Getting off the Grid

I felt uninspired when I tried to imagine how the readings for this week could be related to "Heat Death of the Universe," and I decided that my feeling of unrelatedness would be a decent point of entry for this post. The above is my attempt to map the large number of locations mentioned in "Heat Death," which I acknowledge to be a different kind of location than the ones that Moretti treats in his chapter. None of them are in the same city, and many are not even in the same country. I found myself wondering what, if anything, an approach like Moretti's might be able to bring to places that lack the centuries-long history and highly-codified mappings of class that characterize European metropoles like Paris and London. And then I began to wonder whether -- if an urban geography is already overlain with information about class, age, demographics, etc -- the spatial arrangement, rather than associated social information, matters at all? Part of this question, for me, is about whether the maps Moretti uses add very much to his analysis. Could the same conclusions be reached without mapping the novels in question? Often I felt that the quotations he paired with the maps said nearly enough already-- is it necessary to know where Cheapside is in London to understand the phrase "uncles to fill all of Cheapside?"

I'd like to look at "Heat Death of the Universe" to see how it structures space (a bit more vaguely than Dickens or Balzac seem to), and then return to ask how this geography reflects back upon Moretti's use of his texts.

Pamela Zoline's protagonist in "Heat Death" is certainly concerned with geography. As early as the first page we get what appears to be a home address for the short story's setting: "BREAKFAST TIME AT THE BOYLES' HOUSE ON LA FLORIDA STREET, ALAMEDA, CALIFORNIA, THE CHILDREN DEMAND SUGAR FROSTED FLAKES" (p. 1). In a lengthy discussion of the cereal box (to which we will return later in this post), Sarah notes that on the back of the box is "a mask of William Shakespeare to be cut out, folded, worn by thousands of tiny Shakespeares in Kansas City, Detroit, Tucson, San Diego, Tampa" (p. 1). This seemingly randomly-scattered listing of cities across america reflects Sarah's preoccupation with what she sees as an entropic homogenization of society. 

Until we reach the statistically likely planet and begin to converse with whatever green-faced teleporting denizens thereof—considering only this shrunk and communication-ravaged world—can we any more postulate a separate culture? Viewing the metastasis of Western Culture it seems progressively less likely. Sarah Boyle imagines a whole world which has become like California, all topographical inperfections sanded away with the sweet-smelling burr of the plastic surgeon's cosmetic polisher, a world populace dieting, leisured, similar in pink and mauve hair and rhinestone shades. A land Cunt Pink and Avocado Green, brassiered and girdled by monstrous complexities of Super Highways, a California endless and unceasing, embracing and transforming the entire globe, California, California!

This notion of a California "endless and unceasing" across the entire globe makes the claustrophobic geography of the domestic sphere to which she is restricted a microcosm of the claustrophobic globe, in the metastatic grips of western culture. Sarah's musings on "the statistically likely planet" with alien life capable of providing an outside perspective is one of several moments where,  despite the general entropic hopelessness of this text, outside places appear to offer possible escape routes from the misery and boredom of Sarah Boyle's life.

The other places of escape (that is, those that are on this planet) are mapped above. Europe is an escape because of dadaism, and for having exceptionally long-lived turtles about which Sarah fantasizes: "to carve a name, date and perhaps a word of hope upon a turtle's shell, then set him free to wend the world, surely this one act might cancel out absurdity?" A similar moment involves party "poppers" which explode into tiny strips of "fortune paper". We learn that "upon them are printed strangely assorted phrases selected by apparently unilingual Japanese. Crowds of delicate yellow people spending great chunks of their lives in producing these most ephemeral of objects, inscribing thousands of fine papers with absurd and incomprehensible messages. 'The very hairs of your head are all numbered,' reads one."[I note the Orientalism of this passage, but don't know whether that invalidates my point here]. The outside spaces that do not seem to map on to an endlessly self-replicating California read to me as moments of hope or mystery.

 If we examine those moments, we might notice that they are all moments associated with a kind of physical distance. But that distance quite clearly exists in a fantasy space, not a real one: unlike Moretti's city streets, there is no direct contact between Sarah and these "outsides." After sitting with this idea for a while, I realized that the kind of distance that Sarah Boyle evokes in order to resist the claustrophobic sameness of her home and societal role is really more of a critical distance than a physical one, despite the association of the two in the text. From this perspective, even the short story's overriding theme of entropy in the laws of physics as a metaphor for Sarah's obsession with globalization, personal aging, housework, and the homogeneity of her culture begins to make sense as a sort of resistance. To see her life, however oppressively meaningless, as an expression of the entropic tendency of the universe is to see herself from a certain critical distance. To take such an objective stance is to insulate herself from the demand that she feel like a "vivacious and intelligent young wife and mother ... busy and happy around the house" in addition to serving the role.

To return (alas, perhaps too briefly) to Moretti's approach, I still find myself wondering if his descriptions of the spatiality of his chosen texts are much different from Sarah Boyle's spatiality of a collapsed universal California and the relieving distance of "outside," wherever she may find it. His spatial distances, too, seem to be figures for differences between groups of people or ways of life.

(With apologies to all for not mentioning many things, including Jameson's cognitive mapping, and for excusing myself from a more careful reading of the traingle thing, or a comparison of Moretti's Paris-of-desires with this idea of getting off grid.)