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The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2007 by Rachel Adams
Such changes remain unrealized on the horizon in Tropic of Orange. It is possible that they will never materialize. The freeway could be cleaned up, SUPERNAFTA could recover from his wounds, and life in Los Angeles could return to its regular patterns. However, the novel also persistently intimates that history need not proceed only in terms of the cycles of doom predicted by Archangel. If characters like Buzzworm and Gabriel do not succeed in realizing their utopian projects, they also are not defeated. The mass movement of people and land that takes place over the course of the narrative suggests a mounting crisis, a coming wave of humanity that cannot be turned back, that promises to "crush itself into every pocket and crevice, filling a northern vacuum with its cultural conflicts, political disruption, romantic language, with its one hundred years of solitude and its tropical sadness" (170-71). Like many recent social critics ranging across the political spectrum from Mike Davis to Samuel Huntington, (9) the novel insists that this meeting between North and South is inevitable, but it does not disclose whether its consequences will be catastrophic or inspiring. It ends ambiguously with the fall of EL GRAN MOJADO but also with the reunion of a truly global family--the Singaporean Bobby, Mexican Rafaela, and their son Sol--in Los Angeles. There is no suggestion that the seething crowds who followed Archangel to the North plan to return home; if they remain they will further contribute to the Latinization of Southern California. Despite its unresolved ending, Tropic of Orange leaves its audiences in a very different position than does The Crying of Lot 49, where the reader, as Hite describes, must conclude that her "own world is a text that behaves in the same way [as the novel], inscribing ostentatiously free agents in preexisting stories that ultimately determine them" (716). Yamashita's readers may feel alarmed at the environmental and human catastrophes--global warming, poverty, urban violence, civil war--that threaten to erupt just beyond the novel's frame, but they will not find themselves confined in a claustrophobically self-referential fiction designed to mirror a lack of agency over their own lives. Indeed, their position is more akin to the inhabitants of gridlocked L.A. Being stuck in traffic does not mean they are immobile. Rather, they are confronted by circumstances that force them outside the enclosed boundaries of the stories that they know, causing them to see and feel the world differently.
Reflecting on the future of cultural studies, Michael Denning writes:
a central task of a transnational cultural studies is to narrate an
account of globalization that speaks not just of an abstract market
with buyers and sellers, or even of an abstract commodification with
producers and consumers, but of actors: transnational corporations,
social movements of students, market women, tenants, radicalized and
ethnicized migrants, labor unions, and so on. (28-29)
