alliance perfectly. He is, as his business card suggests, many things at once. He is a famous hacker, a great swordsman, a member of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong and an employee of the Mafia and the CIC, and of course he is of mixed racial background to boot. Hiro is the product of a hundred clashing cultures. Paradoxically the world he protects is not just that of the thrashers and hackers, diverse subcultures, but also the America of the franchise, which, while still diverse, celebrates uniformity to an absurd degree. Even though the mind-controlling machinations of Rife are foiled, isn't America still heading towards an increasingly uniform franchised, burbclaved future?

I agree with Lloyd on our critical text this week– reading Jameson’s argument on “cognitive mapping” was difficult and pretty confusing until he connected the concept to the idea of spatiality through the example of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in Detroits in the 70’s. In this, he argues that the League’s socialist revolution could not be carried into other areas of the world because of its unique approach to bringing socialism to Detroit by curtailing their efforts to the sociopolitical landscape of the city. This made the ideas he had explained earlier in the text, and their relation to Snow Crash, more clear to me – namely, his description of art as being “limited to a tiny corner of the social world” (349) and his “late capitalism” (350).

Jameson uses art, and our perception of it, to explain the inevitable discord between what we take from a piece of art, and what it was meant to leave us with. Regardless of what an artist means through his art, the displacement of the art outside of his control and mindset into another’s changes its meaning such that all spectators get something different from his art, especially if these spectators view the art in the context of his life or background. Jameson argues that all viewers are thus not seeing, and never will see, the truth of the art. Just as the League’s strategies could not spatially expand beyond the city to which they apply, art, or artists, can not truthfully share it’s meaning with those who did not make it. One sees this idea in Snow Crash through the Metaverse, specifically in its avatars’ facial expressions. Though the users of the Metaverse control the actions and voices of their avatars, much of the emotion and purpose of regular human activity is lost in its pixilated and robotically-moved world. Action, in general, is simplified: most public parts of the Metaverse are programmed so avatars walk through each other and the nonexistence of virtual death means destruction, physical violence, and even actions that would normally cause murder amount to nothing. As seen through the success of Juanita Marquez’s faces, the human search for a more reliable system of “cognitive mapping” via facial recognition led to the popularity of Black Sun’s facially-superior avatars. This trend shows how important physical recognition or connation is to humans, but also further highlights the futility of humans ever really understanding each other. Despite Juanita’s programming advances, many of the top-notch avatars are described as twitchy or less dimensional with the black-and-whites being the most vivid examples of this.

Let us Imagine a Future Worth Hoping For

Stephenson's Snow Crash presents us with a human-race headed in the wrong direction. That is to say, the world is on the verge of - though one could argue that it has already experienced - societal collapse. What remains in the land that once was America is laissez-faire on crack cocaine. The federal government has relinquished most of its power to competing organizations: mercenary armies compete for national defense contracts; the CIA and Library of Congress have merged into the for-profit CIC; the Mafia controls several giant and powerful international corporations; burbclaves are among the few remaining safe places to live, with private security forces to keep law and order; local governments owned by entrepreneurs (Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong) control much of the land, and highway companies compete with each other for drivers' business. Stephenson points out the irrelevance and wastefulness of the federal government with the inclusion of a detailed description of its toilet paper policy. After all, "This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem?"

So is this the future that we are headed towards? I certainly hope not. This laissez-faire-gone-haywire future is one that we have already encountered in Octavia Butler's Parable, and even somewhat in Nova and Neuromancer. Is this just because people don't have a clear ideological alternative to entertain in their minds about the future of society (and sci-fi authors write about futures that we can relate to and imagine with some ease)? In Jameson's article, he points out that most people do not have a grasp on what a Marxist society would look like - what a society that has overcome and risen above the principles of the market would resemble. Obviously, this has to do with the lack of examples in the world of Marxist-based states.

"I have said before that the so-called crisis in Marxism is not a crisis in Marxist science, which has never been richer, but rather a crisis in Marxist ideology. If ideology - to give it a somewhat different definition - is a vision of the future that grips the masses, we have to admit that... no Marxist or Socialist party or movement anywhere has the slightest conception of what socialism or communism as a social system ought to be and can be expected to look like" (355).

So all we know is capitalism and free-market, for that is the only example of functioning society the world can provide us with. Does the fact that we do not understand any other way for society to function mean that we are indeed doomed to the fate that Stephenson suggests in Snow Crash? How do we avoid these mistakes? How can we build a society that we can enjoy imagining?

Delivery Pizza

Living in Southern California all of my life, Snow Crash is not only a predictable future, but in a sense, a descriptive present for me. Like Jameson's article expresses, there is a sense of post-modernism from the novel that does not only make room for, but almost worships the culture of dime-store novels, sitcoms, and gated communities. In a world like this, pizza delivery is an art and the Mob is an accepted fact of life.

Much like it is now. True, we still have a central government, and I think the only Pizza Delivery University is probably an online scam, but how much farther until that is a reality? And an accepted one at that. Hiro is proud of his job, despite the stated low salary in comparison to the designer of a billboard ad. Is this the return of the artisan or the demise of culture?

I think it is often wondered if there will be another Shakespeare, another Dickens, or Austen. But when one considers the present, and then considers the present for each of these established masters of literature, it was not much different. Shakespeare's plays were the equivalent of SNL, but maybe with a little less social critique. Dickens was paid by the word, and Austen's Pride and Prejudice was considered to be in a frivolous form (the novel), and on a frivolous topic at that.

So we must wonder - is there really a death of culture, a death of finery - or simply the changing of it from what was once considered inferior to superior. I'm not sure if I accept that explanation myself, or if I consider it the blindly innocent approach, but I enjoy delivery pizza just as much as the last person...

Diversity is the Best Vaccine or "You've Got a Friend in the Family!"

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash we are shown a far-flung future America, but at the same time we examine the themes and culture of the Ancient Sumerians. The novel makes it clear just how important language is to human society and behavior.

The villain of the novel, Bob Rife, tries to use the power of language as a virus, to expand his own control over others. Using the ancient monosyllabic Sumerian language, he links all of his converts together, making them easy to control; xenoglossy. The novel makes it very clear that this language that everyone had in the past was a source of stagnation for civilized human society. With the ‘neurolinguistic hacking’ of the Sumerian God Enki, he creates the Babel event, recorded throughout the myths of many peoples. The gargoyle Lagos and Hiro Protagonist postulate that “the nam shub (hacking) of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness,” (398).

The reason why the creation of a diversity of languages, this Babel event, had to occur was a simple fact that a homogenous linguistic society was susceptible to the neurolinguistic Asherah virus, the source of irrationality. But, now with a diversity of languages, and the inability to understand the Sumerian me, human beings were forced to adapt and evolve into the higher level of autonomy and consciousness.

Just as was shown in Octavia Butler’s novels, again the importance of diversity is stressed. The characters on both sides of the fight in Snow Crash are very diverse. Both the Mafia and Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong understand the importance of diversity as well. Mafia-sponsored billboards in Compton show Uncle Enzo squaring off against Narcolombian thugs with a multi-racial posse of neighborhood people, and the Mafia “have black, Hispanic, and Asian capos that will respect your cultural identity,” (146). And Mr. Lee espouses in his welcome address his mission for “the potentials of all ethnic races and anthropologies to merge under a banner of the Three Principles,” (99). Compare those franchises to the homogeneous, xenophobic, and racist New South Africa, which are shown to be full of nasty “rednecks” that promptly get decapitated by Hiro’s katanas. Whether the diversity is language or ethnicity it’s importance cannot be missed in defending against the viral influences of irrationality.

Michael Randolph

Interesting Transitions

“Interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.” (122)

The concept of transition between pure states can be found throughout Snow Crash. The transitional state between flesh and technology is approached by the Rat Things, a biological component within a highly altered machine, gargoyles, the information hoarders who are physically in Reality but live plugged into the Metaverse, and in the hackers like Hiro himself, who forgo their physical being to participate and socialize within a fictional realm. And, indeed, the most interesting questions of the novel appear along these transitional states. When considering the fate of Fido, or dogs like him, Y.T. implies that an organic life in reality was a better fate, while Ng argues for existence as a Rat Thing, liberated by technology and living in a canine simulated reality (248). This undefined border between natural life and existence as “other” hearkens back to “The Matrix,” begging the question, if the rat things could choose between the red and blue pills, which would they pick? Is life as part of a machine, like the existence Ng has created for himself, a desirable thing?

Gargoyles live on the border between virtual and real, much like Ng lives on the border between human and machine. But while Ng profits from his duality, the gargoyles seem to suffer, looked down upon by all of the voices we hear in the novel. The attempt to use technology while in reality, in effect, is seen as negative while the opposite attempt, that of Ng, is positive. Does this suggest that life in a simulated environment, removed from unalterable truths like physical ability or race, would be better than a current existence in a world where elements cannot be arbitrarily changed? Is the true self one that is constructed from our mental personality and freed from the trappings of physicality?

The border we discussed with Neuromancer, between flesh and machine, is apparent again in Snow Crash. Just like Case, Hiro sees an erotic appeal to entering the technological network (23). This entanglement of pleasures of the flesh (sex) with inhuman technology challenges the assumed givens of either experience. With Hiro, the disconnect between virtual experiences and ones in reality affects his sword fighting at one point, as he notes that a neck does not slice as clean in reality as it does in the Metaverse. This juxtaposition between a result that Hiro can write, manipulate and control (a situation that adapts to him) against one that he must simply experience and work to maneuver through (a situation he must adapt to) shows the appeal of power within the Metaverse. For people in the real world, natural laws must be followed. For those in the virtual world, natural laws do not exist. The transition of control of ground rules from an external source to one internal to humanity is where interesting things happen. This virtual ownership really does attract human beings in the real world, as Stephenson implicitly predicts, as evidenced by the huge amount of dedicated MMORPG players.

From Mythology to the Metaverse

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson creates an interesting twist on cyberpunk, capitalism, and techno-orientalism. In this novel, Stephenson successfully creates a story full of interesting technological twists and a bizarre world dynamic. Basically, the U.S. government has sold out. Instead of private gated communities, large corporations like Mr. Lee’s Greater Honk Kong, not the actual Honk Kong, have taken over, and the only things that American’s are good at are making small micro-parts for computers, making musicand movies, and delivering pizzas. Yes, I said delivering pizza. Stephenson makes it clear that this is a very real job by showing how the protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, a Korean and African American half breed, struggles to deliver a pizza, for CosaNostra Pizza, the mafia run pizza conglomerate, that he has been given just ten minutes to deliver, because in this reality, the thirty minutes or less doesn’t just mean it’s free, it could cost him his job as a “Deliverator.” Interestingly, the government, which has now sold the Smithsonian buildings and allowed them to become a “theme park” because they wanted to focus more on governing, has allowed for the mafia to run wild and monopolies to take over. This seems Dystopian, but reality isn’t the focus of the novel, the Metaverse, Stephenson’s version of a virtual reality cyberspace, is.
While the Japanese, referred to by a more nationalistic name, the Nipponese, referring to the Japanese name for their own country, seem to be feared by the western world for their keen business sense, Hiro has embraced the way of Bushido, becoming the world’s greatest swordsman. Hiro is a super hacker who works in the Metaverse, where people use avatars to interact in a virtual world where almost anything is possible. Hiro describes himself as “last of the freelance hackers/ Greatest sword fighter in the world/ Stinger, Central intelligence Corporation [a radical version of the Library of Congress where they literally hire people to look for facts and observations that might be interesting]/ specializing in software intel/ (music, movies & microdes)” (Stephenson 17). In this job description, I find two very interesting cultural differences. One is that Hiro, who clearly embraces kendo, the way of the Japanese sword, chooses not to refer to himself as “samurai,” or even “ninja,” as his suit while working as a “Deliverator” would suggest. Hiro is the world’s greatest swordsman, but instead of choosing to assimilate himself with the samurai, who are generally considered one of the best swordsmen, if not the best. While this might be considered a poke at the Nipponese and a way of degrading them since the best swordsman is an American hybrid, if one delves deeper, there may actually be another reason. Samurai literally means “one who serves,” however, as Hiro says on his business card, he is a “freelance hacker.” He only works part-time for the CIC, and even that he does more out of his own leisure. Thus, Hiro serves no man, he works for himself and his own interests, so Stephenson can’t classify him as samurai, for he is ronin, a sword without a master.
Also, I find the term “hacker” to be rather amusing. Right now, hackers are regarded as criminals who violate people’s privacy; however, in this digital world, hackers are just computer programmers. Interestingly, Y.T, the skateboard riding “kourier” that Hiro ends up partnering up with, says that her Mom is “a programmer for the feds” (Stephenson 266). This creates an interesting dynamic dividing the line between those who are with the Feds and those who aren’t. The corporate “hacker” seems to live a freer lifestyle while the programmer doesn’t even now what project he/she is working on is. In the end, the programmers end up being used by our villain, the mysterious billionaire L. Bob Rife. Stephenson romanticizes the “hacker” through Hiro who seems to embody everything cool from his two katana, to his hair, motorcycle, and outfit.
Obviously, the novel deals with a drug crisis called “Snow Crash.” With the help of a “kourier” called Y.T., Yours Truly, Hiro works in the Metaverse, and the CIC database to delve into the mythological creation of this virus. The mythos goes all the way back to the Sumerian mythology of Babel. I found Stephenson’s interpretation of Babel to be fascinating. He describes Babel as a shifting point in humanity. “Prior to Babel/Infocalypse, languages tended to converge. And after that, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and become mutually incomprehensible—that this tendency is … coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem” (Stephenson 218). Not surprisingly, Stephenson creates this links to biblical stories of Adam and Eve and the loss of Paradise. However, while Jewish midrash seems to push away from Eve being the sole source of temptation and moves toward the idea of “Lilith” being the snake, Stephenson presents the idea that Eve is present through out all ancient religions and that she is Asherah, a deity who was worshipped during the time of the Ancient Hebrews, and that through her cult, the Sumerian being Enki was able to change human tongue. This idea was mind blowing. Stephenson connects the future with the past because “Snow Crash” is really a new version of the linguistic virus that created split languages and destroyed the Sumerian spoken tongue. Stephenson takes the bible and creates a “Da Vinci Code-esque” cult surrounding the origin of human language.
Hiro is able to relate the computer language to that of the Sumerians since at some level all computers use the same language for operating and programming, just like the ancient people apparently did. Through this link, Stephenson does something truly amazing; he creates a sci-fi drama in the past. The idea of a linguistic virus that erased human “programming” seems fantastical. Usually science fiction is a reflection of the present conditions, however, Stephenson takes the fears of the late 80’s and early 90’s and ties them to the mystique of the past. Stephenson creates an epic point, that if “you forget history, you are doomed to repeat it.” Thus, by creating a Metaverse where everyone essentially uses the same language, just like the ancient days of Sumer, destruction is evident.

Are Burbclaves Here Yet?

In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson depicts a world where Hiro Protagonist's main job is as a pizza deliverer, while he freelances as a correspondant for the Central Intelligence Corporation. America's economy is at the bottom rung, commercialization is over the top, and the national government as such is impotent outside of its own district.
Although shocking, these trends, albeit in a less exaggerated form, wouldn't be unexpected. But then Stephenson shocks the reader's system, when Y. T. goes into a White Columns to deliver the pizza Hiro can't deliver because his car is submerged:
He takes her as far as the entrance to the next Burbclave, which is a White Columns. Very southern, traditional, one of the Apartheid Burbclaves. Big ornate sign above the main gate: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED (32).
Here, reified on the landscape, is the sort of overt segregation that the law proclaims is past. The United States Stephenson creates seems to simultaneously regress and progress. Seems is an operative word. Neighborhoods are, by and large, still divided by race in our present United States. Sides of town are partioned, unofficially but extremely noticeably, into "black," or "white," or "Latino," or so forth. Sometimes these can take the form of "ethnic enclaves" or "ethnic neighborhoods," often concentrations of recent immigrants from a particular country or region, a label which often draws a fairly neutral, or even positive response. However, these neighborhoods can also include the poverty-created "ghettos" or "projects," mostly home to African-Americans and Latinos, sites with much more negative connotations, or overwhelmingly white country club estates or gated suburban communities, sites that often aren't considered as racial spaces.
Stephenson's Burbclaves then are not, in reality, terribly unique in conception. In fact, one could argue that they're the visual manifestation of cognitive spaces. The primary difference is that they've become the substitute for the nation state. One has "citizenship" in a burbclave, but each burbclave has multiple copies that can be found throughout the landscape, each one only marginally different from the rest. "Citizenship" earns automatic passage through the gates and hence, shelter and conviennence. Burbclaves give new meaning to the term "A man's home is his castle," as they freely discriminate to determine who can and cannot enter.
Equally intriguing is the presence of spaces exterior to the burbclaves, often the site of stores, prison franchises, and other undesirable businesses. If we follow the metaphor of burbclaves as nation-states, Stephenson has created territory outside the nations, on the peripherary between them. It suggests that some things happen outside the collected imagination of place, that real life can't spoil a constructed fantasy.
Multiple worlds collide as well. The reader sees both white supremacist New South Africa and Atazania, the black power version of the same space. One is assured that "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" is NOT the same as the real Hong Song, and Italy appears as both Nova Siciliana and Cassa Nostra. Although these places could not coincide in reality, they can coincide in the world of the imaginary.
How can we understand this comparison of gated suburban communities - or even neighborhoods generally - to nation-states in relation to stratification and division? Is there a distinction between how neighborhoods segregate and how nations do so? Should there be? Is the United States itself a burbclave?

Whereas the lack of racial indicators is a major feature of Nova, Neal Stephenson mentions the race very specifically within the first few lines of nearly every character that is introduced in Snow Crash. In reading Nova, race is brought to mind because of its absence. It poses the question, why is this book different from others? Why does race play a role in other works, since it is apparently not necessary to an enjoyable or meaningful book? At the same time, it gives life to the hope that some day, race really will be as insignificant as it is portrayed in Nova.

Snow Crash offers a stark contrast to the subtlety of making a point through omission. Even the most inconsequential characters warrant a physical description including the color of their skin or nationality. At times, this description is given through the eyes of an overtly racist character, such as when a New South African asks Hiro, "Are you a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass nigger, or a sneaky little v.d.-infected gook?" (301). Obviously, racism is still alive and well in the futuristic world of Snow Crash. Race also plays a part in how other characters understand Y.T.'s name. It also demonstrates the degree to which race is on people's minds when the cops arrest her and find out her name. " 'How come you keep calling yourself Whitey?' the second MetaCop says. Like many people of color, he has misconstrued her name" (49). It is also interesting to note that both Hiro and Y.T. categorize people according to their race. It doesn't matter whose point of view is being represented or whether or not the thought is verbalized in the form of dialogue. Race is always on the minds of the characters of Snow Crash. This implies that everyone views other people this way, the other characters in the book as well as the reader.

However, while Stephenson goes to great lengths to show how people are preoccupied with race, it is presented as an everyday occurrence rather than a phenomenon worthy of particular notice. Everyone goes on about their lives, even while racism exists and even flourishes within certain Burbclaves such as White Columns, which displays a sign reading, "WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED" (32). The characters are described and categorized by race but instead of fighting against it, they accept it as a normal part of life. People further isolate themselves by choosing to live in highly sequestered Burbclaves, operating as nations. When, "the only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood" it is obvious that people are pulling inward, seeking sameness (191-92). Snow Crash warns against this kind of isolation. Hiro and Y.T. come from very different backgrounds but it is only through their cooperation that they are effective. Humanity has become terribly fragmented by its own choice in the world of Snow Crash. We can only hope that as the world moves forward, we can heed this warning and pull together rather than hiding from our fellow man.

Avatar and the Self

When we construct a new self, do we construct a new identity? Avatars are inherently digital extensions of the self. These constructs in video games and web environments have only in the past decade been opened up to a personal customization. Even if it is only a visual recontextualization of identity, avatars pose an intriguing and complex question of identity in a digital era. Indeed, we can even exist as two entirely different species in many massively multiple player environments. The very fact of choice in physical appearance and in more complex simulations, voice, sexuality, gender implies a deeper question, is the avatar a more real representation of self than our flesh?

“Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you see all these.” (pg 36 Snow Crash)

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the Metaverse acts as a huge experimental petri dish of self representation. Hero Protagonist has his avatar customized to look exactly like he does in the real world. The obvious undertone is that Hero is fully accepting of his actual skin. In antithesis are the generic avatars, the Clint and the Barbie. These two archetypical examples of American physical perfection have become ironically symbols of white trash and the less wealthy. The standardization and mass production of such images comments on our collective ideas of beauty and how it is lost when generic. Even further down the digital totem pole of the Street are the black and whites. These characters who lack the skill or equipment to create an avatar and are instead grainy representations of the real flesh. These avatars are stripped of details and features, such as skin color, and in this reductions, become pariahs.

In the digital world of the Metaverse, uniqueness not conformity is the cultural peak. This trait is embodied in the rockstar avatars who take craziness incarnate to a whole new level. Furthermore, the separating factors in the Metaverse are not so much racial identity as wealth. In this, the Metaverse reflects the out of control capitalism that dominates the world of Snow Crash. However, most of the wealthiest, most gifted hackers, and strongest personalities forgo the transformative abilities of avatars. Hero, Raven, and others seek to instead created hyper representations of the self. The avatar is not used as a tool of escapism but rather as a means of further self expression.

The question of the avatar is increasingly complex nowadays. In digital spaces like second life, the avatar can work, socialize, play, and love, in essence live a “full” life. Such avatars can become the entire identity of a “real” world person. Creating avatars and the choices made in customizations, thus, intrinsically reflect the image one wants to display of oneself. Although Snow Crash gives us a glimpse into a world of avatars it is not a fully realized one. The questions still remain to the future. With avatars, do we escape, transform, and start anew? Do we accentuate certain features? How much of this new identity is the self and not the culture? Is the avatar more the self than what we can’t change, the flesh?

The idea of cognitive mapping was rather abstract, until Jameson likened it to that of mapping one’s position in an actual city. He cited Kevin Lynch’s work, The Image of the City, where Lynch theorizes that “the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves”.

Jameson cites the Althusserian redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence”. Jameson shows how this is just what cognitive mapping is needed for in the context of the urban problem, i.e. “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole”. When cognitive mapping is unachievable, in the urban setting, there is urban alienation, in the ideolological context, there is an inability to picture oneself as part of a totality, to picture that relationship between the Imaginary and the Real.

The way I understood it, Jameson theorizes that the years after 1960, labelled “postmodern” and shaped by “late capitalism”, or in the words of Mandel “the moment of the multinational network”, have been an era where cognitive mapping in a social context (as opposed to urban, as demonstrated above) has become impossible. Where the denizen of Jersey City experiences “urban alienation”, the citizens of the postmodern era, similarly, experience a different sort of alienation, one where they are unable to imagine their position in a social totality.

I felt I could see this to some extent in the novel, Snow Crash. First of all, the world here is definitely a depiction of late capitalism, to the point where multinational networks and corporations, such as Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, have superceded governments and nations, even the great superpower of the United States (or in the cause of Mr Lee’s Hong Kong, the actual Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which he is quick to disclaim as being simply a part of the People’s Republic of China).

The characters and people in Snow Crash seem to be victims of this postmodern inability to cognitively map themselves in their social environment. After all, what else could we expect besides a healthy amount of disorientation, in a world where Hong Kong is both a corporation and a country, where a trillion dollars is loose change, and where a virtual reality exists that mirrors the real world, where people are judged by avatars that may not have the faintest similarity to their real image.

Postmodernism's Threat to Individuality

With the conversion to a postmodern society where "the end [...] of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)" (15), according to Jameson, is due to come, will all new mediums of technological and mechanical progress be devoid of individual creativity? According to the alternate reality proposed by Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, this new society will not. Instead, this new reality, our future, will create new forums and opportunities, technologically, transportationally, and interactively, for the exhibition of emotions, personalities, and uniqueness. In this postmodern era Jameson speaks of, there may not be as much opportunity for the current popular modes of art and creativity, but, as shown in Snow Crash, all of the current modes of expression can be converted to a technological or more advanced counterpart. In Snow Crash, people in the Metaverse are able to design their avatars to be as much or as little like their actual selves, they are able to defy laws of physics in combat, they are able to access advanced programs and helpful applications to supplement their work, they are even able to attend concerts and social events without even leaving their couches. With these possibilities presented by Stephenson, can it be guaranteed that with the societal switch from modernism to postmodernism will come the diminishing of cultural and individual distinction? Furthermore, is it even possible to rid an individual of its individuality? Isn't that one's birthright, to be his own unique person? Without mankind evolving in correlation with this apparent change, how can it even be proposed that the advances of the postmodern era will eliminate man's innate individuality? If the present continually repeats the past, as it can be and has been proven many times over throughout the centuries of the existence of humankind, how would it be possible that our future would stray so far from the present and past that man's individuality could be overtaken by the technology man has developed?
Stephenson shows that, even in a technologically dominated society, it is still very possible for past conflicts with religion, hierarchy, and spirituality to be present or even repeated. In Snow Crash Hiro shows this when he is explaining the intentions and reasons behind L. Bob Rife's actions and beliefs to Ng. He explains, "'Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV--which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite--the people who go into the Metaverse, basically--who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages'" (Stephenson 379). Even in this world where computers are turned to for careers, interaction, entertainment, and much more, humanity remains the same race with the same cultural, individual, and creative instincts as humanity had even as far back as Sumerian times.

Octavia Butler's futuristic representation of race was incredibly stark and central to the integral meaning of the text; she created strong, leading black characters who were as defined by their race as their actions in reaction to others' races. Samuel Delaney's Nova, on the other hand, focuses largely on socioeconomic inequality, and difference in education and cultures to draw on for social commentary. In fact, the forces of "light" and "shadow" seem to come much more into play, as Sebastian's beasts and the two twins are concerned, but also amongst Tarot readings and Lorq and Prince's relationships.

Race colors each economic class, each political system, each level of education in Nova, but the nonchalance and normalcy of its presence in the text creates and incredibly believable and comfortable situated reality for the reader. It is almost as if Delaney, by not stressing racial equality in the future, but simply racial presence, creates a much more easily-accepted representation than someone who would attempt to force such things (almost like Orr's attempts in Lathe of Heaven).

Another interesting side note is the strange similarities to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I may simply be imagining this, but the occurrence of the names Sebastian and Illyrium (Duke Orsino is from Illyria, much like Lorq is from the Kosmos), as well as the presence of a set of twins, is very indicative of a consciousness of this text. Not to mention the almost-word that Lorq's name forms, especially in relation to Prince's name: a lord and a prince. Similar to a prince (Sebastian) and a duke (Orsino) in Twelfth Night. In this case, surely, Orsino's conclusion that "with great power comes great responsibility" is thrown into a romantic, futuristic light in the context of the plot and characters of Nova.

What's Left of Culture

Nova presents us with a world in human cultures are so enmeshed as to make a universe without culture at all. Culture has both disintegrated as humanity has expanded, and also been trivialized as it has lost its importance. Rather than being part of human life, cultures originating from Earth are appreciated for their historical relevance, and used, through their music and art, to liven parties or flaunt one’s know-how. As a result of mass transportation between planets and people, culture is both absent and without meaning: “There’s no reservoir of national, or world solidarity….This pseudo-planetary society that has replaced any real tradition, while very attractive, is totally hollow…” (46)

Earth, the very origin of human culture, is known as culturally inferior to that of other planets’: life on Earth is seen as inferior, more difficult, and generally more ignorant than human life elsewhere. Unlike humans in other parts of space, not all Earth inhabitants are physically suited to the demands of the book’s modern day. There still exist tribes of gypsies and others without sockets, for which to plug into modern technology, who are left with little to no work or use in a universe that depends entirely on a human’s ability to connect to machinery. Thus already on the fringe of humanity, such Earth-goers have furthermore inhabited a kind of cultural defiance to the culture that has formed outside of Earth. Not only do some Earth inhabitants not fully believe in concepts that have been taken for granted elsewhere in the universe like Tarot cards and socket technology, life on Earth seems to be more chaotic, violent, and even primitive to outsiders. In response to Mouse’s accounts of violence he has witnessed on Earth, Katin, in horror, muses, “Those of us who weren’t born [on Earth] probably will never be able to figure it completely. Even in the rest of Draco, we lead much simpler lives, I think.” (126) Humanity seems to have evolved emotionally, or in its own control of itself, by branching out from its home planet: the majority of humanity, or those who have grown up off of Earth like Katin and Loq look at Earth with some scorn at its life of sectarian and senseless violence, which is the custom of Earth in both the book’s time frame and that of the modern 21^st century. Katin discusses the time period “from the great stellar migrations” (122) as a defining point in human enlightenment, showing that man’s jump from Earth lifted him from many of his mental limits. Ironically, this book shows us a future in which all the cultures we, as readers, know of have become somewhat inferior to a greater and more civil culture. The cross-cultural mesh of the universe can be seen as the killing of individual cultures, but it can also be seen as an step in human evolution furthering us from reasons for societal division. Without culture, or with culture as a something to appreciate as a historical artifact, humans have less to appreciate in its differences, but also less to fight over.